Hundreds of thousands of years ago, human species exchanged unwieldy hand axes for smaller, easier-to-use stone flakes.
In 2018, researchers announced that they had found evidence of this transition at an archaeological site in southern India called Attirampakkam. The area contained million-year-old hand axes and smaller, more sophisticated tools from between 385,000 and 172,000 years ago. At other sites in India, these smaller tools date to around 100,000 years ago.
There are a couple of possible explanations for the Attirampakkam tools. Either humans brought the technology much earlier than originally thought or another hominin species independently developed similar tools around that time.
“Rather than equating technologies from Europe to Africa to South Asia, you can also recast it as independent invention by large-brained early humans,” paleoanthropologist Michael Petraglia told National Geographic in 2018.