Archaeologists working in China found something they weren’t supposed to: stone tools that look exactly like those made by Neanderthals in Ice Age Europe.

Buried in red clay at the Longtan site in Yunnan province, these rugged stone tools — crafted 50,000 to 60,000 years ago — shouldn’t exist that far east. Until now, this tool style, called Quina, had only ever shown up thousands of miles away, alongside Neanderthal fossils in Europe.

So what gives? Did Neanderthals really make it all the way to China? Or did another mystery species copy their tech?

Mobile Neanderthals or copy cats?

Anthropologists care deeply about the Middle Stone Age — also known as the Middle Paleolithic — because it marks a pivotal chapter in human evolution. This is when our species started to move around. Homo sapiens, as well as Neanderthals, Denisovans, and possibly other species, were developing new technologies and adapting to various environments. They were also interacting with each other, as proven by interbreeding.

For a long time, archaeologists thought people in East Asia completely skipped the Middle Paleolithic. But this discovery says otherwise.

Quina is not just a vague style. It’s a craftsmanship signature. These tools — thick, sharp-edged scrapers with repeated retouch marks — were long considered an unmistakable calling card of Neanderthals in Europe.

Their presence in East Asia is perplexing. They’re around 7 to 8 thousand kilometers east of the region traditionally associated with this technology.

Excavations in 2019 and 2020 revealed not just tools, but the cores from which they were struck, and the flakes produced during sharpening. Optical luminescence dating, which measures when sand grains were last exposed to sunlight, confirmed the artifacts’ age: 50 to 60 thousand years old.

But it’s not at all clear who made these tools.

Indirect evidence

There is no direct evidence — no fossil, no DNA — to identify the toolmakers. The site lacks human remains. Yet the resemblance of the tools to those associated with Neanderthals is striking.

People used Quina scrapers to scrape and cut soft materials. They would have been used as for meat and animal skins, and possibly also for tougher materials like wood.

Hélène Monod, from Universidad Rovira i Virgili in Spain, analyzed the Quina scrapers and found traces of bones and antlers. She also found signs that they were used on meat and soft plants. They were used for years and sometimes retouched and recycled. In essence, they were used just like Neanderthals used them in Europe.

The most obvious possibility is that Neanderthals themselves reached China. Neanderthals are well documented in Europe, going as far east as the Altai Mountains. But it’s very possible they made incursions into today’s China, and possibly even settled some regions there.

Another possibility is cultural convergence. Another population, perhaps the Denisovans, could have developed a similar style of scraping rocks. There could have even been a cultural exchange where a Neanderthal showed someone else how to create such tools and the technique was passed from one group to another.

A new chapter in an old story

But if East Asian populations had this type of tool, why haven’t we found more of them?

Partly, it’s because archaeologists have focused on Europe longer, where rich fossil and tool sites are more densely studied. But there could be a deeper reason: biases in how archaeologists define innovation. For years, researchers overlooked artifacts in China that didn’t fit the textbook definitions drawn from other sites.

Future excavations might offer clarity.

“To answer these questions, we hope to find more Quina scrapers at sites with deeper — meaning older — layers than Longtan. If older layers hold what look like the remnants of experiments in stone toolmaking that would eventually result in Quina tools, it suggests Quina tools were invented locally. If deeper layers have dissimilar tools, that suggests Quina technology was introduced from a neighboring group,” writes co-author Ben Marwick in an article for The Conversation.

“Whoever was making and using these Quina scrapers, they were able to be inventive and flexible with their technology, adapting to their changing environment.”

The study was published in PNAS.