Human evolution; early Asia spread (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 09, 2021, 21:24 (1353 days ago) @ David Turell

New found stone tools:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/india-stone-tools-human-evolution-ar...

"The discovery, described in Nature on Wednesday, pushes back the start of what’s called the Middle Paleolithic culture in the region by more than a hundred thousand years. That, in turn, could reshape how scientists view the global spread of hominins—humans and their ancient relatives—before modern humans migrated out of Africa some 60,000 years ago.

“'This clearly shows that populations with this culture were present in most parts of South Asia, adapting to local factors and with tool types evolving and changing through time,” says Shanti Pappu of the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education in India, who led the most recent excavations at Attirampakkam.

"The find also deepens scientists’ view of how ancient hominins lived in South Asia, a region where the fossil record remains poorly understood.

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"Genetic evidence shows that more than 90 percent of humans today descend from a small population of Homo sapiens that left Africa between 60,000 and 125,000 years ago. From there, they rapidly fanned out, reaching the tip of South America by 18,000 years ago.

"Some researchers suspected that this wave of Homo sapiens expanded so rapidly because they were armed with advanced stone tools superior to those of the earlier Acheulian culture, which is defined by bulky stone hand-axes and cleavers.

"To test this idea, archaeologists have tried to find and date stone tools around the world, to see when the tool transition occurred in different regions. Previous studies found that Middle Paleolithic tools didn’t enter India before 140,000 years ago.

"Recent research, however, is building the case that multiple waves of humans left Africa before the migration inscribed in our collective DNA. Just last week, research published in Science suggested that modern humans ventured into what’s now Israel as early as 180,000 years ago, earlier than previously thought.

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"In this context, Attirampakkam is an Indian national treasure. First explored for scientific purposes by British geologist R.B. Foote in 1863, it’s one of the subcontinent’s few thoroughly excavated archaeological sites dated to more than a hundred thousand years old.

"For more than 20 years, Pappu’s team has worked at Attirampakkam to unravel its secrets, digging through 30 feet of sediment an inch at a time.

"It hasn’t been easy; they’ve had to cope with summer heat, cobras, and a shoestring budget. But in 2011, their efforts massively paid off, when they announced the discovery of Acheulian tools at Attirampakkam that are more than a million years old, far older than other similar sites in India.

"The site continued to offer surprises. To Pappu’s delight, her colleagues also found artifacts in the sediments above the Acheulian layers. But unlike those bulkier tools, some of the younger tools were slimmer flakes of stone that could have tipped spears, a calling card for the Middle Paleolithic.

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"In all likelihood, Attirampakkam’s oldest Middle Paleolithic layer—and its stone tool contents—are at least 250,000 years old, the team reports.

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“'We used to think that modern humans spread from Africa because they had some enormous technical advantage that let them replace ‘stupid’ archaic humans; we now know this is false,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoanthropologist John Hawks, who wasn’t involved with the study.

"But many questions remain. For one, Pappu stresses that the identity of the tools’ creators is still unknown. And Petraglia, who reviewed the study, cautions that while the tools at Attirampakkam may resemble Middle Paleolithic tools found elsewhere, that doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility that different peoples converged on similar solutions to common problems.

“'I don’t think this is necessarily an out-of-Africa event,” he says. “Rather than equating technologies from Europe to Africa to South Asia, you can also recast it as independent invention by large-brained early humans'.”

Comment: Early homos either had massive wanderlust or environmental problems that drove them. Like convergence why could there not have been different populations with the same new concepts?