Eoliths: Siberia. 1.5 - 2.5 million year old stone tools

Continuing with my series on primitive paleolithic tools, ones that resemble Oldowan cobble pebbles, following yesterday's post on the 100 ky Texas Street, San Diego, California site excavated by George Carter (1940s-1970s), I will go back to Siberia.

Recently I posted about two sites there, Diring Yuirakh and Karama, today I will mention another one, on Ulalinka River dated to over 1.5 million years ago.

Ulalinka River site

Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, in their 1993 work Hidden History of the Human Race mention the Ulalinka River site as follows: "In 1961, hundreds of crude pebble tools were found near Gorno-Altaisk, on the Ulalinka river in Siberia. According to a 1984 report by Russian scientists A. P. Okladinov and L. A. Ragozin, the tools were found in layers 1.5-2.5 million years old."

Little has been written about it in Western journals. The second source I encountered about it, is a travel agent based in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, that mentions the attractions in Gorno-Altaisk, and casually refers to the site on their website:

"Ulalinskaya Paleolithic site
Ulalinskaya Paleolithic site is one of the main sights in Gorno-Altaysk. It is situated on the bank of the Ulalushka River, after which the site took its name.
The site constantly attracts attention of archeologists. It was found during the excavations of 1960-1970s under the guidance of academician Alexey Okladnikov. Exactly that time more than 600 stone tools were found, referring to the age of Paleolith. It proves the fact that the territory was made habitable more than 1,5 million years ago. Although the views of geologists about this subject are still not common. Some experts determine the age of the site in the range of 100 - 350 thousand years; others indicate the date from 690 thousand to half a million years.
Unfortunately, only primitive tools, no other traces of sites of ancient people were found during excavations.
This sensational archeological find became the city’s pride. No wonder that exactly these tools are depicted in the coat of arms since 1996.
The debates over this discovery are conducted to this day - many scientists believe, it would a grand hoax of the 20th century."

Gorno-Altaysk means "Mountainous Altai" in Russian, note that (1) this article calls the river Ulaluska, and the site Ulalinskaya. (2) It suggests it may be a hoax. (3) And that the city adopted the tools in its coat of arms (pictured).

Details

The site is located in the twon of Gorno-Altaysk itself — 51°°57'20.7"N 85°58'25.5"E (see it in Google maps) which is 110 km (68 mi.) as the crow flies, from the famous Denisova Cave.

The megalithic.co.uk website has some pictures of the site.

There is an English language publication A. P. Okladnikov and G. A. Pospelova, 1982 (Ulalinka, the Oldest Palaeolithic Site in Siberia p. 710–712, Current Anthropology Vol 23, No 6 (🔒 paywalled, but you can read the first page of the paper). Which says that it was discovered in 1961 on the Maima River, at its confluence with the Ulalinka River by the cemetery of Gorno-Altaysk. It describes the sedimentary layers in the dig, which produced neolithic tools from its upper layer (younger than 25,000 years - 25 ky), and then, the one with the primitive eoliths:

"The main cultural level of this section, associated with the boulder-pebble horizon, differs from the upper one and from all other known Palaeolithic sites in Siberia principally in the strikingly archaic shapes of the tools and their primitive technology. The tools were made almost entirely from pebbles of yellowish-white quartzite, whole or split in half, and sometimes from pebbles of obsidian and quartzite fragments.
The finds include choppers, chopping tools, scrapers, a peculiar pebble core and tools with a spoutlike curved projection that might have served as cutting instruments. All these tools are nearly untreated pebbles, only slightly retouched (fig 1) [see it below]. All the artifacts are amorphous. They may sometimes have served as cutting tools, sometimes as scrapers, sometimes both functions at once. Their primitive diversity seems to reflect the pursuit of a useful and stable shape. The stone inventory and the techniques of manufacture are so primitive and peculiar that they cannot be classified in the framework of the classic Lower Palaeolithic typology. The nomenclature of the Western European schemes cannot be applied to them."

