© Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, IndiaMiddle Palaeolithic artefacts emerging during excavation at Attirampakkam.
Science has long thought that we
Homo sapiens didn't leave Africa until approximately 175,000 years ago.
Now a newly discovered collection of sophisticated stone tools in India that dates back to around 385,000 years has archeologists Archaeologists scratching their heads.It's a discovery that challenges everything we thought we knew about early humans and changes our understanding of when they spread out to other landmasses.
Using luminescence dating to age the artifacts,at the stratified prehistoric site of Attirampakkam, India, the researchers determined that the end of the Acheulian culture and the beginning of the Middle Paleolithic culture begun almost 450,000 years ago, much earlier than was conventionally presumed for South Asia. Around 7,261 stone artifacts were extracted from the site, which rests on the banks of a tributary of the Kortallaiyar River.
"Chronologies of Middle Palaeolithic technologies in regions distant from Africa and Europe are crucial for testing theories about the origins and early evolution of these cultures, and for understanding their association with modern humans or archaic hominins," says the
study, published today in the
Nature journal.
While the Attirampakaam site and its rich Middle Paleolithic record are best suited for this research, the study also says that insufficient fossil samples have prevented much research in the area. This adds to the significance of their findings.
"At Attirampakkam, the gradual disuse of bifaces, the predominance of small tools, the appearance of distinctive and diverse Levallois flake and point strategies, and the blade component all highlight a notable shift away from the preceding Acheulian [axes]," says the study.
"These findings document a process of substantial behavioral change that occurred in India at [aprox. 385,000 years ago] and establish its contemporaneity with similar processes recorded in Africa and Europe. This suggests complex interactions between local developments and ongoing global transformations. Together, these observations call for a re-evaluation of models that restrict the origins of Indian Middle Palaeolithic culture to the incidence of modern human dispersals after approximately 125 [thousand years ago]."
This isn't even the first groundbreaking research to challenge the long-held "Out of Africa" theory this month-a
partial jawbone found in an Israeli cave suggests humans left Africa much earlier than previously thought. "Recent paleoanthropological studies have suggested that modern humans migrated from Africa as early as the beginning of the Late Pleistocene, 120,000 years ago," that study read. "[We] now suggest that early modern humans were already present outside of Africa more than 55,000 years earlier."
Reader Comments
Then recent studies suggest the 120K event should be put back to 175K
Imagine if the recent studies had thrown up their resulting theory before the new stones changed the other theory ... then you would have one apparent set of monkeys converting to two different types of human at the same time
Are these meant to be two different lines of monkeys that went through effectively the same randomly evolutionary path but 210K years apart?
At 385K when the first set on monkeys converted, did the other set notice design flaws which random evolution corrected over then next 200K (I assume the full evolution from monkey to modern man takes more that 200K years)
I suppose if all your history, all your theories totally ignore catastrophism and support gradualism then you will have to resort to monkey-mouse stories