Scientists have discovered remains of a Stone Age culture less than 100 miles west of Beijing where ancient hominids used a reddish pigment called ocher and made tiny stone blade-like tools. The archaeological site, called Xiamabei, offers a rare insight into the lives of Homo sapiens and now-extinct human relatives who inhabited the area approximately 40,000 years ago.

The newly excavated site is in the Nihewan Basin, a depression in a mountainous region in the north China. The excavation team found evidence of the culture about 8 feet (2.5 meters) underground, when they spotted a layer of dark loamy sediment dating to between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago, based on radiocarbon dating and other analyses. This Stone Age sediment contained a treasure trove of artifacts and animal remains, including more than 430 mammals bones; a home; physical evidence of the use and processing of ochre; a bone tool; and over 380 miniaturized lithics, or small cut or ground stone tools and artifacts.

“The remains appeared to be in their original location after the site was abandoned by locals,” co-first author Shixia Yang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute, told Live Science. for the science of human history. in an email. “Based on this, we can reveal a vivid picture of how people lived 40,000 years ago in East Asia.”

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The identification of a 40,000-year-old sediment layer dotted with such artifacts was “a surprise”, said co-author Francesco d’Errico, CNRS research director at the University of Bordeaux and professor at the University of Bergen, to Live Science in an email. Notably, “this is the oldest known ocher workshop for East Asia”, and the collection of tiny stone tools suggests that the makers probably produced and used specialist tool kits, a he declared.

Yang, d’Errico and their colleagues published a report on the site and the artifacts on Wednesday March 2 in the journal Nature.

Evidence of ocher processing at Xiamabei includes two pieces of ocher with slightly different mineral compositions, as well as an elongated limestone slab with smoothed areas stained with the crimson pigment. The team found these artifacts in close proximity to each other, resting on an area of ​​reddened sediment.

“I don’t think anyone should find it shocking that the people of what is now northern China [40,000 years ago] were collecting and using ocher,” because in general, humans and their relatives had been using the pigment for many years by then, said Andrew M. Zipkin, assistant professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and a scientist associated with Eurofins EAG Laboratories, who was not involved in the study.

“The ocher artifacts in this study are quite limited in number, but I would be delighted [to] see follow-up work on them that seeks to identify where the ocher was collected,” Zipkin told Live Science in an email. Regarding the new study, “for me, the important element here is not the ocher per se, but its presence as part of a suite of technologies and behaviors,” he said.

The first piece of ocher found at the site bore signs of having been “repeatedly abraded to produce a brilliant dark red ocher powder”, the authors reported; the second, smaller piece of ocher had a more crumbly texture, in comparison, and probably came from a larger piece of ocher that had been crushed. An analysis conducted by d’Errico revealed that the different types of ocher had been crushed and scraped into powders of varying consistency.

Another analysis showed that the reddish sediments found near the ocher contained rock fragments rich in hematite, a mineral that contains oxidized oxide. iron and gives red ocher its distinct hue. (Other types of ochre, including yellow ocher and so-called specularite, a shimmering red-purple pigment, have slightly different mineral compositions, according to Discover.)

However, based on the available evidence, they could not determine exactly how the pigment was used. Ocher can be used in adhesives, for example, or in “symbolic applications” such as rock art painting or paint applied to the body both as cosmetic decoration and as sunscreen, Zipkin said. “Distinguishing between symbolic and functional uses of ocher in material culture records is an ongoing challenge for prehistoric archaeologists,” he noted.

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Traces of ocher appeared on several stone tools at the site, and the nature of these tools suggested that the pigment may have been used as an additive used in the treatment of hides and as an ingredient in a hafting adhesive – that is, a sticky substance used to affix handles to stone tools. This evidence does not negate the possibility that the pigment was also used symbolically, Zipkin said.

Archaeologists have found evidence of ocher processing in Africa and Europe, to a lesser extent, dating back around 300,000 years, and there is evidence of ocher use in Australia around 50,000 years ago. years, d’Errico told Live Science. But before the Xiamabei excavations, “evidence of the use of ocher in Asia before [28,000 years ago] was, however, very low,” he said.

Based on wear patterns and lingering residue on the hafted lithic items found at the site, the team determined that these artifacts were likely used for multiple purposes, including piercing materials, scraping hides, carving materials vegetable and cut soft animal materials. Likewise, handleless lithics were probably intended for several purposes, such as piercing hard materials and cutting softer materials.

“We are therefore faced with a complex technical system exploiting different raw materials to create highly efficient portable tools, which are used in a variety of activities,” said d’Errico.

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Small stone blades known as microblades, or lamellae, became widely used in northeast Asia during the late Pleistocene era (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) , Yang said; specifically, the technology began to spread throughout the region around 29,000 years ago, the authors note in their report. The lithic objects from Xiambei are not microblades but have characteristics similar to small stone tools, leading Yang to wonder if these objects represent the “root” of later microblade technology, she said.

The study raises another big question: Which archaic hominids actually occupied Xiamabei 40,000 years ago? Some clues point to modern humans, but the authors cannot be sure that the human relatives – namely Neanderthals and Denisovans – were not present on the site.

“We cannot be sure that Homo sapiens Xiamabei occupied, due to the lack of human fossils at the site,” Yang told Live Science. That said, modern human fossils have been found at a younger site called Tianyuandong, which is about 110 km away, as well as another site in the area called Upper Zhoukoudian Cave, she said. Nearby fossils suggest that the ocher-working and tool-making hominids that visited Xiamabei may also have been H. sapiens.

“We cannot, however, entirely ignore the possibility that other closely related human ancestors were not yet present in the vast landscapes of North Asia, for it is clear that earlier groups of Homo sapiens were mating and intermingling with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” Yang said. Additionally, since Neanderthals also used ocher, evidence for ocher use offers no clues to the hominins present at the site, Zipkin said.

“Further excavations planned in Xiamabei will help us better understand our evolutionary story,” Yang said.

Originally posted on Live Science.