Below is Fig. 1 from this paper, showing these tools. The article adds that the "archaeological data alone were insufficient to estimate the age of these tools", and that they used other, geological, paleogeographical, and paleontological techniques. There were different opinions among the scholars, with some dating it at no more than 40 ky, while others, including the author of the paper in two articles published in 1964 and 1972, Gaiduk, 1968, and Ceitlin, 1979 placed it in the Lower Pleistocene.

The articles, in Russian, are:
Okladnikov, A.P., 1964. Ulalinka–the earliest Palaeolithic occupation in Siberia. Investiya AN SSSR 1/1, 131–133.
Okladnikov, A.P. 1972, Ulalinka – drevnepaleoliticheskiy pamyatnik Sibiri. In Paleolit i neolit SSSR, vol. 7. Moscow: Nauka, pp. 7–19. (MIA; No. 185).
Gaiduk, I. M. 1968. Kamenny vek basseina Verhnei i Srednei Obi. (paleolit, neolit). Avtoreferat dissertatsii, Novosibirsk.
Zeitlin (or Ceitlin S.M. 1979. Geology of the Paleolithic of Northern Asia. Moscow: Nauka. Yamskikh

Ulalinka is cited by Dennell, Rendell and Hailwood, 1988 "... the artefacts from the site of Ulalinka in Soviet Central Asia, that were dated to the Olduvai Event (Okladinov & Pospelova, 1982), but need not be older than the Brunhes- Matuyama boundary at c. 0.7 My."

Shunkov, 2005 gives it an old, yet more recent age "The available palaeomagnetic and radiothermoluminescence (RTL) dates suggest attribution of the lowermost layers at Ulalinka to a wide chronological range of c. 300 - 400 ka to 1.5 mya (Okladnikov et al. 1985). The lower chronological boundary seems doubtful, whereas the upper boundary is reliable, supporting the age estimates of the Ulalinka site as older than 300 ka."

However, an older dating is provided by UNESCO in History of civilizations of Central Asia, v. 1: The Dawn of civilization, earliest times to 700 B.C., 1992 (see p. 54), though with some reservations; highlights are mine:

"The site of Ulalinka, within the town of Gornoaltaisk in the northern Altai, gives rise to considerable controversy among specialists. Discovered in 1961, it was excavated overseveral seasons by A. P. Okladnikov. Beneath a four-metre layer of alluvial loam lies a stratum of multicoloured clays resting on boulder deposits. In the lower part of the clay, which geologists ascribe to the Kochorka Eneopleistocene suite, a series of hand-worked pebbles is to be found in a seam of yellow-ochre-coloured clay, containing quartzite boulders and pebbles. Palaeomagnetic analysis suggests that the yellow-ochre is in the Matayama zone of negative magnetization. The thermoluminescent date of the layer that contains the tools is 1.48 million years. [Note: Matayama reversal, or negative magnetization took place between 2.58 and 0.78 million years ago]
The archaeological material is restricted to quartzite tools scattered among the pebbles in the clay. Okladnikov identifies several groups: crude pebble ‘proto-axes’, ‘tools with anextended nose’, crudely made choppers and crude scrapers. Particular attention was paid to laterally split quartzite pebbles with dressed edges and tips. Although these artefacts are comparable in period with the Olduvan industry, their general appearance does not allow direct analogies to be drawn with that site or its typological series. The reason is that Ulalinka lacks both stable designs and, most importantly, the usual signs of deliberate working – the struck crest, surface cutting, precise spalling facets and so on. Okladnik overcomes this difficulty by explaining that the Ulalinka finds are unusual in that the pebbles were split not by striking but by being heated in a fire and then dropped in water. Analysing the formation about this site, it should be noted that until more convincing evidence is available, Okladnikov’s conclusions cannot be unreservedly accepted."

Another online reference (Novosibirsk State University (NSU) in Russia, in english) states that "Ulalinka which lies within the limits of today's Gorno-Altaisk, is the most ancient settlement of primitive man. During the excavation of the Ulalinka site some primitive stone tools were found. The fire technique, that is the heating and quick cooling of stones, was used when making the tools. Ulalinka's finds are dated within the limits of the lower Palaeolithic period - from 150000 BC to 1.5 million years."

