139,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Found in Andhra Pradesh: Who Made Them?

The recent discovery of 139,000-year-old stone tools in Andhra Pradesh, India, has left archaeologists puzzled. The tools’ age suggests that sophisticated tool-making occurred long before modern humans were believed to have arrived in the region. Researchers are uncertain who made these tools, but they doubt it was modern humans, as reported by The Telegraph.

Traditionally, it was thought that only modern humans could create such tools. However, an excavation near the village of Retlapalle in Prakasam district unearthed what are known as “middle-paleolithic” stone tools. This discovery has led experts to speculate that tool-making might have been practiced by other ancient, extinct human species.

The findings were published in the journal PLOS One by a team of Indian and German scientists.

This isn’t the first time such tools have been found in India. Nearly two decades ago, similar stone tools were discovered at Attirampakkam, a prehistoric site near Chennai, dating back between 372,000 and 170,000 years.

Previous evidence has suggested that Homo sapiens, or modern humans, left Africa between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. Scientists have concluded that all people alive today are descendants of these modern humans.

Some experts argue that Homo sapiens may have been in the region as far back as 125,000 years ago. A separate archaeological study at Jwalapuram in Andhra Pradesh, conducted around a decade ago, uncovered 77,000-year-old stone tools, further supporting this theory.

At Attirampakkam, researchers also found 1.5 million-year-old tools, discovered by prehistorians Shanti Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh from the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education. Additionally, a site in Karnataka revealed 1.2-million-year-old tools, leading to the belief that modern humans may have been present in Asia earlier than previously thought.

However, these older tools are classified as “Acheulian” and are believed to have been made by Homo erectus, an extinct ancestor of modern humans that lived in Africa and Asia from about 1.6 million years ago to at least 250,000 years ago.

Anil Devara, an assistant professor of archaeology at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, who led the excavations, told The Telegraph that similar finds in Europe, along with those at Retlapalle and Attirampakkam in India, challenge the assumption that such tools were only made after modern humans arrived.

Shanti Pappu explained that the lack of fossilized remains of ancestral human species at these sites in South Asia makes it difficult to determine who made the tools.

Devara noted that middle-paleolithic tools were found around the same time in Africa, Europe, and South Asia, well before the arrival of modern humans in these regions.

“This suggests that the same tool-making technology may have evolved independently among different species—in modern humans in Africa, perhaps in Neanderthals in Europe, and maybe in some other archaic human species in South Asia,” Devara said.