RESEARCHERS FIND ANCIENT STONE TOOLS IN INDIA

RESEARCHERS FIND ANCIENT STONE TOOLS IN INDIA

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID | AP

Published: Mar 25, 2011 22:28 Updated: Mar 25, 2011 22:38

WASHINGTON: The human migration out of Africa reached south India more than a million years ago, newly discovered stone tools indicate.

Researchers led by Shanti Pappu of the Sharma Center for Heritage Education in Tamil Nadu discovered more than 3,500 quartzite tools of the distinct Acheulian design used by the earliest humans in Africa starting more than 1.5 million years ago.

The tools dated to at least 1.07 million years old and some possibly 1.51 million years old, the researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

That is almost contemporary with similar tools found in Africa, the researchers noted in their paper.

“If the early age of 1.5 million years ago is to be believed, this has major implications,” said archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the University of Oxford, England, who was not part of the research team.

The early date would be consistent with the age of early populations of Homo erectus, and not the later forms of hominins, such as Homo heidelbergensis, he explained.

“This is important as it means that a smaller brained form of hominin was able to cross formidable barriers and adapt to the ecological settings of India.” Robin Dennell of Sheffield University, England, said the new evidence suggests the spread of this type of tools from Africa occurred in two phases, first by H. erectus into South Asia and much later by H. heidelbergensis northward and westward into Europe.

The discovery at a site called Attirampakkam in the Kortallayar river basin helps anthropologists better understand the spread of ancient people from Africa into Asia.

The find is unprecedented for archaeological studies in India, said Petraglia.

“This means that soon after early humans invented the Acheulean toolkit ... groups migrated out of Africa at an early stage, crossing formidable geographic barriers to get to southern Asia,” Petraglia said. “The suggestion that this occurred at around 1.5 million years ago is simply staggering. This is the oldest date for out of Africa dispersals, supplanting the much cited 1.4 million-year-old ages from the Levant.” Petraglia said the main issue here is one of confidence in the dating methods, but as the researchers used two independent dating techniques, “I am satisfied that the ages are accurate.” The early date for the Indian find also help explain similar tools found in the Bose Basin of South China and dated about 800,000 years ago, Dennell added. While the tools could have been developed independently in China, the finding of older artifacts in India now shows it was possible for the technology to have spread there from India.

A separate paper in the same issue of Science reports that a mass of ancient stone tools discovered at an archaeological dig in Texas is pushing back the presence of humans in North America, perhaps by as much as 2,500 years.

Thousands of artifacts dating to between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago were uncovered by researchers led by Michael R. Waters of Texas A &M University, the team reports in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The find was located beneath materials left by the well-known Clovis Culture, which was once thought to have been the first American settlers around 13,000 years ago.

“This is really exciting. This is like, you know, like finding the holy grail for me,” Waters said in a telephone interview. “And to finally find something that appears to be a large kind of open-air campsite activity area is really gratifying. Lucky and gratifying.” The trove that included 15,528 artifacts including chipping debris from working stones, and 56 tools such as blades, scrapers and choppers, was found in the Buttermilk Creek Complex near Austin, the Texas capital.

The find is the oldest credible archaeological site in North America, Waters said at a briefing. The artifacts were found in an eight-inch (20 centimeter) layer beneath about five feet (1.5 meters) of earth and other material from later human occupation at the site.

The tools were small, Waters said. “This is a mobile tool kit, something that is easily transported. It’s lightweight. These are the type of tools that you would have if you were a mobile hunter gatherer.” This “demonstrates that people were in America at least 15,500 years ago, 2,500 years before Clovis,” Waters said.

And the tools were the type that could have led to the later development of the fluted points that trademark Clovis technology.