Somebody was making tools in India up to almost 400 000 years ago! But who?!

Findings from Central India show that somebody was making stone tools typical of modern humans. But those should have come that much much later.

Stone Tools from Skorba - Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the last issue of the Nature magazine, an interesting article popped out. It was about stone tools found in the area known as Attirampakkam (it is close to the East Coast roughly in the middle of the subcontinent). About seven thousand stone tools that beautifully documented to switch from the simplest tools to more advanced flint tools. And thus it also nicely described how the less evolved humans have been replaced by modern Homo sapiens. When this should have happened isn’t completely clear. Some theories say that humans first got there somewhere between 80 to 130 thousand years ago. Modern humans then survived the Toba super-volcano explosion and ruled the area ever since. Some other theories think humans arrived after the super-volcano exploded and that the horrific event allowed modern humans to more easily replace the less evolved humans. New results don’t really help us to find the truth. The research paper shows that the flint tools are somewhere between 170 – 380 thousand years old.

This result is based on the luminescence method that can determine when a particular material was exposed to light and thus how long it has been above ground. You probably saw that it isn’t particularly precise, but still, the expected age of the tools doesn’t correlate with the theories when Homo sapiens came to India at all. This brings paleontologists in India face a real conundrum. Were these “modern” tools made by other hominid species than Homo sapiens? If yes, where did they acquire the knowledge? Are our ideas about the link between culture and biology wrong? Or did just modern humans arrive in India much earlier than we expected?

Sadly, at the moment we are missing the most important piece of the puzzle – the bones. No bones have been found so far and until that changes, we won’t really have an answer.

Sources:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25444
• https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/india-stone-tools-human-evolution-archaeology-science/