Stone tools found in China could be the oldest evidence of human life outside of Africa | News from the world

Remains of stone tools roughly uncovered in China suggest that human ancestors were in Asia 2.1 million years ago, more than 200 000 years earlier than expected, the scientists said Wednesday. – The group of humans and our extinct ancestor species – left Africa earlier than archaeologists have been able to demonstrate it up to here, a team reported in the scientific journal Nature.

"Our discovery means that it is necessary now to reconsider the timing of when the first humans left Africa," said co-author of the Robin Dennell study of the & # 39; 39, University of Exeter, England.

Hominids are thought to have emerged in Africa more than 6 million years ago. They left the continent in several migratory waves beginning about two million years ago.

The earliest migrants were probably members of the Homo erectus or Homo ergaster species, extinguished predecessors of our own group, Homo sapiens (wise man), who emerged about 300,000 years ago.

The earliest known African fossil attributed to a member of the Homo family is a jaw aged 2.8 m from Ethiopia.

Previously, the oldest evidence of hominins in Asia, they came from Georgia in the form of fossilized skeletal fragments and artifacts dated between 1.77 m and 1.85 m high. years.

There have been other unproven claims of even older fossil discoveries, according to the authors

. The latest discovery of 96 stone tools was extracted from 17 layers of sediment in the Loess Plateau in southern China.

Dennell and a team used a field of science called "paleomagnetism" to date the sediment layers. These form when dust or mud settles before being covered by another new layer of soil. Any artifact found inside a diaper would be the same age as the soil that surrounds it.

Dennell and a team measured the magnetic properties of minerals in soil layers to determine when they were deposited

. a type known to have been manufactured by Homo species in Africa for at least 3.3 million years.

The paper offers strong evidence for a hominin presence in Asia further back than we thought, Dennell said. Older evidence in places like India and Pakistan, but so far … the evidence is not convincing enough to convince most researchers, "he said. "With this type of claim, for an early human presence in an area, the evidence must be absolutely watertight and bombproof."