Friday 17 June 2011

Toolmaking humans may have evolved earlier than thought

According to an article in Scientific American , Reid Ferring, an anthropologist at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues excavating the Dmanisi site in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, found stone artifacts--mostly flakes that were dropped as hominins knapped rocks to create tools for butchering animals--lying in sediments almost 1.85 million years old. Until now, anthropologists have thought that H. erectus evolved between 1.78 million and 1.65 million years ago--after the Dmanisi tools would have been made.

The full story is here:-
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-ancestors-in-eurasia-earlier

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