Not your high school teacher’s human evolution, it seems. From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews:
Excavated stone artifacts document a gradual shift from larger, handheld cutting implements to smaller pieces of sharpened stone, known as Middle Paleolithic tools, by around 385,000 years ago, researchers say. That shift mirrors a similar change seen in tools from a variety of hominid populations in Africa, Asia and Europe between about 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, including African Homo sapiens and European Neanderthals.
…
The new finding suggests, however, that some humanlike populations reached South Asia shortly before H. sapiens even appeared in Africa, which possibly occurred around 300,000 years ago.
…
Still, “we cannot be sure who made the Attirampakkam tools, because we lack fossil [hominids] for this time period in India,” Pappu says. More.
From Kate Wong at Scientific American:
Recent discoveries might make such an early dispersal of our species seem more plausible than it once did. In 2017 a team working at the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco announced it had unearthed fossils of H. sapiens and accompanying Middle Stone Age tools dating to more than 300,000 years ago. And just last week a different team unveiled a fossil from Misliya Cave in Israel that pushes back the earliest known evidence of H. sapiens outside of Africa to around 185,000 years ago. The Misliya fossil turned up in association with Middle Paleolithic artifacts, including Levallois tools.
But other archaeologists are not so sure about the Attirampakkam team’s interpretation.More.
A decade ago, we don’t recall very many people having this discussion. Back then, Michael Cremo was just wrong, Wrong, WRONG! The trouble is, if he isn’t establishment, he has to be Wrong on principle, even if he is right. Evidence is not an establishment’s priority until everything else has failed and sometimes not even then.
See also: Stone tools nearly 2 million years old – and Michael Cremo is still wrong?
Earliest crayon (possibly) discovered so far, at 10 kya Those Stone Age people get smarter every time we run into them. Is there an explanation for that?
Australia: Sophisticated inland campsite 50 000 years ago
The search for our earliest ancestors: signals in the noise
and
Paleontologist: Nothing seems to be happening like they said in human evolution documentaries