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
Related Stories
Earliest Human Remains Outside Africa Were Just Discovered in Israel
For decades, scientists have speculated about when exactly the bipedal apes known as Homo sapiens left Africa and moved out to conquer the world. That moment, after all, was a crucial step on the way to today’s human-dominated world. For many years, the consensus view among archaeologists placed the exodus at 60,000 years ago—some 150,000 years after the hominins first appeared.
But now, researchers in Israel have found a remarkably preserved jawbone they believe belongs to a Homo sapiens that was much, much older. The find, which they’ve dated to somewhere between 177,000 and 194,000 years, provides the most convincing proof yet that the old view of human migration needs some serious re-examination.
The new research, published today in Science [DOI: 10.1126/science.aap8369] [DX], builds on earlier evidence from other caves in the region that housed the bones of humans from 90,000 to 120,000 years ago. But this new discovery goes one step further: if verified, it would require reevaluating the whole history of human evolution—and possibly pushing it back by several hundred thousand years.
Also at Binghamton University, BBC, and The Guardian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @06:31PM (12 children)
From here [soylentnews.org]:
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:49PM (1 child)
Why not try learning from twitter instead?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:44AM
Ad hominem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @02:26AM (4 children)
The best explanation I've seen for that legend is the Santorini event [wikipedia.org].
A supervolcano created a tsunami that creamed the north shore of Crete and took out the Minoan civilization there somewhere between 1642 BCE and 1540 BCE.
If the watery end was a gradual thing, it seems logical that the Atlantians would have moved inland and just carted their stuff with them.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @05:02AM (3 children)
Plato says that Solon (c. 638 BC – 558 BC) visited Egypt, where he was told that 9000 years before, tragedy befell Atlantis in an abrupt cataclysm.
So, this story depicts an event far further in the past than yours.
Moreover, the date ~9500 BC coincides with the abrupt, downright cataclysmic end of the Younger Dryas [wikipedia.org] period, which also began in an abrupt, downright cataclysmic fashion; indeed, there is growing evidence that Earth may have been struck by devastating impacts.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 04 2018, @05:26AM
Plato also claims that Athens whupped Atlantis in a straight-up naval fight 9000 years before. Where's the evidence that Athens has been around for 11,000+ years and had a navy back then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @10:40AM (1 child)
Solon (c. 638 BC - 558 BC)
That leaves about 8-1/2 millenia unaccounted for.
Ever play the game "Gossip" in school?
Wikipedia says it's also known as Chinese Whispers. [wikipedia.org]
The way that even a simple phrase being transmitted faithfully through a small number of people over a span of a minute fails repeatedly doesn't have me putting much faith in twice-told tales.
When there's something in writing that goes back about that far which corroborates the story, that will be a starting point WRT "proof".
In the meantime, I find the Carbon-14 evidence in Crete more compelling.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @02:50PM
Your thought process made sense until they found Gobekli Tepe, which informed us that mankind was a great deal more advanced in the deep past.
That megalithic site (which is enormous) was (according to the carbon dating) deliberately buried around 8000 BC, which means it existed before then.
There's more than enough room for Atlantis in history.
Furthermore, the megalithic site known as "Puma Punku" in Peru would sit nicely at the edge of lake Titicaca when its water level was higher... around 12 thousand years ago! Interestingly, that's the date to which certain Peruvian megaliths align astronomically.
(Score: 5, Funny) by SomeGuy on Saturday February 03 2018, @07:07PM
And they were still in use by an outsourcing IT company.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday February 03 2018, @07:18PM (4 children)
Why all these DOI and DX links in articles which point to the same paywalled articles as the main citation?
I'd rather see the link to the Russian sources for non-paywalled articles.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:57PM
In Russia, the source codes YOU. Or something like that. :^)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @11:03PM
Maybe some of the editors want to avoid DMCA notices?
IIUC, you could use those DOIs in a certain way to do certain things...
Just sayin'.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday February 03 2018, @11:42PM
The DOI is always useful. You can put it in a search engine, and even use it to look up and pirate the paper cough cough.
I put (DOI: 10....) when the article is paywalled, and (open, DOI: 10....) when it is freely available.
As for the DX link, someone complained about me linking to the current direct URL of the paper, which could be subject to change. The DX link links to dx.doi.org/10.blahblah or doi.org/10.blahblah which should redirect to the correct location no matter what (in theory).
If there is an arXiv link for a paywalled paper, and I notice it, I will throw that in beside all that other stuff. There isn't an automatic way to find this out since arXiv isn't linked to the final form of the paper in any database I know of.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday February 03 2018, @11:44PM
I don't link the (DOI: 10....) text because my extension can detect it and link it to the search engine of your choice. No matter how Russian that search engine may be. If you don't want to run my entire extension, the portion of code that deals with the DOI can be ripped out of it and put in your own userscript.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:14PM
Is that racism I smell? Why are these old tools found in India, and not Africa? It's probably just white people trying to prove their superiority again. Damn those Indians! They probably stole their tools from a bunch of Africans, which is why the Africans don't appear to have any tools!
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Provocateur on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:25PM
Africa hadn't set up its Nigerian prince scam yet.
While India figures out Can't we make money doing this??
Outsourcing isn't an ancient thing -- it's a prehistoric thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @10:49PM (2 children)
... and yet, they haven't discovered the toilet yet.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 03 2018, @11:19PM (1 child)
Well - let's be fair. Indians like to squat in fields, where their body waste becomes fertilizer. Americans, however, prefer to flush their waste into the streams and rivers, where the waste is eventually washed into the seas, producing huge dead zones within the seas. Which is better?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @12:03AM
Definitely the designated shit street...