139,000-year-old stone tools discovered in Andhra Pradesh. Who made them?

The discovery of 139,000-year-old stone tools from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has stumped archaeologists. The dating of the tools has led them to believe that complicated tool were being made at a time when modern humans hadn't even reached the region. It is not clear who made the stone tools but scientists don't think it was modern humans, The Telegraph reported.

It had been assumed that only modern humans were capable of making such tools. But an excavation near a village named Retlapalle in Prakasam district has thrown up so-called “middle-paleolithic” stone tools. Experts now believe that the art of tool-making was likely also practised by some ancient extinct human species.

The findings have been published in the journal PLOS One by a team of Indian and German scientists.

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Nearly two decades ago, similar stone tools were excavated at Attirampakkam, a prehistoric site near Chennai. The tools were estimated to be between 372,000 and 170,000 years old.

Evidence found till now has long suggested that Homo sapiens, or modern humans, moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. Based on scientific evidence, experts have deduced that people around the world today are descendants of modern humans.

Other similar discoveries have led some experts to argue that Homo sapiens likely lived in the region 125,000 years ago. An independent archaeological study at Jwalapuram in Andhra Pradesh some ten years back led to the discovery of 77,000-year-old stone tools, strengthening the belief.

Attirampakkam also revealed 1.5 million-year-old tools some time back. Prehistorians Shanti Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh at the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education made the discovery. A site in Karnataka yielded 1.2-million-year-old tools, pushing further the belief that modern humans were in Asia much earlier than thought.

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However, the older tools found are classified as “Acheulian” tools and are said to have been made by the extinct ancestral species called Homo erectus, a species that lived across Africa and Asia between 1.6 million years ago to at least 250,000 years ago, as per experts.

Anil Devara, an assistant professor of archaeology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, who led the excavations, told The Telegraph, that similar discoveries made in Europe as Ratlepalle and Attirampakkam in India have put a “big question mark” on the assumption that such tools were made only after the arrival of modern humans.

Pappu told the Telegraph that the absence of fossilised remains of ancestral human species from such sites in South Asia makes the job of assigning the tools to the makers even harder.

Devara says that middle-palaeolithic tools were found around the same time in Africa, Europe and South Asia, much before modern humans arrived in these parts.

“What this suggests is that the same tool-making technology may have evolved independently in different species -- in modern humans in Africa, perhaps in the Neanderthals in Europe, and perhaps in some other archaic human species in South Asia,” Devara said.