Human evolution; possibly we first appeared earlier (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 01, 2018, 00:48 (2270 days ago) @ David Turell

Findings of advanced stone tools in India are suggestive of 385,000 years ago:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-tools-from-india-fan-debate-over-origi...

"Sometime around 400,000 years ago human ancestors went on an innovation bender. No longer content to make do with only the large hand axes and other hefty cutting tools that they and their predecessors had manufactured for more than a million years, they began fashioning sophisticated new kinds of stone tools. The novel tool types made more efficient use of raw material and were smaller, more portable, among other desirable traits. The shift was, by most accounts, a major technological advance, one that may have helped its makers push into previously impenetrable lands.

"For decades experts have debated which human species invented this new tool-making tradition—during what is called the Middle Stone Age in Africa and the Middle Paleolithic in Eurasia—and how it came to replace the preceding Acheulean tradition at locales across the globe. One theory holds that our own species, Homo sapiens, masterminded this technological revolution in its birthplace, Africa. From there, our forebears carried this new culture into the rest of the Old World when they began dispersing out of Africa, introducing it to the archaic species they encountered in Eurasia, including the Neandertals. A second theory posits the last common ancestor of Neandertals and H. sapiens came up with the technology and passed the know-how down to its descendant species. Or maybe, some scholars have argued, different human groups independently developed this novel way of making stone tools.

"New findings from India add an intriguing data point to the picture. In a paper published in the February 1 Nature, Kumar Akhilesh and Shanti Pappu of the Sharma Center for Heritage Education, India, and their colleagues report on the recovery of stone tools from Attirampakkam, a site on India’s southeast coast, that span the time between around 385,000 and 172,000 years ago. According to the team, the artifact assemblages show signature elements of the Middle Paleolithic, including tools manufactured using the so-called Levallois strategy for obtaining thin, broad flakes from a stone core. The researchers determined the age of the tools using a technique known as luminescence dating. If they are correct in their assessment, the Attirampakkam tools are by far the oldest Middle Paleolithic tools in India, besting the previous record holders by more than 200,000 years.

"According to the discovery team, the Middle Paleolithic tools at Attirampakkam are markedly different from the older Acheulean technology at the site. Previously some researchers have argued the emergence of Middle Paleolithic technology in India was linked to dispersals of H. sapiens from Africa after around 125,000 years ago. But if people were making Middle Paleolithic stone tools as early as 385,000 years ago in India and other sites in Eurasia, and somewhat earlier in Africa, then the possibility of a far earlier dispersal of technologically advanced humans—perhaps H. sapiens—into India warrants consideration."

Comment: H. sapiens are only as old as the oldest fossil we can find, and those fossils are few and far between. We still don't know when we appeared in our earliest form. The article concentrates on the arguments about the significance of the tools. But it raises the issue of how long we had a big complex brain and didn't use it much. Under the dhw theory that concepts had to be implemented and that necessity 'pushed' the appearance of a larger, more complex brain, one must wonder why it took so long to really use it. What happened to the 'push'.