Chinese find suggests human relatives left Africa earlier

NEW YORK » Stone tools recovered from an excavation in China suggest that our evolutionary forerunners trekked out of Africa earlier than we thought.

Until now, the oldest evidence of human-like creatures outside Africa came from 1.8 million-year-old artifacts and skulls found in the Georgian town of Dmanisi. But the new find pushes that back by at least 250,000 years.

“It’s absolutely a new story,” said archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who did not participate in the study. “It means that early humans were getting out of Africa way earlier than we ever realized.”

That exit came long before our own species, Homo sapiens, even appeared. The researchers believe the tools were made by another member of the Homo evolutionary group.

The items included chipped rocks, fragments and hammer stones.