Earliest humans reach Asia: stone tools at Shangchen, China
- Date
- c. 2.1 million years ago
- Category
- Exploration & colonisation
- Region
- East Asia (China, Loess Plateau)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
At Shangchen on the Loess Plateau of Shaanxi Province in northern China, archaeologists led by Zhaoyu Zhu recovered 96 simple stone artefacts — notches, scrapers, cores and hammerstones — from seventeen sediment layers, the oldest dated by palaeomagnetism to about 2.12 million years ago.
If the dating holds, these are the earliest known traces of the genus Homo anywhere outside Africa, predating the celebrated Dmanisi fossils in Georgia by roughly 270,000 years. No hominin bones accompany the tools, so the maker is unknown, but an early form of Homo erectus (or a related early Homo) is the leading candidate. The find implies that toolmaking populations dispersed out of Africa across thousands of kilometres of Eurasia far earlier than the traditional date of about 1.8 million years ago, and that they returned repeatedly to the region over a span of more than 800,000 years. Shangchen reshapes the timeline of the first human expansion across the Old World and underlines how mobile and adaptable early Homo had become.
One piece of history in your inbox, weekly
New empires, events and features as they land — one good email a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Related exploration & colonisation events
- Dmanisi: the earliest well-dated humans in Eurasiac. 1.8 million years ago
- Pre-Clovis America: Monte Verde and the Pacific coastal routec. 16,000–14,500 years ago
- Settlement of Sahul: human occupation of Australia at Madjedbebec. 65,000 years ago
- White Sands footprints: humans in the Americas during the Last Glacial Maximumc. 23,000–21,000 years ago
- Earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateauc. 40,000 – 30,000 years ago
- Early settlement of Japan and obsidian seafaring to Kozushimac. 38,000 years ago
Further reading
The wider story
China: A History
Sweeping, readable single-volume narrative of China from its beginnings to today.
Get it on Amazon →As an Amazon Associate, Human Saga earns from qualifying purchases.