Ancient Asian Tools Crossed the Line
By Bruce Bower
Large stone-cutting tools dubbed hand axes regularly appear at prehistoric archaeological sites from India westward across southern Asia into Europe and Africa. In 1944, Harvard anthropologist Hallam L. Movius Jr. proposed that those prehistoric populations, living 1.6 million to 200,000 years ago, existed on one side of a geographical line that separated them from groups in central and eastern Asia, where early humans fashioned much simpler stone implements.
Now, the discovery of ancient hand axes in southern China’s Bose basin supports the growing suspicion that hand ax production sometimes crossed what archaeologists call the Movius line. The 800,000-year-old Asian tools look much like Stone Age hand axes from anywhere else, concludes a team led by Hou Yamei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.