Complex stone tools from 160,000 to 170,000 years ago found in China

The Levallois method of making stone tools was used in India 172,000 years ago:

Rather than chipping flakes off a stone to create a tool, Levallois techniques work on the stone so it is the flakes themselves that become the tools. This enables several tools to be made from a single stone.

Until recently, it seemed that the Levallois revolution didn’t spread east to places like China until much later – about 40,000 years ago – but that idea is now being questioned. Bo Li at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and his colleagues have just confirmed that Levallois-style stone tools recovered from Guanyindong cave in south China are between 160,000 and 170,000 years old. Colin Barras, “Complex stone tools in China may re-write our species’ ancient history” at New Scientist

Interesting that Barras uses the term “ancient history” in describing the find’s significance. As more and more blanks are filled in, evolution becomes more of a history and less of a theory.

Here’s a guess: More light will be shed on some questions but many popular ones will recede in importance. If, for example, someone wants to claim that early man’s brain was shaped by sexual jealousy, well, it’s an opinion the commentator is entitled to but it won’t really have the same status as a trove of newly discovered artifacts. It will be more like having a similar Big Theory about the Sumerians or the Biblical patriarchs.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Stone tools found in Saudi Arabia from 300,000 years ago

How did stone tools get to the Philippines 700 kya?

Revolutionary stone tools found in India “much earlier than thought,” 385 kya

Stone tools confirmed from 3.4 mya?

and

Stone tools now dated to 3.3 million years ago

Copyright © 2018 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana