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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, @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?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @12:03AM
Definitely the designated shit street...