The final reference is Zwyns, 2012: "The Ulalinka site was discovered in 1961 by Okladnikov and was intensively investigated starting in 1969. The dating of human occupation at theses sites varies depending of the authors (Maloletko, 1972; Okladnikov, 1972; Gayduk, 1973; Okladnikov and Pospelova, 1982; Ragozin and Shliukov, 1984; Tseitlin, 1986) and doubts have been raised regarding the authenticity of the lithic assemblage (Mochanov, 1976; Medvedev, 1983 quoted after Derevianko et al., 2001). Okladnikov admitted that evidence of percussion is not clear (Okladnikov, 1972) but other scholars observed and described nearly a hundred artifacts (Abramova, 1989)."

Conclusions

The site at Ulalinka is controversial, deemed very old by some, recent by others, or even a hoax. It is part of a trend that reveals several sites in Siberia, far older than accepted in the West, described in papers written in Russian, and therefore, ignored and not cited by Western archaeologists.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Karama site in Siberia: 500-800 ky old

Following yesterday's post on a site known a Diring Yuriakh in northeastern Siberia that is 400,000 years old, today's post will look at another ancient Siberian site known as Karama which is just 15 km (less than 10 miles) from the famous Denisova Cave in the Altai.

The map shows the main sites in the Altai region, the red arrows mark Karama, and Denisova Cave.

Non-sapiens humans lived there 400,000 - 800,000 years ago

According to an online article this region, at that time had a relatively benign climate, and a forest cover with animal resources that favored settling there. But these were not modern human beings (we appeared ~300,000 years ago), these people were possibly Denisovans, Neanderthals, or even their predecessors, H. heidelbergensis or Homo erectus who fashioned cobble tools similar to the primitive Oldowan lithic industry:

"The earliest evidence of penetration of the Paleolithic man into the Altai is the Karama site dating back 400–800 thousand years. In red-color deposits of the lower Pleistocene, some large-size pebbles were found with roughly chopped-off sharp edges used as primitive stone implements like side scrapers, choppers, and choppings, which constituted the pebble-tool industry typical of the early Paleolith epoch. In that age, the climate in the Anui Valley was mild and favorable for the life of the primitive man. The occurrence of such deciduous species as elm, hornbeam, linden, maple, and oak, exotic for the contemporary flora of the Altai, in the birch and pine forests of the region testify to it. Numerous and diverse fauna inhabited the rich vegetation of the forests. Small and medium-sized mammals such as badger, marmot, hare, etc., made a significant part of the diet of hunters of the time. As for large prey, primitive men used to make a living by gathering the remains of meals of such predators as hyenas, wolves, or bears."

Most of the literature on this site is in Russian language (thank God there is a Google translating tool!). The site was excavated by Anatoly P. Derevianko and published in 2001 and 2002 according to his colleague M. Shunkov, both from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

These appear to be the first two publications on Karama, and they are cited in the literature, but I have not been able to find them:

Derevianko, A.P., M.V. Shunkov and V.A. Ulianov. 2001a. Novoe rannepaleoliticheskoe mestonakhozhdenie v Gornom Altae. Problemy arkheologii, etnografii i antropologii Sibiri i sopredelnykh territorii. 7:115-19. (In Russian).

Derevianko, A.P. and M.V. Shunkov. 2002. Middle Paleolithic industries with foliate bifaces in Gorny Altai. Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 1:16-42.

One paper, Early Paleolithic Site of Karama in Altai: Initial Research Results, Archaeology, ethnography and anthropology of Eurasia 3 (23) 2005, provides an dating, when it ncludes that "Taken together, the palynological study materials of the section, along with other analytical data, allow us to correlate the accumulation time of the deposits in the middle and lower strata of the section with the Early Neopleistocene, i.e., to determine their age in the range of 400,000-800,000 years."

The old date for this site is ratified by a presentation given by A. P. Derevianko, M. V. Shunkov, 2008: Early Paleolithic of Altai, see p. 127 in the abstracts listed which provides sediment dating for this Early Paleolithic site.

