A group of sapiens developed 40,000 years ago in China a technology that mixed ancient and modern elements
The great adventure of human expansion out of Africa is much more intricate than previously believed. The sapiens did not launch around the world in a single wave, imposing themselves with their ‘modern’ technology and destroying with their superiority the rest of the human species they encountered. In fact, it seems that there were several episodes of dispersal with innovations that appear and disappear, local traditions, coeval but more or less advanced groups, and the mixture, as geneticists have shown, of different human species. Perhaps they also shared knowledge.
The new discovery carried out by an international group of archaeologists in northern China highlights all that complexity. The researchers found at the Xiamabei site, in the Nihewan basin, evidence of a unique culture from 40,000 years ago that mixes very primitive elements with more modern ones.
A particular way of doing things that have never been observed before in East Asia. The authors of the study, published this Wednesday in the journal ‘Nature’, believe that these toolmakers were the first sapiens to get there. They don’t rule out that their technology was influenced by the Denisovans, a mysterious now-extinct group that anatomically modern man came to interbreed with (it’s written in our DNA) in Eurasia.
Andreu Ollé, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), has studied the stone industry found in Xiamabei under the microscope. “What is shocking is the combination of traits for that period. Most of the tools made from local materials, such as flint and quartz, are produced using a very simple carving technique and are very small (more than half were less than 20 millimeters). The elements that one would expect for this chronology would be more modified by retouching, would present more standardized forms (points, burins, scrapers, etc.)”, explains the scientist, who is also a professor at the Rovira I Virgili University (URV).
However, many of the tools have traces of having been attached to fragments of wood or bone with the help of ocher or vegetable fibers. Small polished ones, which were reproduced experimentally, indicate that they were used in scraping for leather tanning, carving vegetable material,
Red stained floors
Another of the modern features seen in Xiamabei is the extensive use of ocher. Two pieces of ocher and what appears to be a mill used to process the dye and produce powders of different colors and textures have been found. Their use must have been widespread, as they even left red stains on the ground. «They used it as an adhesive to sleeve the tools but we don’t know if it had a symbolic function. There are no paintings”, says Daniela Eugenia Rosso, from the University of Valencia. This ocher production represents the earliest known example of this practice in East Asia.
Although no hominin remains were found at Xiamabei, the presence of modern human fossils in contemporary locations suggests that its occupants were sapiens. For researchers, these findings can help understand how our species became established throughout Asia since much is unknown about the life and cultural adaptations of the first peoples and their possible relationships with archaic groups. “That is one of the big questions,” says Rosso, “probably Sapiens and Denisovans mixed because it was a time of hybridization and it is possible that there was an exchange of technologies.”
The discovery does not fit with the idea of continuous cultural innovation or a set of adaptations that allowed early humans to spread around the world. Instead, there is a mosaic of patterns of innovation, local traditions, and the invention of new practices… all in transition.
“Geneticists have seen that we didn’t completely replace Neanderthals and Denisovans. Different degrees of hybridization occurred. Well, we are seeing this in archaeology”, underlines Ollé. Later waves of sapiens using microblade technologies eventually replaced them.
or cutting meat. “This is the behavior of a modern human, but curiously it is not associated with lamellar carving, the way of extracting the fine and homogeneous flakes that sapiens had to make knives or scrapers,” says the researcher.
