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These Tools Upend Our View of Stone-Age Humans in Asia
Long ago in what's now southern India, early humans showed a knack for disruption that would've made Silicon Valley tech wizards envious. Over time, the ancient innovators rejected bulky hand-axes and cleavers, instead opting for sleek flakes of stone meant for cutting and tipping spears.
Similar disruptions occurred in Africa among the forebears of modern humans around the same time. But the timing of the Indian transition, spotted in the soil layers of a site called Attirampakkam, is eye-popping. At 250,000 years old—and possibly up to 385,000 years old—this tool transition occurred far earlier than it did at other sites in India.
The discovery, described in Nature on Wednesday [DOI: 10.1038/nature25444] [DX], pushes back the start of what's called the Middle Paleolithic culture in the region by more than a hundred thousand years. That, in turn, could reshape how scientists view the global spread of hominins—humans and their ancient relatives—before modern humans migrated out of Africa some 60,000 years ago.
Also at The Verge.
Related: Earliest Human Remains Outside of Africa Discovered
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @06:42PM (4 children)
People have noticed that certain stone structures have incredibly precise alignments to astronomical phenomena (such as as stars, constellations, solstices, equinoxes, etc.), but that such alignments only become obvious if they were built many thousands of years before civilization is officially supposed to have begun.
There are even indications that there was knowledge of the Precession of the equinoxes [wikipedia.org], which not only suggests a very sophisticated system of astronomy, but one that must have involved centuries of meticulous recording.
Add to that the fact that Earth's history has been punctuated by many enormous cataclysms over the last 150k years, and you get the idea that Civilization might have begun several times.
Great system, guys.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:15PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:47PM (1 child)
Different AC. Doesn't stone last longer? If you built something like the pyramids in Egypt and South/Central America out of steel and concrete how long would they last?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday February 04 2018, @10:08PM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:49PM
They are always the unique, incredibly high-precision foundations of other structures, or they are buried (sometimes deliberately) or sit as ruins.
Go look up Göbekli Tepe [wikipedia.org] for an example of the first archaeological find that really made the "mainstream" historians start to re-think their understanding of humanity's past.
Also, a whole continent's worth of coastal land has been swallowed up by the rising oceans; archaeologists tend not to go looking in hundreds of feet of water, because their view of history "informs" them that there cannot be anything down there, and even if there were, our own titanic wouldn't last but a few centuries, so what of the materials of a less industrial civilization?
Also, we live today among hunter-gatherer peoples; there are reportedly some tribes in the Amazon that don't even know our Civilization exists.
Please, there are a lot of resources on this topic now. Don't sit there smugly thinking you've got it all figured out, because you don't. There are a lot of questions, and 100s of thousands of years of obscure history.