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Ah, when I read "very sophisticated" I was hoping to see something more than images of few stones. To clarify: for a few days in my pre-adolescent years in Ind
by nnain 9y ago
Ah, when I read "very sophisticated" I was hoping to see something more than images of few stones.
To clarify: for a few days in my pre-adolescent years in India, I had gotten into a quirky habit of picking chipped-stones lying around (which I imagined could be from pre-historic ages). Finding some really interesting shapes wasn't all that difficult.
I'm genuinely curious about how archeologists/anthropologists come up with such definitive conclusions.
- lancebeet 9y agoPerhaps there are signs of knapping on the pieces? I would surmise such signs may not be obvious to a layman, but may be to an archaeologist.
- gcb0 9y agothey seem to have the same doubts as the layman "Alison Brooks, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, said she's not convinced that the smaller tools described by Pappu and her colleagues are true Levallois points. “It's still basically a single point in a giant continent,” she added — more discoveries are required to give context to this find"
- pingu 9y agoThere's something called a Conchoidal fracture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchoidal_fracture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchoidal_fracture ... the presence of which is technically diagnostic of material that's been artificially manipulated.
- givinguflac 9y agoLink didn't work for me, this did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchoidal_fracture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchoidal_fracture
- pingu 9y agoThanks for the heads up, i fixed the formatting.
- danans 9y agoRegarding the age, the tools were found via excavation in soil layers that have a known geological age range determined via Geochronology[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochronology
- gumby 9y agoThe WaPo article only makes a glancing reference to the fact that they look like Levallois tools, which require a more complex manufacture than simple knapping (including imagining the internal structure). Here's a bit more discussion: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16955858/stone-tools-attirampakkam-india-hominins-human-evolution-levallois-acheulean-paleolithic https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16955858/stone-tools-atti...