we generally think homo erectus As the first of our hominin ancestors to expand beyond Africa, along routes where our own species would spread again 1.5 million years later. More importantly, many paleontologists consider them to be the first hominins. can We have adapted to many different environments, each with its own challenges.
But we may need to give to earlier members of our lineage, such as homo habilis, A little more credit because stone tools from two other sites in China appear to be even older. homo erectus. Archaeologists in Shangchen, located on the southern edge of China’s loess plateau, extracted stone tools from a 2.1 million-year-old layer of sediment. And at the Xihoudu site in northern China, stone tools date back 2.43 million years.
“If you have a site in China that is 2.43 million years old, and it originated Homosexual erectus 1.9 million years ago, or so you need to push back its origins hOMO erectus 2.5 or 2.6 million years ago or so we need to acknowledge that we need to look at other hominins who may have actually moved out of Africa,” paleoanthropologist Christopher Bay of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, coauthor of the new study, told Ars.
So who made those 2 million year old tools?
Archaeologists have found stone tools but no hominin fossils at either site, making it difficult to say with certainty who made the tools. But if they weren’t homo erectusThe next most likely suspects would be older members of our genus, such as homo habilis Or Homo rudolfensis. This would mean that hominin expansion “out of Africa” actually occurred several times during the history of our genus: once with the early Homosexualtogether again homo erectusAnd once again with our species.
“There may have been an earlier wave that collapsed or coalesced, so there are all kinds of possibilities,” Purdue University paleoanthropologist Darryl Granger, a co-author of the latest study, told Ars.
In fact, there is some debate about whether the Dmanisi fossils actually belonged to homo erectus Appropriate. One thing that two dueling reconstructions of Yunxian skulls agree on is that those hominins had flat faces, like ours – and like the one 1.63 million years old homo erectus Skull from Gongwangling. But the lower faces of the Dmanisi hominin bulge forward as dramatically as those of older hominins.
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