About 1.7 million years ago, a leggy human ancestor, Homo erectus, began prowling the steamy swamps and uplands of Java. That much is known from the bones of more than 100 individuals dug up on the Indonesian island since 1891. But the culture of early "Java Man" has been a mystery: No artifacts older than 1 million years had been found--until now.
At the meeting, archaeologist Harry Widianto of the National Research Centre of Archaeology in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, wowed colleagues with slides showing stone tools found in sediments that he says were laid down 1.2 million years ago and could be as old as 1.6 million years. The find, at a famous hominid site called Sangiran in the Solo Basin of Central Java, "opens up a whole new window into the lifeways of Java Man," says paleoanthropologist Russell L. Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
There's a point made near the bottom about these tools (flakes, really) being much smaller than similarly-aged tools in Africa because of a relative paucity of tool material. That's been a general theory about why microlithic tools developed: they're portable and make efficient use of limited raw materials.