Stone Tool 1.83M Years Old Discovered In Malaysia

goran72 writes with news out of Malaysia that archaeologists have announced the discovery of stone tools more than 1.8 million years old — the earliest evidence of human ancestors in South-east Asia. Researchers believe the tools were made by members of the early human ancestor species Homo erectus. The tools actually date as slightly older than the earliest H. erectus fossils, which came from Georgia and China. No bones of that antiquity have so far been found in Malaysia. "The stone hand-axes were discovered last year in the historical site of Lenggong in northern Perak state, embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites which was sent to a Japanese lab to be dated."

Comments

Re:when does a stone become an axe

[Colonel Korn]

OMG, they probably never even considered that! It's not as if they are trained archaeologists or anything...oh, wait.

Archaeologists do make this sort of mistake, and can often be found guilty of wishful thinking. If there were a picture attached to TFA we could judge for ourselves. Being too lazy to look up related journal articles, I'm going to guess that most likely the conclusions are correct, but not beyond a certainty of about 90%.