Archaeologists in China Discover the Oldest Stone Tools Outside Africa (original) (raw)

Science|Archaeologists in China Discover the Oldest Stone Tools Outside Africa

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/science/hominins-tools-china.html

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Matter

Chipped rocks found in western China indicate that human ancestors ventured from Africa earlier than previously believed.

July 11, 2018

Image

One of the 2.1 million-year-old artifacts, right, recovered from a gully in western China, left, suggest that hominins may have left Africa far earlier than previously believed.Credit...Zhaoyu Zhu

The oldest stone tools outside Africa have been discovered in western China, scientists reported on Wednesday. Made by ancient members of the human lineage, called hominins, the chipped rocks are estimated to be as much as 2.1 million years old.

The find may add a new chapter to the story of hominin evolution, suggesting that some of these species left Africa far earlier than once believed and managed to travel over 8,000 miles east of their evolutionary birthplace.

The age of the Chinese tools suggests that the hominins who made them were neither tall nor big-brained. Instead, they may have been small bipedal apes, with brains about the size of a chimpanzee’s.

“The implications of all this are large,” said Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who was not involved in the new study. “We must re-evaluate our understanding of human prehistory in Eurasia.”

The human lineage arose in Africa; the ancestors of modern humans separated from those of chimpanzees over seven million years ago. But scientists have known for many years that Asia has a long human history.

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In 1891, the Dutch explorer Eugene Dubois discovered a humanlike skull in Indonesia that turned out to be about half a million years old. Paleoanthropologists later named Dubois’s skull Homo erectus, a species subsequently found at many other sites across Asia; some specimens were as old as 1.6 million years.

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