\n
![\"EarthSnap\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/earthsnap-banner-news.webp.webp\")
\n<\/a><\/p>\n
The dig sits near the village of Lingjing in Henan Province. It is an open-air pit where ancient humans came to butcher animals like deer, leaving behind bones and more than 15,000 stone artifacts in the dirt.<\/p>\n
Yuchao Zhao, assistant curator of East Asian archaeology at the Field Museum<\/a> in Chicago, leads the new analysis along with senior author Zhangyang Li, a professor at Shandong University<\/a> in China.<\/p>\n The people who left those tools belonged to Homo juluensis<\/a>, a species formally named in a 2024 paper<\/a>. Its name translates roughly to \u201cbig head,\u201d and the fossils back it up. Skulls from the site show very large brain cases.<\/p>\n Their anatomy is a mosaic. Some traits look East Asian and archaic. Others resemble Neanderthals from Europe. Homo juluensis were cousins of our species, Homo sapiens, and the two groups likely crossed paths.<\/p>\n For decades, archaeologists have read the East Asian human fossil record as a quieter story than the European or African one. Big technological leaps seemed scarce across the late Middle Pleistocene, the stretch from about 300,000 to 120,000 years ago.<\/p>\n The stone tools<\/a> at Lingjing complicate that view. Disc-shaped cores at first glance look unremarkable. Look more closely, and they are anything but.<\/p>\n The Lingjing toolmakers struck small stones against larger cores to peel off sharp flakes. Some cores were worked fairly evenly on both sides, hit from multiple angles.<\/p>\n Others were handled as two distinct surfaces. One served as a platform to strike from. The other was the face where useful flakes came off.<\/p>\n That asymmetry is the giveaway. It suggests the toolmaker was managing a three-dimensional object, assigning roles to faces, holding the angles steady so the flakes kept coming out usable. Not casual work.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was not casual flake production, but a technology that required planning, precision, and a deep understanding of stone properties and fracture mechanics,\u201d said Zhao.<\/p>\n This kind of organized core work turns up in the ancient European and African record \u2013 among Neanderthals and early human ancestors. Until this study, no site in eastern Eurasia had yielded the same logic this early.<\/p>\n While pulling bones out of the dirt around the cores, the team noticed something glittering inside one of them. A deer rib threaded with calcite crystals<\/a>.<\/p>\n The crystals held a chemical record. When calcite forms, it traps tiny amounts of uranium. Over time, that uranium breaks down into a different element called thorium \u2013 a process that happens at the same speed, year after year, like a ticking clock. <\/p>\n By measuring how much thorium has built up compared to the uranium still left, scientists can figure out exactly when the crystal formed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe calcite crystals inside the bone acted like a natural clock, allowing us to refine the age of the site,\u201d said Zhao.<\/p>\n Earlier dating placed the Lingjing artifacts at around 126,000 years old \u2013 in a warm period between ice ages. The crystals pushed the date to roughly 146,000 years.<\/p>\n A 20,000-year difference might sound minor. It is not. That older window lands inside a glacial period, when ice sheets had grown and the climate around the site was harsh and cold.<\/p>\n Cold and creative<\/p>\n Earth\u2019s Pleistocene climate swung between glacial cold snaps and warmer intervals. The old date placed the toolmakers in one of those warmer windows. That fit a familiar assumption: creativity tends to bloom when life eases up.<\/p>\n The new date breaks that assumption. These toolmakers were planning and refining through a cold glacial \u2013 the very conditions older theories said would suppress that kind of work. \u201cHard times can force us to adapt,\u201d said Zhao.<\/p>\n The revised dating comes from calcite in a single bone, and the researchers acknowledge that not all of the assemblage necessarily dates to 146,000 years ago. Results from one site, however rich, can only go so far in revising the wider East Asian record.<\/p>\n More dated finds from the region will sharpen the picture.<\/p>\n Lingjing has produced surprises before. An earlier study<\/a> at the site reported bone retouchers, animal bone trimmed and used to refine stone edges, left behind by this same population.<\/p>\n Each round of analysis adds to a fuller portrait of Homo juluensis as careful hunters and toolmakers, not the technological backwaters the older model presumed.<\/p>\n What is now known that was not: the planned, multi-surface core technique at Lingjing is the earliest of its kind identified in eastern Eurasia. Practiced under glacial cold. Creativity here was not the dividend of plenty.<\/p>\n The default assumption \u2013 that complex techniques only appeared in East Asia during warm windows or arrived from the west \u2013 gives way to something messier.<\/p>\n Innovation here has its own timeline. It does not track climate the way older models suggested, and it shows up at sites Western archaeology long underestimated.<\/p>\n The study is published in the Journal of Human Evolution<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When archaeologists have found complex stone tool techniques at prehistoric sites in East Asia, those regions tended to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-443811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Early](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/bone-crystals_imaging_Yuchao-Zhao_1s.webp.webp\")
<\/a>Early humans, Homo juluensis, showed great ingenuity during difficult Ice Age climate conditions. Credit: Zhangyang Li. Click image to enlarge.Bone crystals act as a clock<\/p>\n![\"Crystals](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/bone-crystals_Lingjing-site_Zhanyang-Li_1s.webp.webp\")
<\/a>Crystals growing inside a bone found at the Lingjing archaeological site; these crystals were used to date the site, and the tools found there, to an ice age 146,000 years ago. Credit: Zhanyang Li. Click image to enlarge.Clearer picture of early humans<\/p>\n