Stone Axes Suggest Diversity’s Dawn
Archeologists have discovered the oldest stone axes ever found in Asia, 800,000-year-old implements that hint at the minds that painstakingly shaped them at the dawn of humanity.
The findings provide provocative evidence of the beginnings of cultural diversity, which, like toolmaking itself, is today the hallmark of humankind.
The discovery is also certain to force many researchers to reconsider the pace of human development in Asia, which until now has been considered an evolutionary backwater. Previously, tools of this vintage had been found only in Africa and Europe.
The subtle differences between these newly discovered axes in Asia and similar artifacts found elsewhere reveal evidence of two distinct toolmaking cultures emerging among humanity’s distant forebears, some researchers believe.
Unearthed by the thousands, the tools are so sophisticated that they effectively dispel any lingering scholarly notions that humanity’s earliest ancestors in Asia lagged behind those in Africa and Europe in developing the rudiments of technology, experts said.
The tools were found buried amid the molten debris of an ancient meteorite impact that eons ago ignited forests across a broad swath of southern China.
A team of American and Chinese scientists announced their discovery Thursday. Their research is published today in Science.
Researchers excavated the tools at 24 sites in the Bose basin of the Guangxi Zhuang region of southern China.
Chipped from cobbles of chert, sandstone and quartz, such primitive cutting tools are the foundation stones of modern technology.
Stone implements known as Acheulean tools are the handiwork of a wide-ranging, prehuman species called Homo erectus, which was the first hominid to leave Africa and populate Eurasia. For more than a million years, its hand axes were the indestructible Swiss Army knives of the early human family throughout much of the world.
Yet until now, these relatively advanced stone tools were nowhere to be found in eastern Asia.
“That is what is unexpected about all of this,” said Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History, who was a co-leader of the international team. “People in the Western world don’t expect such finds in China.”
The Asian implements clearly display a level of sophistication and skill that equals any used to make tools in Africa 800,000 years ago and are more advanced than those made in Europe at that time, several anthropologists familiar with the find said.
The excavations were conducted by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, in conjunction with the Smithsonian in Washington.
The site was dated by the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, which analyzed the radiometric decay of argon isotopes in the material thrown up by the meteorite.
F. Clark Howell, an expert at UC Berkeley on early human origins, said the discovery offered “a major contribution” to the regional understanding of early human evolution.
“We will have to look at these problems now in a new way,” Howell said.
At UCLA, anthropologist Thomas Plummer said the find was the first indication that such sophisticated tools were made in Asia during that period.
“Overall, there is a different texture or feel to the Asian archeological record. This is the first indication of something similar to the Old World,” he said.
So few traces of humanity’s earliest ancestors have survived that humble stone tools are the only enduring evidence of evolving prehuman behavior.
The earliest known tools, which date to about 2.6 million years ago, were discovered in Africa. No one knows what prehuman species made them.
Recent discoveries at the Renzidong Cave in Anhui province in eastern China suggest that such extremely primitive chopping stones, scrapers and flaked stone knives may have appeared in Asia as early as 2.25 million years ago, though many anthropologists have been skeptical.
The more sophisticated tools crafted by Homo erectus first appear in Africa about 1.5 million years ago.
Deceptively simple in appearance, these kinds of cutting tools were devilishly difficult to make.
Each hand ax of the period required about 50 steps to shape properly, experts said.
In Africa and Europe, the design and dimensions of these distinctive stone axes did not vary for a million years.
The cutting tools discovered in the Bose basin, however, show subtle differences that stamp them as made in China.
“They basically have an equal degree of technical competence, but there are some differences in the technology,” Potts said. “That suggests an independent development.”
Many of the stones are worked on only one side, while some cutting tools and choppers have been chipped in a different pattern from what was common elsewhere. The Acheulean ax, with its almond shape and double-edged blade, was not found at the Bose sites.
“They have tools that are as sophisticated as these [Acheulean] hand axes, but they are not hand axes,” said anthropologist Richard Klein at Stanford University.
The prehuman Homo erectus hominids “in the Far East were as good at flaking stones and forming tools, but they were culturally different,” Klein said. “There is no cultural retardation. They are hunting just as effectively. But the tools are different in form.
“That is important in the overall pattern of human evolution,” Klein said. “Different populations on different continents went in different directions.”
Others, however, including Potts, believe that any variations in toolmaking simply reflect the differences in the raw materials at hand rather than behavioral or cultural differences.
Potts is more impressed by what all these toolmakers had in common than by any technical differences in the finished products.
In all likelihood, the early hominids in Asia used bamboo or wood to fashion their implements, until the meteorite strike laid bare deposits of useful cobblestones.
The moment they had access to the proper stones, the toolmakers apparently adapted quickly to the new materials, turning out the blades and cutting tools that Potts and his colleagues unearthed.
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Stone Age High Technology
Chinese and American archeologists have unearthed the oldest stone axes ever found in Asia. The 800,000-year-old tools take the wind out of scholarly suggestions that Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa in developing the foundations of technology. The timeline shows the evolution of tools from 2.6 million years ago to 150,000 years ago.