Original (Russian) caption: At the ancient Karama site in the Altai Mountains, primitive pebble tools were found in multilayered Pleistocene deposits. Photo by A. Postny (top) and S. Zelins. Source

An article about Derevyanko (who seems to be an authority on Denisovans and their migrations across Asia), includes the image shown above, which depicts: on the upper left side, the Karama site, the same image can be seen in Derevyanko and Shunkov's 2005 paper captioned Fig. 1. View of the Karama site in the Anuy Valley., the lower left stone tool is seen in Fig. 17 of that same paper as Fig. 17. "2 - beak-shaped tool", and the excavation (lower righgt) can be seen in the paper as Fig. 9, the excavation #2 at Karama -but full of diggers.

Cobble, Oldowan-like tools

Shunkov, 2005 (English) describes the stone tools as follows: "... Paleolithic artifacts, which have been attributed to the Lower Paleolithic pebble industry judging form the morphology of the finds. The assemblage of the products of primary reduction include pebbles showing signs of core preparation with plain striking platforms and negative scars of parallel detachments and short non-faceted spalls. The collection of typologically distinct tools includes longitudinal and transverse racloirs; denticulate and notch-denticulate tools fashioned on short spalls, and cutting tools of the chopper/chopping tool type with a convex flattened cutting edge and a trimmed massive back. Most pebble tools from Karama are characterized by archaic morphological features and a comparatively advanced technology of secondary treatment." So they are primitive (cobbles) yet their finishing is advanced.

The original dates for the site were much earlier 1.77 to 1.95 million years, but it was refined to a lower limit of 800,000 years (see Kuzmin, Y.V., Kazanskii, A.Y., 2015 in Debatable questions of Siberia settlement by early humans. Stratigr. Geol. Correl. 23, 114–118 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0869593815010074) who writes: "... Judging by the results of a preliminary study of the Zasukhino site in Trans-Baikal, early humans could have appeared in Siberia about 1 million years ago, but additional research is required in order to obtain reliable information..." Regarding Karama, he this paper considers that the site "corresponds to MIS 16–19", roughly 620,000 to 780,000 years ago.

Regarding the stone tools, this paper confirms the technology employed by the people at Karama and, again, its antiquity:

"Archaeological materials of Karama are represented by Early Paleolithic pebble industries. They are characterized by irregular and parallel flaking. The primary flaking products include core-like pebbles with smooth or roughly prepared striking platforms, as well as flakes with sub parallel dorsal patterns and prepared platforms. The tool set is dominated by longitudinal, diagonal and transverse side-scrapers (as a rule naturally-backed or negative-backed), followed by massive-base choppers with straight, convex, or concave working edge. Next in importance are notches, denticulates and beaked tools formed mainly by Clactonian notches. The rest of the inventory is constituted by large pebble tools with an intentionally shaped thorn-like projection, core-like endscrapers formed by steep or abrupt retouch, massive tools with wide-angle working part, knives on “citrus slices” with clear traces of utilization, flakes bearing intermittent retouch.
Thus the site of Karama contains a sequence of Early Paleolithic horizons occurring in clear stratigraphic conditions. They yielded an expressive pebble industry, which can tentatively be dated to the period of 600–800 kya. For the time being this is the oldest archaeological assemblage with reliable stratigraphic and palynological data known in Northern and Central Asia."

Original (Russian) caption: Fig. 6. Stone inventory from layer 7 in excavation 1 of Karama. 1, 3 - side scrapers; 2, 4 - backed tools.. Source

A similar content is found in another paper by Kuzmin and Kazansky, 2019 (Chronology of the Lower Palaeolithic Site of Karama (Gorny Altai): Facts and Problems, Stratum plus. 2019. No 1), whose abstract places it not older than 800 kya. It reads as follows:

"Factual information and its interpretation regarding the geological age of the Lower Palaeolithic site of Karama (Altai Mountains, Siberia) are considered. It is demonstrated that palynological data do not allow to date this site to earlier than ca. 800 kya; archaeological data are consistent with this estimate. The viewpoint of V. S. Zykin with coauthors, according to which the age of Karama is ca. 1.95—1.77 mya, finds no support in the light of the available geological and paleomagnetic evidence. The so-called “Karama suite” of the Upper Pliocene of Altai Mountains in reality does not exist. For the time being there are no reliable data indicating than the initial peopling of Siberia took place prior to ca. 1 mya."

