160,000-year-old sophisticated stone tools discovered in China may not have been made by Homo sapiens
Archaeologists have discovered that early humans in what is now China used sophisticated stone tools 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.
“The identification of handled tools provides the first evidence of the existence of composite tools in East Asia, to our knowledge,” the team wrote in a study published Tuesday (Jan. 27) in the journal Natural communications.
Researchers already knew about tool use very early in East Asia, with the the oldest known wooden tools date back 300,000 years ago. However, the new finds, which were excavated between 2019 and 2021, are the first known tools made of two materials, as evidenced by the hafted artifacts.
The hafting “is a new technological innovation by which the stone tool is inserted or linked to a handle or handle”, Michael Petragliadirector of the Australian Center for Human Evolution Research at Griffith University and co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. “This improved the performance of the tool by allowing the user to increase their leverage and providing more force for actions such as reaming.”
It appears that the tools were used to process plant matter. “Microscopic analysis of the edges of the stone tools indicates drilling actions, used against plant matter, probably wood or reeds,” Petraglia said.
Their toolmaking techniques “appear well established and involve several intermediate steps, demonstrating planning and foresight,” the team said in a statement.
Ben Marwickprofessor of archeology at the University of Washington and co-author of the paper, said it was unclear which early human species made these tools.
“The exact identity of the makers of these tools is unclear, because at that time several species of hominids likely lived in the area,” Marwick told Live Science in an email. “It could therefore be, for example, the Denisovans, H. longi, H. juluensis Or H. sapiens who made these tools. Hopefully, future work will recover fossil remains or DNA that will shed more light on this interesting question. »
It is notable that most of the artifacts are small – less than 50 millimeters – but were made with complex techniques, Marwick noted. “These date from a period when previous archaeological research had mostly uncovered large objects produced using simple flaking methods,” he said. “Our results therefore suggest that complex tool production strategies appear earlier than previously thought.”
The newly discovered tools date from between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago. At this time, people in the region lived as hunter-gatherers, but the details of their lifestyle are unclear.
“Although the lack of mammal bones and other evidence makes it difficult to infer their lifestyle, their stone tools at least indicate a high degree of behavioral flexibility and successful adaptation to local climate and resources.” Shi-Xia Yanga paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.
The discovery of sophisticated stone tools from this region and period challenges a long-held hypothesis regarding ancient tool making, the study authors noted.
“The broader relevance of these findings is that they challenge the long-held prejudice that East Asian hominids only produced ‘conservative’ tools,” Marwick said. “The prejudice was deeply rooted and dominated archeology for more than half a century thanks to the concept of the Movius line.
“Proposed in the 1940s, this ‘line’ suggested a geographic division between the ‘advanced’ Acheulean cultures of Africa and Western Eurasia and the ‘conservative’ chopping tool cultures of East Asia,” he continued. “This created a narrative of East Asia as a cultural backwater, where hominids were thought to be evolutionarily stagnant.”
John Sheaprofessor of anthropology at Stony Brook University who was not involved in the research, praised the article but noted that the idea that East Asia was a cultural backwater was never accurate. He noted that, in his own experiments with stone tools, the small, complex, sharp stone tools that were most commonly constructed in Europe could be dangerous to use. “Trust me, because I have the scars to prove it,” he said.
Any “hominid with a bit of common sense almost certainly minimized the time they spent pounding razor-sharp flakes,” Shea said. “In this regard, [Southeast] Asian hominids did what was expected of them. …The idea that “simple tools equal simple minds” is archaeological mythology.
Anne Fordassociate professor of archeology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, praised the research.
“This is truly a great finding and highlights our need to move away from old descriptions of Asian technologies as simple commodity industries,” Ford said in an email to Live Science. She noted that hafting is “an important technological milestone and has implications for assessing the cognitive ability of hominids in China during this period.”
Yue, J., Song, G., Yang, S., Kang, S., Li, J., Marwick, B., Ollé, A., Fernández-Marchena, JL, Shu, P., Liu, H., Zhang, Y., Huan, F., Zhao, Q., Qiao, B., Shen, Z., Deng, C., and Petraglia, M. (2026). Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China around 160,000 to 72,000 years ago. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67601-y
