Discovery of Stone Tools suggests that Neanderthals went to China

Stone tools discovered in southwest China helped a mysterious group to survive in a cold and hostile environment between 60,000 and 50,000 years . But who shaped them? The answer can shake what is known about the human origins in this period of the stone age according to a new research.

Archaeologists that excavated the site of Longtan in Yunnan province, on the southwest edge of the Tibetan Plateau, found hundreds of stone artifacts on two trunches excavated in the reddish and silt clay of the region.

The research team determined that many of the tools were made in the style known as Quina, generally considered an archaeological brand of Neanderthals, a kind of ancient humans. The study, published this Monday (31) in the magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceshe stated that this style, or complex, had never been found before in eastern Asia.

“The discovery on the Longtan site is remarkable because it documents this tradition-specific tradition (at least 7,000 or 8,000 kilometers) of the region traditionally associated with this techno-cultural complex,” the co-author of the study Davide Delpiano, a postdoctoral researcher in Paleolithic archeology at the University of Ferrara, Italy, said by e-mail.

Neanderthals inhabited Eurasia for about 400,000 years before they disappeared 40,000 years ago, but there is no evidence of their traces east of the Altai mountains in southern Siberia.

Bones and skeletons have already been found next to Quina Stone Tools in various sites in Western Europe, including La Quina, in southwest France, which named it. Quina is one of several stone styles associated with this species and classified by archaeologists as part of Mustorian culture.

The unprecedented discovery in Longtan has “significant implications,” said Delpiano, raising two competing possibilities. Neanderthals may have migrated to the east and arrived at what today is China, or a different species of ancient human may have produced stone tools incredibly similar to those being made in Europe during this period, known as the average paleolithic.

Stone tools with deep implications

The Longtan discovered tool set between 2019 and 2020 includes scrapers, used to work leather or wood with a sharp edge, stone tips that may have been fixed to wooden spears and tools similar to those of a saw.

In Europe, Neanderthals used a corner stone tools for a dry and cold period, between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago, in an open woods landscape. These utensils would have helped them hunt migratory herds of reindeer, giant deer, horses and bisons, according to the study.

The Quina tools usually had a long period of use and were often retouched and reused – suggesting that they were a response to the scarcity of resources and a highly mobile lifestyle, the researchers wrote.

Longtan’s old pollen grain analysis revealed that the climate and atmosphere in southwest China were similar to those of Europe. However, the study’s authors did not find traces of animals on the site, so it is not known if humans who lived there hunting similar animals, they said.

“The set of quina objects represents an adaptation to highly developed mobility strategies: these artifacts were designed to last a long time, because nomads were forced to look for resources that, due to increasingly severe weather conditions, were becoming scarce,” said Delpiano.

It was possible that Neanderthals arrived as far as southwest China, or perhaps found other human species in their home territory, an interaction that allowed their stone tool technology to spread to the east, he said.

Denisova cave fossils in the Altai mountains show that the neanderthals lived there about 200,000 years ago, approximately at the same time as an related species, known as denisovans, inhabited the region.

The authors of the study added that skulls found in Xuchang, Henan Province, downtown China, also exhibited some neanderthal characteristics, which “may indicate that human interactions occurred between the West and the East.”

“I would not be surprised if individuals of this kind made occasional raids in the Chinese territory.

That said, the problem is that we currently do not have this technological set in the rest of Asia, which leaves us without a clear trail of crumbs to connect to a possible route of migration, ”said Delpiano.

Neanderthals vs. Denisovans

An equally plausible explanation raised by the study was that the hominids that inhabited Longtan – perhaps denisovans or other unknown species – developed separately the same style of stone tool as neanderthals, in response to the equally hostile environment.

“Although we can not confirm the presence of this group in China – which were responsible for the medium paleolithic tools in Europe and Central Asia – we know that their” sister “species, the Denisovans, were present in the region,” he said.

“Thus, it is possible to assign these innovations and ecological adaptations to them,” he added.

“From a knowledge base – a technological foundation common to European Neanderthals – local groups may have ‘reinvented’ this tool manufacturing because it filed well with its ecological conditions,” said Delpiano.

Dongju Zhang, archaeologist and professor at the University of Lanzhou, China, who did not participate in the study, said both hypotheses were plausible, although speculative. More concrete evidence is needed to understand who made the tools, she said.

“For me, it’s too early to explain the creators of this style in Longtan. I’m looking forward to seeing more safe new discoveries and evidence, such as human fossils, old or paleoproteomic (old protein) fossils in the east Asia,” he said by email.

The only way to prove that Neanderthals lived in what is China today is that paleontologists find a Neanderthal fossil in the country, said John Shea, professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York.

“Stone tools are not identity wallets,” he said.

The new study adds to a series of unanswered questions about how human history unfolded in Asia before the large scale arrival of our own species, Homo Sapiens, to the region.

“For me, the importance of this article is that it contributes to a growing list of recent discoveries that highlight East and Southeast Asia as key areas for research on human origins,” said Ben Utting, a postdoctoral researcher at the Anthropology Department of the National Museum of Natural History of Smithsonian, Washington, DC.

“Although archaeologists and anthropologists have long considered east and southeast Asia as culturally ‘peripheral’ regions, these findings are helping to reverse this narrative and demonstrating that humans living in these regions were as dynamic and complex in their behavior as those living in other parts of the world at the same time.”

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This content was originally published in the discovery of stone tools suggests that Neanderthals went to China on CNN Brazil.

Source: CNN Brasil