Exquisite 160,000-year-old stone tools discovered in China may not have been made by Homo sapiens

Archaeologists have discovered that early humans in what is now China dated back 160,000 years and used sophisticated stone tools.

“This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia was lagging behind that of Europe and Africa during this period,” the research team said in a statement about the discovery.

At the Xigou site, discovered in central China’s Henan province in 2017, an archaeological team found more than 2,600 stone tool remains and determined that some of them were “handled,” or attached to pieces of wood or other shaped sticks.

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“The identification of a handled tool provides, to our knowledge, the earliest evidence of a composite tool in East Asia,” the research team said in a study published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday (27 January).

Researchers already know of very early tool use in East Asia, where the oldest known wooden tools date back 300,000 years. However, this new find, excavated between 2019 and 2021, is the oldest known tool made of two materials, as evidenced by the handle artifact.

Hafting is “a new innovation for inserting or securing stone tools into handles or shafts,” Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Center for Human Evolution Research at Griffith University and co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. “This has improved tool performance by allowing the user to increase leverage and apply more force to operations such as boring.”

This tool appears to have been used to process plant materials. “Microscopic analysis of the tool edges shows a boring action, probably used on wood or plant material such as reeds,” Petraglia said.

Their tool creation technique “appears to be well established, with several intermediate steps and shows evidence of planning and foresight,” the team said in a statement.

Ben Marwick, a professor of archeology at the University of Washington and a co-author of the study, said it’s not clear which early human species made the tools.

“The exact identity of the creators of these tools is not clear, as there were probably multiple hominid species living in this region during this time,” Marwick told Live Science via email. “So these tools could have been made by Denisovans, Homo longhii, Homo juruensis, or Homo sapiens, for example. We hope that future studies will recover fossil remains and DNA that will shed further light on this interesting problem.”

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What’s remarkable is that many of the artifacts are less than 2 inches (50 millimeters) long, yet made using complex techniques. “These date from a period when previous archaeological research was primarily discovering large artifacts made using simple exfoliation techniques,” he said. “Our findings therefore suggest that complex tool production strategies emerged earlier than previously understood.”

The newly discovered tools are between 160,000 and 72,000 years old. At that time, the people of this area lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but the details of their lifestyle are unknown.

“The lack of mammalian bones and other evidence makes it difficult to infer how they lived, but at least their stone tools indicate a high degree of behavioral flexibility and successful adaptation to local climate and resources,” study co-author Shi-Xia Yang, a paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told LiveScience in an email.

The discovery of sophisticated stone tools from this region and period challenges long-held assumptions about early tool making, the study authors noted.

“The broader relevance of this discovery is that it challenges the deep-rooted prejudice that East Asian humans produced only ‘conservative’ tools,” Marwick said. “This prejudice was deeply rooted and dominated archeology for more than half a century through the concept of the Möbius line.

“This ‘line’, proposed in the 1940s, suggested a geographical divide between the ‘advanced’ Ature hatchet cultures of Africa and Western Eurasia and the ‘conservative’ chopper-chopping tool cultures of East Asia,” he continued. “This has given rise to a narrative of East Asia as a cultural backwater where humans are thought to be evolutionarily stagnant.”

John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University who was not involved in the study, praised the paper but noted that the idea that East Asia is a cultural backwater is far from accurate. In his experiments with stone tools, he pointed out that the small, intricate, and sharp stone tools frequently made in Europe could be dangerous to handle. “Trust me, I have the scars to prove it,” he said.

“A common sense hominin can almost certainly minimize the amount of time it spends knocking out razor-sharp flakes,” Shea said. “In this regard, [Southeast] Humans in Asia were doing what they expected. … “The idea that ‘simple tools equal simple minds’ is an archaeological myth.”

Anne Ford, associate professor of archeology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, praised the research.

“This is a truly exciting discovery and highlights the need to move away from the old narrative of Asian technology as a simple core flake industry,” Ford told LiveScience in an email. She noted that hafting was “an important technological step that has implications for assessing the cognitive abilities of Chinese humans during this period.”