The tools could suggest that Homo sapiens reached South Asia far earlier than previously thought, but critics disagree
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.
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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.
Recent discoveries might make such an early dispersal of our species seem more plausible than it once did. In 2017 a team working at the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco announced it had unearthed fossils of H. sapiens and accompanying Middle Stone Age tools dating to more than 300,000 years ago. And just last week a different team unveiled a fossil from Misliya Cave in Israel that pushes back the earliest known evidence of H. sapiens outside of Africa to around 185,000 years ago. The Misliya fossil turned up in association with Middle Paleolithic artifacts, including Levallois tools.
But other archaeologists are not so sure about the Attirampakkam team’s interpretation. Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, an authority on the Paleolithic record of India, says that although he is satisfied with the dating of the new finds, he disagrees with their classification as Middle Paleolithic. “At best, I see them as transitional between the Acheulean and the Middle Paleolithic, he says. “They could even be classified as Late Acheulean.” Petraglia notes Late Acheulean stone tool kits from India and elsewhere have many of the same tool types seen at Attirampakkam.
Rather than signaling an early dispersal of a new human group into India, Petraglia thinks the Attirampakkam remains reflect reflects regional continuity between the Acheulean and the Middle Paleolithic. “These stone tool kits were likely made by archaic humans that were already present in India,” he suggests. Human fossils from India are exceedingly rare. But Petraglia observes that an enigmatic skullcap from the Narmada River Valley, 1,000 kilometers north of Attirampakkam, shows large-brained early humans were living in India at around this time.
A similar view comes from Harvard University archaeologist Christian Tryon, an expert on the Middle Stone Age of Africa who was not involved in the new work. He says there is no reason to link the new finds to Africa. He does not see a sharp divide between the Acheulean and Middle Paleolithic artifacts at the site, which one would expect to see if a new group of humans swept into India with new technology. “It’s safest to assume it’s a local phenomenon,” he says of the cultural transition at Attirampakkam.
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