Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Stone Toll Sophistication and Multiple Hominin Species in East Asia

Stone tool manufacture in China

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Discovery challenges long-held beliefs on early human technology in East Asia - Griffith News

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with palaeoanthropologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University, have just published an open-access paper in Nature Communications presenting evidence of advanced stone-tool technology dating to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago in China.

This represents a significant shift in our understanding of the development and diversity of stone-tool technologies in East Asia. For many years it was assumed that stone technology in China lacked complexity and sophistication because bamboo provided a more versatile alternative — the so-called “Bamboo Hypothesis”. Archaeologists now have compelling reasons to revise that view.

If there is one thing calculated to excite creationists, it is the fact that scientists frequently change their minds when the evidence changes — an essential feature of the scientific method. In the simplistic binary worldview common to creationism, however, science is either right or wrong. Any revision of conclusions is therefore taken as proof that science is “wrong”, and that creationism wins by default, without needing to provide any supporting evidence of its own.

From this it follows, in the creationist imagination, that if scientists were wrong about stone-tool technology in China, they must also be wrong about human evolution and the age of the Earth. Consequently, the very evidence that caused scientists to revise their views — sophisticated tools securely dated to 160,000–72,000 years ago — must itself also be wrong. Few creationists seem to notice the paradox of arguing that science must be wrong because evidence corrected it, while simultaneously insisting that the correcting evidence is also wrong. Within the confines of the creationist rabbit hole, believing six impossible things before breakfast merely requires practice.

Nevertheless, the evidence from Xigou, in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region of central China, shows that stone-tool manufacture was not only an advanced skill but may also have been practised by more than one species of hominin. By this time, humans had already diversified into several relatively large-brained species, well before modern Homo sapiens had migrated into Eurasia in significant numbers.

The tools themselves show clear evidence of hafting — the fitting of handles to stone implements — representing the earliest known composite tools in East Asia. This implies an ability to plan ahead and to understand how tool performance could be enhanced, combined with a high level of technical skill and craftsmanship.

Hominin Diversity in East Asia (c. 300,000–40,000 years ago). During the period represented by the Xigou assemblage, East Asia was not occupied by a single, linear human lineage but by a mosaic of hominin populations. Fossil, archaeological, and genetic evidence increasingly shows that multiple large-brained hominin groups co-existed, interacted, and in some cases interbred across the region.

Alongside early populations related to Homo sapiens, East Asia was also home to Denisovans — a sister lineage to Neanderthals — whose presence is known primarily from genetic data recovered from cave sediments and fragmentary remains. Denisovan DNA persists today in modern populations, particularly in Melanesia, Australia, and parts of Southeast Asia, indicating repeated and successful admixture events.

Other archaic populations, often grouped loosely under “late archaic Homo”, are represented by fossils such as those from Dali, Jinniushan, and Harbin. These specimens show a mixture of derived and ancestral traits and resist tidy classification, suggesting long-term regional continuity combined with gene flow from neighbouring populations.

The Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans ultimately descend from a widespread Eurasian population derived from Homo erectus, with subsequent divergence, regional adaptation, and extensive gene flow between lineages.

Rather than a simple replacement model, the emerging picture is one of population structure, overlap, and cultural exchange. Advanced behaviours — including sophisticated stone-tool manufacture and composite technologies — need not be attributed exclusively to anatomically modern humans. Instead, they appear to have arisen within a broader, interconnected hominin landscape in which multiple human species were capable of innovation.

This growing body of evidence further undermines the notion of a sudden behavioural or cognitive “spark” unique to Homo sapiens, replacing it with a view of human evolution as a braided stream rather than a single, straight line.

The research and its wider significance are discussed in a Griffith University news and analysis article.

Discovery challenges long-held beliefs on early human technology in East Asia
A newly excavated archaeological site in central China is reshaping long-held assumptions about early hominin behaviour in Eastern Asia.
Led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers conducted archaeological excavations at Xigou, located in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region in central China, uncovering evidence of advanced stone tool technologies dating back 160,000-72,000 years ago.

The explorations, co-led by Griffith University, revealed hominins in this region were far more inventive and adaptable than previously believed, at a time when multiple large-brained hominins were present in China, such as Homo longi and Homo juluensis, and possibly Homo sapiens.

Excavation of Xigou site.
Credit: Guo-Ding Song.

Researchers have argued for decades that while hominins in Africa and western Europe demonstrated significant technological advances, those in East Asia relied on simpler and more conservative stone-tool traditions.

