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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."
I have no problem with the imterpretation that these are stone tools from 1.8 MYA (and you can tell by my pretentious use of the "MYA" abbreviation that I was once on the road to related Ph.D.).
But I don't understand this:
The stone hand-axes were discovered last year...embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites....
How or why were these tools embedded in rock formed by meteorites? This rock was either formed before or after the tools. If formed before, they could only have been embedded manually, by H. erectus miners, I guess.
If the rock formed later, then these tools survived intact a meteorite strike, which seems unlikely. (Or was the rock formed by meteorite splash sediments?)
There is one other possibility, but it's so unlikely that I reject it: that the tools and rocks were thrown up in to the air and the whole mess coalesced and solidified.
I wish the article had more info, or I could find the original paper, although here is an AP article with a photo of the rocks.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
> Neither of the natural patterns are likely to lead to the organised pattern of chips that a worked stone would exhibit.
It depends. Up to this day there is a big number of inconclusive cases where archaeologists "discovered" sets of "older stone tools" but there is no clear consensus but acid disputes.
Of course when you have the nice bifacial spearpoints depicted in most books your argument is valid, but in a lot of "unifacial industries" typically oriented to cutting wood and plants, there are no such clear traces of chipping you allude. In several areas, a lot of originally "non interesting" stones are being reevaluated (always with several levels of controversy); the case is that probably most of the "stone age" tools and cultures are of this "ugly" kind.