Siberia to America?

This post and the previous one have shown the presence of humans in Northern Siberia long before the previously accepted dates. 500,000 to 800,000 years ago some humans (Denisovans? H. erectus? H. heidelbergensis? were thriving in this region, fashioning tools that were primitive (not the Acheulean tools of erectus, or Mousterian tools of Neanderthals). Again, it makes one wonder, why didn't they continue their journey across Siberia and reach America?

My next post will explore this interesting hypothesis.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Diring Yuriakh site: Ancient humans in Siberia ~400 kya

The Diring Yuriakh site in Central Siberia shows that some humans reached the area long ago, well before modern humans had evolved in Africa, and more or less contemporary with the Denisovan and Neanderthal split. This was at least one hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens appeared.

But Siberia was a harsh environment, and the tools don't resemble Neanderthal Mousterian tool technology, it is more "primitive". Who were these humans braving the cold Siberian winters 400,000 years ago?

I found a very old (nearly 40 years old!) article in Science, Diring Yuriakh: A Lower Paleolithic Site in Central Siberia 🔒 by Forman, Pierson and Waters (1997) discussing the site and its archaic tools. (See it here too 🔓)

This paper mentions the accidental discovery of a site along the Lena River in Siberia, a spot known as Diring Yuriakh where stone tools were unearthed (see it in Google Maps). These were not natural (geofacts) stones, but man-made. The site was excavated by Mochanov, 1992 🔒, who believed they were very ancient, 1.8 to 3.2 million years old, which would place the makers of the tools found there in the Homo erectus or Homo habilis time period. Other researchers suggest a later date of 800,000 years (800 kya) to 1 million years, which would make them H. erectus or possibly the common ancestors of Denisovans and Neanderthals.

According to Richards, 1994, Y. A. Mochanov presented a paper in 1992 at the 45th Annual Northwest Anthropology Conference (The Earliest Palaeolithic of Northeastern Asia and the Problem of the Extratropical Cradle of Man) which gave thermoluminescence dating calculated by O.A. Kulikov of over 1.1 million years (My) for layer 6, 2.9 + 0.96 My for layer 5, and more than 1.8 My for layer 4. Richards recommends caution when considering those dates.

Unifacial choppers. From Fig. 3. in the article

The dates provided in the paper from 1997 (resulting from a 1993 samples obtained at the site), are a minimum of 260,000 years, and a maximum of around 370,000 years, on average, 300,000 years. Interestingly, Mochanov had previously reported other sites with similar artifacts in the same sedimentary layer, and hence, of the samey age, at 14 other sites along a 800 km (500 mi) section of the Lena River in Northeastern Siberia.

This site is very close to America, just 3,000 km west (1,880 miles) of Alaska.

How did these people survive in this bleak northern environment? The paper suggests that the people who lived here probably did so during a warm spell at the end of glacial period known as MIS 8 (Marine Isotope Stage 8) which spanned a period from 300 to 243 kya. Another option is the warmer interglacial stage 7 period (245-190 kya). But, even during the warmest summers, the climate would have been very cold, requiring the use of fire, warm clothing, and effective shelter strategies. This indicates that these people were well adapted to the harsh conditions of Siberia. How long they stayed here, or how much territory they coccupied is not known.

Simple Stone Tools

The image further up depicts some tools from this site, which look quite primitive. The paper reports finding over 4,000 artifacts, mostly cores and flakes. Around 500 of them are "unifacial pebble choppers core scrapers, and scraper planes. A few tools made from flakes are present in the assemblage."

