Ancient New

The art and pottery at the site show influences from all five nations of the Iroquois to the south in New York State, suggesting extensive contacts and trade. For instance, among Mantle's discoveries are the earliest European goods ever found in the Great Lakes region of North America, predating the arrival of the first known European explorers by a century.

They consist of two European copper beads and a wrought iron object, believed to be part of an ax, which was carefully buried near the center of the settlement. A maker's mark on the wrought iron object was traced to northern Spain, and the fact that it was made of wrought iron suggests a 16th-century origin.

In fact, in the early 16th century Basque fisherman and whalers sailed to the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador. It's believed that it would have been acquired by the aboriginal people there and exchanged up the St. Lawrence River until eventually reaching Mantle. The people of Mantle, it seems, were on trading relations with the Iroquois of the St. In the period before Mantle there is evidence of widespread warfare throughout southern Ontario and New York as well as parts of Michigan and Quebec, a period known as "the dark times.

Mantle, with its large size and palisade defense, may have discouraged this type of warfare, making an attack risky. Other settlements in southwest Ontario were getting larger and sites in New York were clustering together, suggesting that they too were becoming harder to attack. Birch compares the situation at Mantle and other sites to what happened after World War II, with the formation of the United Nations and NATO, institutions that discouraged warfare, allowing for trade and cultural interaction.

Williamson noted that, sadly, with the arrival of Europeans, this peace did not last, with warfare intensifying in the 17th century. However, while the site is mostly built over, the modern-day town where Mantle was discovered — Whitchurch-Stouffville — is commemorating the Wendat's history in the community. Follow LiveScience on Twitter livescience.

Owen Jarus writes about archaeology and all things about humans' past for Live Science. Owen has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Ryerson University.

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He enjoys reading about new research and is always looking for a new historical tale. A woodpecker pipe effigy, about 5 cm across. But some of the most profound technological innovations in human evolution have been made out of stone. Archaeologists had thought that artifacts of this kind had been carried into China by groups migrating from Europe and Africa.

But our new discovery, dated to between , and 80, years ago, suggests that they could have been invented locally without input from elsewhere, or come from much earlier cultural transmission or human migration.

Several different species of humans lived on Earth at this time, including modern ones like us. These Chinese artifacts provide one more piece of evidence that changes the way we think about the origin and spread of new stone tool technologies. And intriguingly we made our discovery based on artifacts that had been excavated decades ago. Archaeologists have identified five modes humans have used to make stone tools over the last 3 million years.

Each mode is represented by a new stone tool type that is dramatically different from what came before.

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The appearance of each new mode is also marked by a big increase in the number of steps needed to make the new tool type. One of these modes, Mode III, also called Levallois, is at the center of several big debates about human evolution. They are the result of a set of very specific steps of chipping a piece of stone to create similar-sized tools suitable to be shaped for a variety of purposes.

These steps are remarkable because they are a much more efficient way to produce lots of useful cutting tools, with minimal wasted stone, compared to earlier technologies. One of these debates is whether Mode III tools were invented in one place and then spread out, or independently invented in several different locations. On the other hand, finds of similarly early Levallois tools in Armenia and India support the idea of independent inventions of the technology outside of Africa. In China it has been hard to find evidence of Mode III tools until relatively late in the Palaeolithic period , approximately 30, to 40, years ago.

This suggests that Levallois tools appeared in China when modern humans migrated in and brought these new technologies with them around 30, to 40, years ago. Our results support a different story for the origin of Levallois tools in China. This puts them well before Mode IV tools, and at around the same time that Levallois were the main tools used in Europe and Africa.

One major implication of our new early ages from Guanyindong Cave is that the appearance of Levallois tools in China is no longer tied to the arrival of modern humans and Mode IV tools 30, to 40, years ago. Instead, Levallois tools could have been invented locally in China — maybe by a different human species. Another possibility is that they were introduced by a much earlier migration, perhaps by the people whose teeth have been found in a cave in Daoxian , Hunan Province , who lived between 80, and , years ago.

All of the stone tools we studied had been excavated from Guanyindong Cave in the s and s. Since that time Guanyindong has been famous as one of the most important Paleolithic sites in South China because of the relatively large number of stone tools found there. Most are stored at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, and our team spent a lot of time carefully inspecting each tool to identify the traces that reveal how it was made. It was during this painstaking analysis of the museum specimens that we encountered a few dozen Levallois tools among the thousands of artifacts in the collection.

During the previous excavations at Guanyindong Cave, researchers had used uranium-series methods to date fossils found in the sediments. This technique relies on the radioactive decay of tiny amounts of uranium that collects in bone shortly after it is buried to come up with an age range for its burial. At Guanyindong these uranium-series ages span a wide range, from 50, to , years ago. Also, the association between the dated fossil pieces and the stone artifacts was not recorded in detail. The dates were important to nail down, because if they were older than , years, then they could be the earliest Levallois tools found in China.

To uncover the true age of these Levallois tools, we made several trips to the cave to collect new samples for dating.