{"id":600,"date":"2014-12-29T06:23:18","date_gmt":"2014-12-29T06:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/?p=600"},"modified":"2014-12-29T06:23:36","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T06:23:36","slug":"old-stone-tool-discovered-in-turkey-is-1-2-million-years-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/2014\/12\/old-stone-tool-discovered-in-turkey-is-1-2-million-years-old\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Stone Tool discovered in Turkey is 1.2 million years old"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stone-tool\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Archaeologists have set up a Paleolithic stone flake in the ancient deposits of the Gediz River, revealing that human ancestors passed through the gateway from Asia to Europe much earlier than previously thought.<\/p>\n

Although Paleolithic stone tools have been established in western Turkey before, few have been associated with geological deposits of known age. As a result, the timing of early humans\u2019 development across the Anatolian peninsula is badly understood.<\/p>\n

The newfound stone tool is composed mostly of quartz and is about 5 cm long.<\/p>\n

It shows proof of being hammered by a hard tool and, according to the scientists, is at least 1.2 million years old.
\n\u201cThe flake was an extremely exciting find. I had been studying the sediments in the meander bend and my eye was drawn to a pinkish stone on the shell. When I turned it over for a better look, the features of a humanly-struck artifact were immediately apparent,\u201d said Prof Danielle Schreve of Royal Holloway University of London, UK, who is a co-author of the paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis discovery is significant for establishing the timing and way of early human dispersal into Europe.\u201d
\n\u201cOur research suggests that the flake is the earliest securely-dated artifact from Turkey ever recorded and was dropped on the floodplain by an early hominine well over a million years ago.\u201d
\nProf Darrel Maddy of Newcastle University, who is the guide author on the study, added: \u201calthough the find of an individual struck flake may not in itself be strange, the observation is significant because we can assign a precise time range to the relic and thus the presence of hominins.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe observed markings on the flake that obviously suggest it had been struck with force by a hard hammer or other stone tool, making it highly unlikely that it was created by natural processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis quartzitic flake was then dropped on the floodplain of a vigorous river meander. That meander cut through lavas with age estimates of 1.24 million years and was finally discarded as a response to damming of the river downstream by a younger lava flow dated to 1.17 million years.
\n\u201cThis makes it the initial securely-dated artifact from Turkey yet reported.\u201d<\/p>\n

The oldest hominin fossils in western Anatolia, attributed to Homo erectus, were improved in 2007 in the deposits of travertine at Kocaba\u015f in the Denizli basin \u2013 about 100 km south of where the flake was discovered \u2013 but their dating were uncertain.
\n\u201cThis study highlights the need for geologists and archaeologists to work more intimately together,\u201d Prof Maddy said.
\n\u201cBy doing so we should be able to track the actions of early humans with ever increasing detail, affording us great opportunities to understand the distribution of our ancestors and the origins of the first Europeans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archaeologists have set up a Paleolithic stone flake in the ancient deposits of the Gediz River, revealing that human ancestors passed through the gateway from Asia to Europe much earlier than previously thought. Although Paleolithic stone tools have been established in western Turkey before, few have been associated with geological deposits of known age. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,3,45,48],"tags":[143,175,31],"class_list":["post-600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archaeological-research","category-archaeology","category-historical-archaeology","category-world-archaeology-museums","tag-archaeological-news","tag-archaeological-research","tag-archaeology-findings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":603,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}