Dr Shi-Xia Yang, co-corresponding author
Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing, China.

The Xigou findings challenge the narrative that early humans in China were conservative over time. Detailed analyses from the site show hominin inhabitants employed sophisticated stone toolmaking methods to produce small flakes and tools that were then used in a diverse array of activities.

Professor Michael Petraglia, co-corresponding author
Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution
Griffith University
Brisbane, QLD, Australia.

Among the most striking finds was the discovery of hafted stone-tools – the earliest-known evidence of composite tools in East Asia.

These tools combined stone components with handles or shafts, and demonstrated complex planning, skilled craftsmanship, and an understanding of how to enhance tool performance.

Tanged borer from Xigou.
Credit: Jian-Ping Yue

Their presence indicates the Xigou hominins possessed a high degree of behavioural flexibility and ingenuity.

Dr Jian-Ping Yue, co-lead author
Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing, China.

The site’s rich layers, covering a 90,000-year period, aligned with growing evidence of increasing hominin diversity in China.

Large-brained hominins identified at Xujiayao and Lingjing, sometimes referred to as Homo juluensis, provided a possible biological context for the behavioural complexity reflected in the Xigou assemblages.

The technological strategies evident in the stone tools likely played a crucial role in helping hominin populations adapt to the fluctuating environments that characterised the 90,000-year-period in Eastern Asia.

Professor Michael Petraglia.

The research team said the Xigou findings reshaped our understanding of human evolution in East Asia, proving early populations possessed cognitive and technical abilities comparable to their counterparts in Africa and Europe. Dr Yang added: “
Emerging evidence from Xigou and other sites shows early technologies in China included prepared-core methods, innovative retouched tools, and even large cutting tools, pointing to a richer and more complex technological landscape than previously recognised.

Dr Shi-Xia Yang.

Publication:
Yue, JP., Song, GD., Yang, SX. et al.
Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago.
Nat Commun 17, 615 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67601-y

Abstract
Technological innovations in Africa and western Europe in the later part of the Middle Pleistocene signal the behavioural complexity of hominin populations. Yet, at the same time, it has long been believed that hominin technologies in Eastern Asia lack signs of innovation and sophistication. Here, we report on technological innovations occurring at Xigou, in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, central China, dating to ~160,000–72,000 years ago. Technological, typological, and functional analyses reveal the presence of advanced technological behaviours spanning over a 90,000-year period. The Xigou hominins used core-on-flake and discoid methods to effectively obtain small dimensional flakes to manufacture a diverse range of tool forms. The identification of the hafted tools provides the earliest evidence for composite tools in Eastern Asia, to our knowledge. Technological innovations revealed at Xigou and other contemporary sites in China correspond with increasing evidence for Late Quaternary hominin morphological variability, including larger brain sizes, such as demonstrated at Lingjing (Xuchang) in central China. The complex technological advancements recorded at Xigou indicate that hominins developed adaptive strategies that enhanced their survivability across fluctuating environments of the late Middle Pleistocene and middle Late Pleistocene in Eastern Asia.

Yue, JP., Song, GD., Yang, SX. et al.
Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago.
Nat Commun 17, 615 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67601-y

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Findings such as these are a reminder that human technological and cognitive evolution did not unfold along a single, linear trajectory leading inexorably to modern humans. Instead, it was a long, branching process extending over hundreds of thousands of years, involving multiple hominin populations capable of planning, innovation, and the transmission of complex skills. Sophisticated stone-tool manufacture, including composite technologies, was not an abrupt cultural “spark” but the cumulative outcome of deep evolutionary history operating across a geographically widespread and genetically diverse human landscape.

This evidence also illustrates why scientific understanding improves over time. Earlier models of East Asian prehistory were not abandoned because science “failed”, but because new discoveries demanded better explanations. Revising hypotheses in the light of new evidence is not a weakness of science but its defining strength — a process fundamentally different from belief systems that must remain fixed regardless of what the evidence shows.

For creationism, the implications are unavoidable. Stone tools securely dated to 160,000–72,000 years ago, made by non-modern hominins in East Asia, sit irreconcilably with claims of a recent creation, a single human origin, or a sudden appearance of uniquely human cognition. No amount of rhetorical dismissal can erase the fact that these artefacts exist, that they can be independently dated, and that they fit coherently within a much broader framework of archaeology, genetics, and palaeoanthropology.

Once again, the real world insists on deep time, shared ancestry, and evolutionary continuity — and once again, it is the evidence, not ideology, that has the final word.

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