Something Was Making Stone Tools In China 600,000 Years Before Homo Erectus Showed Up
Reviewed by John Anderer
In A Nutshell
- Ancient skulls found in Hubei Province, China, have been redated to 1.77 million years old, making them the oldest confirmed Homo erectus fossils found in place anywhere in eastern Asia.
- The new age pushes the site back by 700,000 to nearly a million years from its previous estimate.
- Stone tools at other Chinese sites predate these fossils by hundreds of thousands of years, leaving the identity of their makers an open mystery.
- The findings support the idea that early human relatives spread across Asia quickly after leaving Africa, reaching central China at nearly the same time they appeared on the far western edge of the continent.
Stone tools discovered in China date back as far as 2.4 million years. The oldest confirmed human fossils from the same region? Only 1.77 million years old. That gap, now significantly narrowed by new research, leaves one question stubbornly unanswered: who, or what, was already there?