Mochanov characterizes these tools as follows: "these tools more closely resemble those from Olduvai Gorge than from any other Early Pleistocene site, leading the author to ponder the possibility of a non-tropical origin for humanity." Indeed, the Olduvai tool industy is the most primitive one, and also the oldest. The Homo erectus later developed their Acheulean stone tool technology, an advance on the Oldowan one.

Now we know that the period suggested by the 1997 paper (260 to 370 kya) would have spanned the time that Denisovans were living in Eastern Asia together with Neanderthals on its western fringes. We don't have Denisovan toolkits for comparison, but the Mousterian tools of the Neanderthals were far more advanced than the Oldowan. This opens up the possibility that some well-adapted archaic hominin, probably even earlier than the erectus, or a group that opted for simple tools and not the Acheulean ones of the erectus, lived in the cold northern parts of eastern Siberia.

An archaeology blogger (NeilB, 1016) analyzed the data objectiely and concluded that "Verdict: Site inhabited ca. 300, 000 years ago. Likely candidates Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis.".

2024 Research places the age of Diring Yuriakh at 400 kya

More recently, a 2024 paper by John D. Jansen et al., (Redrawing early human dispersal patterns with cosmogenic nuclide, EGU24-4168, updated on 08 Mar 2024. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-4168 EGU General Assembly 2024) used cosmogenic dating to date several Paleolithic sites in Europe, and also the Diring Yuriakh site, where they found "an age of 417 &plusm; 82 ka, which is at least 300 kyr earlier than the previously documented earliest human presence north of 60 degrees. This timing overlaps with exceptional warmth across the High North during the ‘super-interglacial’ MIS 11c (426–396 ka), suggesting that warm climate intervals permitted human migration well beyond widely accepted territorial bounds."

Janssen immediately understood the significance of such an old date in such a northerly location. He immediately suggested that these people could have moved on eastwards and reached America. But this will be the subject of a future post.

My next post will look into another site around 500 to 800 ky old, with cobble-styled stone tools close to the famous Denisova Cave, the Karama Site on Anui River, in the Altai, and then we will explore the subject of an early peopling of America by archaic humans from Siberia 400,000 or even more years ago.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Monkeys and the pre-Clovis stone tools in Brazil

Although I am a strong supporter of an early peopling of America (over 20 and possibly 50 or even 100 kya), I must be fair and that is why this post will look into the intriguing possibility that monkeys, not humans, crafted the crude stone tools dated to around 40,000 years ago, found in Brazil.

The first to suggest this idea was Stuart Fiedel, in 2017, with a research paper titled Did Monkeys Make the Pre-Clovis Pebble Tools of Northeastern Brazil?, in it, he reports that the capuchin monkeys of South America use pebbles as tools to crack open nuts, they hammer them with these cobbles to open them. They also pound wood to find bugs. In the process, they leave behind remains that resemble man-made stone tools. They may have been doing so for the past 100,000 years!

Capuchin monkeys using stone tools to crack nuts. Source

The idea is interesting. The remains left behind by monkeys look like human stone tools. Furthermore, the paper suggests that monkeys taught humans how to use local resoures: "the possible influence of monkeys’ tool use on human behaviour. For example, cashew nuts are native to this area of Brazil, and it is possible that the first humans to arrive here learned about this unknown food through watching the monkeys and their primate cashew-processing industry..."

The matter was followed up by two Argentine researchers, Agustín and Federico Agnolín (see article) suggest that the stone tools attributed to pre-Clovis humans are in fact made by monkeys. They didn't find any differences or evolution between the tools that are 50,000 years old, and contemporary monkey-made tools: "Our study shows that the tools from Pedra Furada and other nearby sites in Brazil were nothing more than the product of capuchin monkeys breaking nuts and rocks some 50,000 years before the present,” says F. Agnolín, also a researcher at the ‘Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences “Bernardino Rivadavia”’ (MACN-CONICET), and the “Azara Foundation.”"

Besides using rock hammers to dig, and break open nuts, the capuchin monkeys also use them to pulverize other stones and lick the mineral-rich dust as natural mineral supplements. The resulting flaked stone fragments resemble human-made stone tools.

