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Stone tools discovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans crossed the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, according to a new study from the University of California, Davis. The date is about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists thought.
Nicolas Zwyns, associate professor of anthropology and senior author of the study, also indicates that the site indicates a new place where modern humans might have met for the first time their mysterious cousins, the Denisovans today. Missing.
Zwyns led excavations from 2011 to 2016 on the Tolbor-16 site along the Tolbor River in the northern Hangai Mountains between Siberia and northern Mongolia.
The excavations produced thousands of stone artifacts, with 826 stone artifacts associated with the earliest human occupation on the site. With long, regular blades, the tools look like those found on other sites in Siberia and in northwestern China, indicating a large-scale dispersion of humans in the area, said Zwyns.
"These objects existed before in Siberia, but not to such a degree of standardization," said Zwyns. "The most intriguing aspect (the aspect) is that they are produced in a complicated but systematic way – and this seems to be the signature of a human group that shares a common technical and cultural context. "
This technology, known in the region as the Upper Early Palaeolithic, led researchers to dismiss Neanderthals or Denisovans as occupants of the site. "Although we did not find any human remains on the site, the dates we obtained correspond to the age of the oldest Homo sapiens found in Siberia," Zwyns said. "After carefully studying other options, we suggest that this change in technology illustrates the movements of Homo sapiens in the region."
Their results were published online in an article by Scientific reports.
The age of the site – determined by luminescence dating on sediment and radiocarbon dating of animal bones found near the tools – is about 10,000 years earlier than the fossil record. a human cap of Mongolia and about 15,000 years after the modern man left Africa.
Evidence of soil development (grass and other organic matter) associated with stone tools suggests that the climate has become warmer and wetter for a period, making the area normally cold and dry more welcoming to grazing animals and humans .
Preliminary analysis identifies bone fragments present on the site as large (wild cattle or bison) and medium (wild sheep and goats) and horses, which frequented steppe, forest and tundra open to the Pleistocene – another sign of human occupation at the site.
The dates for the stone tools also correspond to the age estimates obtained from genetic data for the first encounter between Homo sapiens and Denisovans.
"Although we do not yet know where the meeting was held, it seems that the Denisovans have passed on genes that will later help Homo sapiens to settle at high altitude and to survive. hypoxia on the Tibetan plateau, "said Zwyns. "From this point of view, the Tolbor-16 site is an important archaeological link connecting Siberia to northwestern China on a route where Homo sapiens had multiple opportunities to meet local populations such as the Denisovans."
Among the co-authors of the article are Roshanne Bakhtiary, an anthropology student at UC Davis, and Kevin Smith, former graduate student Joshua Noyer and undergraduate Aurora Allshouse, currently a master's student at the University of Ottawa. Harvard University.
Other members of the team included colleagues from universities and institutes in South Carolina, the United Kingdom, Mongolia, Germany, Belgium and Russia.
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