Archaeologists have found that early humans in what is now China were using sophisticated stone tools as far back as 160,000 years ago.
“This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period,” the research team wrote in a statement about the discovery.
At the site of Xigou, discovered in 2017 in Henan province in central China, the archaeological team found the remains of more than 2,600 stone tools and determined that some of them were “hafted,” or attached to a piece of wood or other form of stick.
“The identification of the hafted tools provides the earliest evidence for composite tools in Eastern Asia, to our knowledge,” the team wrote in a study published Tuesday (Jan. 27) in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers already knew of extremely early tool use in East Asia, with the oldest known wooden tools there dating to 300,000 years ago. However, the new findings, which were excavated between 2019 and 2021, are the earliest known tools consisting of two materials, as is evidenced by the hafted artifacts.
Hafting “is a new technological innovation whereby the stone tool is inserted or bound to a handle or a shaft,” Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University and a co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. “This improved tool performance by allowing the user to increase leverage and providing more force for actions such as boring.”
It appears that the tools were used to process plant materials. “Microscopic analysis on the edges of the stone tools indicate boring actions, used against plant material, likely wood or reeds,” Petraglia said.
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