Stone Age people conquered the Tibetan Plateau’s thin air
Stone tools at least 30,000 years old suggest people settled high altitudes earlier than thought
By Bruce Bower
People settled down high up — really high up — as early as around 40,000 years ago. That’s when humans first inhabited East Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, about 4,600 meters above sea level, scientists say.
Until now, evidence of humans colonizing this high-altitude region extended no further back than around 8,000 years ago (SN: 2/4/17, p. 8). Some researchers have argued that the first permanent settlers arrived perhaps 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.
Archaeologist Xiaoling Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and her colleagues excavated a much older site than that, called Nwya Devu, on the Tibetan Plateau. Three sediment layers contained a total of 3,683 stone artifacts made from local, high-quality rock, the researchers report in the Nov. 30 Science.