ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Earliest Prepared core technology in Eurasia from Nihewan (China): Implications for early human abilities and dispersals in East Asia.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- What Is the Acheulean?Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Article
- Palaeoanthropological evidence from China is changing the picture of hominin evolutionary history.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Review
- Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000-72,000 years ago.Nature communications · 2026Article
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8 authors.
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Abstract
Organized flaking techniques to obtain predetermined stone tools have been traced back to the early Acheulean (also known as mode 2) in Africa and are seen as indicative of the emergence of advanced technical abilities and in-depth planning skills among early humans. Here, we report one of the earliest known examples of prepared core technology in the archaeological record, at the Cenjiawan (CJW) site in the Nihewan basin of China, dated 1.1 Mya. The operational schemes reconstructed from the CJW refit sets, together with shaping patterns observed in the retouched tools, suggest that Nihewan basin toolmakers had the technical abilities of mode 2 hominins, and developed different survival strategies to adapt to local raw materials and environments. This finding predates the previously earliest known prepared core technology from Eurasia by 0.3 My, and the earliest known mode 2 sites in East Asia by a similar amount of time, thus suggesting that hominins with advanced technologies may have migrated into high latitude East Asia as early as 1.1 Mya.
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