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From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com

Ancient tools found in India undermine the "out of
Africa" hypothesis

385,000-year-old evidence for much earlier meetings
between African and Indian hominins.

By Annalee Newitz
Ars Technica, arstechnica.com
January 31, 2018

The red star marks the location of Attirampakkam on this
map. It was once located next to the shady floodplain of
a stream. Early humans started coming here almost 400,000
years ago to make tools from quartzite rocks borne by the
stream to the area. Nature

The scientists carefully dated the layers of the site,
created by sediments from regular flooding. Nature

Some of the thousands of tools and tool parts found at
Attirampakkam. Note that there is a mix of older biface
hand axe tools and sophisticated, Middle Paleolithic
(Levallois) tools. That's a typical mix, and it does not
represent two different groups. Nature

These are from a later period. Middle Paleolithic tools
are often smaller and require more steps to make than
biface handaxes. Based on this new evidence, we can see
that Middle Paleolithic (Levallois) tools become popular
in Africa and India at roughly the same time, between
300-200,000 years ago. Nature

Scientists have unveiled an extraordinary new analysis of
thousands of stone tools found at a site called
Attirampakkam in India, northwest of Chennai in Tamil
Nadu. Thanks to new dating techniques, a team led by
archaeologist Shanti Pappu determined that most of the
tools are between 385,000 and 172,000 years old. What
makes these dates noteworthy is that they upend the idea
that tool-making was transformed in India after an influx
of modern Homo sapiens came from Africa starting about
130,000 years ago.

According to these findings, hominins in India were
making tools that looked an awful lot like what people
were making in Africa almost 250,000 years before they
encountered modern humans. This is yet another piece of
evidence that the "out of Africa" process was a lot
messier and more complex than previously thought.

Pappu worked out of the Sharma Centre for Heritage
Education in Chennai with a team of geoscientists and
physicists to date the tools. They used a technique
called "post-infrared infrared-stimulated luminescence,"
which measures how long ago minerals were exposed to
light or heat. In essence, it allows scientists to
determine how long ago a tool was buried and hidden from
the Sun's heat, and it uses that information as a proxy
for the tool's age.

Writing in Nature, the group explains that the
Attirampakkam site is ideal for this kind of dating,
because it was regularly flooded by a nearby stream,
meaning that discarded tools were quickly covered up by
sediments in the water. Those regular floods left behind
a relatively tidy stack of debris layers, each of which
could be dated.

To their surprise, Pappu and her colleagues found that
this region--once a tree-shaded shoreline, ideal for long-
term camping--had been occupied by early humans for
hundreds of thousands of years. Partly that's because the
river carried great heaps of quartzite rocks and pebbles
to the area. Quartz was the preferred stone for tools,
and it's obvious that this place was a tool workshop.
Alongside axes, knives, projectile points, and scrapers,
the team found half-finished tools and discarded flakes
created by chipping away at a rock to make a blade.

Continues at:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/new-discoveries-raise-critical-questions-for-out-of-africa-hypothesis/

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

http://bit.do/jaimaharaj

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