Archaeologists have discovered that the first people in what is now China used sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago.
“This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period,” the research team wrote in a statement about the discovery.
“The identification of handled tools provides the earliest evidence of composite tools in East Asia to our knowledge,” the team wrote in a report. study published Tuesday (Jan. 27) in the journal The nature of communication.
Researchers already knew about the extremely early use of the tool in East Asia, p the oldest known wooden tools there date from 300,000 years ago. However, the new finds, which were excavated between 2019 and 2021, are the oldest known bi-material tools, as evidenced by the handled artifacts.
Hafting “is a new technological innovation where a stone tool is inserted or attached to a handle or handle,” Michael Petragliadirector of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University and co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. “This improved the performance of the tool by allowing the user to increase leverage and provide more power for actions such as boring.”
The tools appear to have been used to process plant materials. “Microscopic analysis on the edges of stone tools indicates boring actions, used against plant material, probably wood or reeds,” Petraglia said.
Their tool-making techniques “appear to be well established and involve several intermediate steps that show evidence of planning and foresight,” the team said in a statement.
Ben Marwickprofessor of archeology at the University of Washington and a co-author of the paper, said it is not clear which early human species made the tools.
“The exact identity of the makers of these tools is unclear, as several species of hominin likely lived in the region during this time,” Marwick told Live Science in an email. “So it can be, for example Denisovated, H. longi, H. juluensis or H. sapiens which produced these instruments. Hopefully, future work will recover fossil remains or DNA that will shed more light on this intriguing question.”
Notably, many of the artifacts are small — less than 2 inches (50 millimeters) — but were made using complex techniques, Marwick noted. “These date from a period when previous archaeological research mostly found large artefacts made using simple flaking methods,” he said. “Thus, our findings suggest that complex tool-making strategies are emerging earlier than previously understood.”
The newly discovered tools date from 160,000 to 72,000 years ago. At this time, people in the region lived as hunter-gatherers, but the details of their lifestyle are unclear.
“While the lack of mammal bones and other evidence makes it difficult to infer how they lived, at least their stone tools suggest a high degree of behavioral flexibility and successful adaptation to local climate and resources,” Shi-Xia Yanga paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who co-authored the paper told Live Science in an email.
The study’s authors noted that the discovery of sophisticated stone tools from this area and time period challenges the long-held assumption of early tool production.
“The wider significance of the findings is that they challenge entrenched preconceptions that East Asian hominins made only ‘conservative’ tools,” Marwick said. “The bias was deep-rooted, it dominated archeology for more than half a century through the Movius Line concept.
“Designed in the 1940s, this ‘line’ indicated a geographic divide between the ‘advanced’ handaxe cultures of Africa and western Eurasia and the ‘conservative’ chopping tool culture of eastern Asia,” he continued. “This created a narrative of East Asia as a cultural backwater where hominins were assumed to be evolutionarily stagnant.”
John Sheaa professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University who was not involved in the research praised the work, but noted that the idea that East Asia is a cultural backwater has never been accurate. He noted that in his own experiments with stone tools, working with the small, complex, and sharp stone tools more commonly constructed in Europe could be dangerous. “Trust me on this one because I have the scars to back it up,” he said.
Any “hominin with a modicum of common sense almost certainly minimized the amount of time they spent breaking up the razor-sharp flakes,” Shea said. “In that regard [Southeast] Asian hominins did what would be expected of them. … The idea that ‘simple tools equals a simple mind’ is archaeological mythology.”
Anne Fordassociate professor of archeology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, praised the research.
“This is a truly outstanding discovery and highlights our need to move away from older descriptions of Asian technology as simple industries,” Ford told Live Science in an email. She noted that hafting is “an important technological step and has implications for assessing the cognitive abilities of hominins in China during this time period.”
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