Humans
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Stone tools found in India have been dated to almost 3 million years ago, suggesting that hominins may have been butchering animals in Asia at this incredibly early juncture. And while no actual human fossils have been discovered alongside the artifacts, researchers say there is no doubt that they were produced by an early human species.
To date, the oldest confirmed hominin remains outside of Africa date to around 1.85 million years ago and come from Dmanisi, Georgia. However, in the mid-1980s, archaeologists in China discovered what they thought was a 2.5-million-year-old jawbone belonging to some ancient human species, alongside a set of stone tools at a site called Longgupo.
Some years later, this mandible was found to belong to an unknown variety of extinct ape, although most scholars agree that the lithic artifacts were indeed made by humans. With no actual fossils, though, it’s hard to place any hominids at the site at any given time, which means it’s unclear how these tools ended up there, or when.
According to the authors of the new study, large numbers of tools resembling those from Longgupo have been found at a site called Masol in Punjab, along with “undisputable” evidence of animal butchery by hominins. Using magnetostratigraphy, the researchers dated the sediment layer containing the utensils to 2.95 million years ago - which is around the same time that the earliest stone tools appear in the African archaeological record.
To describe how prehistoric toolmakers might have reached India, the study authors go on to reconstruct the paleoclimatic events leading up to this point in time. They suggest that a warming interval that occurred between 2.97 and 2.96 million years may have led the summer intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) to move northwards from Africa and Arabia.
Because the ITCZ is responsible for producing monsoon rains, this shift would have transformed the arid landscapes of Central Asia into lush ecosystems, enabling ancient hominins to migrate across the region and into India. As they moved, they may even have encountered herds of wild horses, which had crossed over from North America when the Bering Strait froze some 3 million years ago before crossing the Hindu Kush en route to Masol.
As with Longgupo, however, the one major missing piece of the puzzle at Masol is that it contains no actual human remains. Despite this, study author Anne Dambricourt-Malassé told IFLScience in an email that the identification of the stone tools and butchery marks is “incontestable… as is their attribution to a hominin.”
Such solid evidence of lithic technology and butchery would therefore appear to strongly suggest human occupation at Masol almost three million years ago. However, questions over which species made the tools - and what happened to the site’s hominin tenants subsequently - remain open for debate.
The study has been published in the journal L’Anthropologie.
Correction 24/10/25: This article has been substantially revised throughout following a conversation with the study authors, in order to more accurately reflect the fact that the focus of the study was on dating the stone tools.
