Earliest Hominins Outside Africa

Shangchen is a palaeolithic archaeological site in Shangchen village, Lantian County, Shaanxi, China. Stone tools found at the site and dated to 2.12 million years ago, now are considered the earliest known evidence of hominins outside Africa, surpassing Dmanisi in Georgia by 300,000 years. Shangchen was occupied for 850,000 years, with the newest tools found dating to 1.26 million years ago. No hominin fossils have been found.

Location

Shangchen is located in and named after the village of Shangchen, Yushan Town, Lantian County, Shaanxi, about 50 km (31 mi) southeast of the provincial capital at Xi'an. The archaeological site is on the cliff faces of a gully in the Loess Plateau. Because loess is a soil made by extremely fine particles blown in by the wind, all larger rocks found in loess deposits had to have been carried in by humans or other animals.

Discovery and Excavation

Lantian County is where fossils of the Homo erectus, now called Lantian Man, were discovered in 1964. The oldest fossil, a skull, was initially dated to 1.15 million years ago. In 2001, geologist Zhu Zhaoyu and other scientists began researching the site again, and determined that the skull was 1.63 million years old.

Zhu's team surveyed the region around the fossil site, and discovered stone tools buried deep in the side of a gully in Shangchen, less than three miles away. The team, later joined by British paleoanthropologist Robin Dennell in 2010, thoroughly searched the gully and excavated the site between 2004 and 2017, and their findings were published in July 2018 in the journal Nature.

Findings at Shangchen

96 stone tools have been found at Shangchen, including flakes, points, and cores. They were found in 17 artifact layers. The oldest of the tools date to 2.12 million years ago, while the newest date to 1.26 million years, indicating that the site was occupied (not necessarily continuously) for 850,000 years. Some of the tools were found with bone fragments of animals including deer and bovines. Even older remains may still lie undiscovered, as the deepest layers at Shangchen are inaccessible as of 2018 because of farming activities.

The findings are highly significant as they represent the earliest evidence of hominins outside Africa, surpassing Dmanisi in the Caucasus region of Georgia, which was the previously known oldest hominin site outside Africa, dating to 1.85 million years ago. It is also older than the Yuanmou Man, the oldest hominin fossils found in East Asia, dating to 1.7 million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangchen

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Footnote: The Paleolithic Period

The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic is a period in human prehistory distinguished by the original development of stone tools that covers c. 95% of human technological prehistory. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins, c. 3.3 million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene c. 11,650 cal BP.

The Paleolithic is followed in Europe by the Mesolithic, although the date of the transition varies geographically by several thousand years.

During the Paleolithic, hominins grouped together in small societies such as bands, and subsisted by gathering plants and fishing, hunting or scavenging wild animals. The Paleolithic is characterized by the use of knapped stone tools, although at the time humans also used wood and bone tools. Other organic commodities were adapted for use as tools, including leather and vegetable fibers; however, due to their nature, these have not been preserved to any great degree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic