Andhra’s 247,000 year old cache: Who had such advanced stone tools?

An unknown species of the Homo lineage was using advanced stone tools in India over 247,000 years ago, according to the findings of a recently published academic paper.

It was believed till now that Homo sapiens, or modern humans, brought advanced stone tool technology across the continents as they came out of Africa and dispersed globally. 

The National Geographic-funded study An Early Presence of Modern Human or Convergent Evolution? A 247 ka Middle Palaeolithic Assemblage from Andhra Pradesh, India was published in the Journal of Archaelogical Science July 29, 2022.

Hanumanthunipadu in the valley of the Paleru river is the site in Andhra Pradesh where the team of researchers found and studied artefacts from the Middle Paleolithic Period.

The researchers belonged to the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda; Luminescence Laboratory, AMOPH division, Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad; the Indian institute of Technology in Gandhinagar and the Department of Archaeology, Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur.

“At the moment, it would be difficult to assign this technological development to any particular hominin group because of the absence of relevant fossils,” the study stated.

“It is also necessary to note that this observation is not inimical to the proposed 120 ka dispersal event of modern humans; the difficulty, however, is associating that group with the introduction of Middle Palaeolithic technologies in South Asia,” it added.

The researchers wrote that it was also possible that the South Asian Middle Palaeolithic was a product of local innovations starting around 400 ka and technologies introduced by the incoming modern humans later on.

“There is a lot of debate regarding the exact date of arrival of modern humans in India. One group of scientists argue that modern humans came to India around 120,000 years ago, bringing with them modern stone tools known as Middle Paleolithic technology,” Devara Anil, lead author of the paper told Down To Earth.

“We found that Middle Paleolithic technology in India was older than 120,000 years and as old as 247,000 years. This means this technology must have been locally invented and used by archaic or unknown humans.

“They could have been Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Hidelbergensis or even an undiscovered species of human. But since we do not have any fossil remains, it is very difficult to say who it was,” Anil said.

He also added that it was very much possible that when modern humans came to India, they interbred with these archaic humans.    

This had been shown by a number of genetic studies. “The paper Using hominin introgression to trace modern human dispersals, published by Joao C Teixeiraa and Alan Coopera in 2020 had already shown that such interbreeding had indeed taken place in India,” Anil said.

“These unknown humans became extinct about 40,000 years ago. The reason for that is not known. It could have been climate change which did occur at the time,” he added.

The advanced stone tools or Middle Paleolithic technology has also been found in sites other than Hanumanthunipadu.

In 2018, archaeologist Shanti Pappu and her colleagues published a paper in Nature which showed that stone tools found in Attirampakkam, a village located about 65 km west-northwest of Chennai, belonged to the Middle Paleolithic technology and were around 385,000 years old.

“Our study, in fact, corroborates the findings of that study,” Anil said.

Other sites where such tools and artefacts have been found include Sandhav in Kutch, Katoti in Rajasthan, Dhaba in the valley of the Son river and Jwalapuram in Andhra Pradesh.

“These four sites are younger. In fact, it was on the basis of the research conducted at these that it was believed till recently that modern humans came to India around 120,000 years ago, bringing with them modern stone tools,” Anil noted.

“The most important contribution of Anil’s study is the absolute dates, something still lacking in Indian prehistoric archaeology,” Parth R Chauhan, assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, told Down To Earth.

He added: “The early Middle Paleolithic was a critical period in human evolution where a new technology became established and also our species appeared in Africa (based on current fossil evidence). Earlier, the Middle Paleolithic was thought to have originated in Africa before spreading elsewhere.

“However, recent research has shown that it seems to have had multiple indigenous origins across parts of the Old World, including India. In short, it seems to have been innovated by more than one hominin species.”

But Chauhan noted that while Anil’s reported evidence seemed to technologically fall within the lengthy Middle Paleolithic phase, there was not enough convincing evidence to easily distinguish it between being indigenous vs being introduced from outside India.

“While the former interpretation is probably true, we should not rule out all possible scenarios at this early stage of research, including that it could also represent dispersal of Middle Paleolithic technology into the region by other archaic populations and mixing with similiar regional records,” he said.

In other words, other hominin species could have been responsible for dispersing the technology across Eurasia in addition to innovating it.

“It is not necessary to always invoke the possible involvement of Homo sapiens, which probably had a role to play here only in a much later time period. Long-term research on this period across India will reveal the true nature of inter-regional variances in technology, adaptations and hominin species present,” Chauhan said.

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