The authors argue that the ancient tools attributed to humans, found at the Piedra Furada site (see my post about this site), are far to simple to have been made by humans "they always consisted of fractured pebbles, anvils, hammers, and jagged-edged rock fragments, but other types of tools never appeared. All these characteristics are indistinguishable from the tools used today by capuchin monkeys".

But, what if... they are the work of a cobble or pebble type lithic industry, simliar to the Oldowan, one used by archaic hominins? Could Homo habilis or even Australopiths have reached America with primitive stone tool know-how?

Read the paper here: Agnolín, A. M., & Agnolín, F. L. (2022). Holocene capuchin-monkey stone tool deposits shed doubts on the human origin of archeological sites from the Pleistocene of Brazil. The Holocene, 09596836221131707. https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836221131707

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall © 

Stone tools 2.6 My old in Northern India... Who made them?

Thank you NeilB for drawing my attention to this paper: The first Indo-French Prehistorical Mission in Siwaliks and the discovery of anthropic activities at 2.6 million years, Anne Dambricourt Malasse, Comptes Rendus Palevol, Volume 15, Issues 3–4, February–March 2016, Pages 281-294, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crpv.2015.12.001.

It is quite controversial to say the least. It discusses some remains and stone tools 2.6 Million years old found at the foot of the Himalayas in NW India, in the village of Masol

I will quote some parts of this paper:

"In the African paradigm, the most probable cradle of Homo genus is the north of the Rift Valley, rather than Central and South Africa.
The first Asian paradigm is interesting. The comparison between the geographical distribution of fossil apes and the oldest human occupations including Riwat, shows clearly a superposition (Fig. 2). The partial mandible of Longgupo was first assigned to a descendant from Homo habilis, then, a dozen of years later, to a "mystery ape". This revision arose from the paradigm of “Out of Africa” dating from 1.8 Ma; "such classifications are always open to interpretation. But I am now convinced that the Longgupo fossil and others like it do not represent a pre-erectus human, but rather one or more mystery apes indigenous to southeast Asia's Pleistocene primal forest. In contrast, H. erectus arrived in Asia about 1.6 million years ago." (Ciochon, 2009)."

The tools found at the site (see image below -from Dambricourt's paper) are chopped pebbles or cobbles similar to those of the Oldowan stone technology, the oldest known stone tools:

The 2.6 MY old tools.

The paper concludes: "These hominines were familiar with an environment regularly exposed to monsoon and floods in the plain, where Himalayan rivers provided carrion for meat, grease, marrow and also raw material for the stone tools. Insofar as, on the ground, there is no hard stone other than the quartzite pebbles with a mean size of 15 cm, hominins likely used the direct percussion that gives an idea of their muscle power. The hominins of Masol had a good anatomical knowledge of the carrion as shown by the marks on the bones, which reveal organized, agile and precise gestures. The discovery of anthropic scavenging activity in Siwaliks dating from 2.6 Ma raises now the question of the geographic and phyletic origins of these hominines."

I am not so positive about an Asian origin of these hominins, but they may represent an early dispersal out of Africa of Australopithecines or Homo habilis, earlier than formerly believed.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Rock Piles: Cobbles, stone tools, and California during the ice age

Rock Piles: Cobbles, stone tools, and California during the ice age - from Journals

Quote from this blog linked above: 

" I found stone tools made out of the cobbles and mixed in with them. Those tools were probably made during an ice age. That is not too surprising, that people were in California making stone tools about 25 thousand years ago. The first things I found looked pretty "fresh" and were all of a certain style. But there were other heavier axes in there too, of a different style that were a bit rounded and smoothed - part way back to being cobbles. If you think about it, this means they were part of the cobble production of the last ice age, which means they were tools made during a previous ice age - around 60 thousand years ago. That is a bit more surprising.

So that's my story: stone tools made from glacial cobbles which themselves got turned back into cobbles. It means there were people in California making stone tools two ice ages ago."

Interesting!!  say 100 ky old tools, one (from the blog) is shown below:

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in PatagoniaCopyright 2009-2015 by Austin Whittall ©