By Paul Recer
AP Science Writer
Thursday, March 2, 2000; 4:55 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON –– Highly refined stone age tools discovered in China disprove an old theory that ancient people in East Asia were less accomplished at making stone cutting tools than early humans in Africa and the Middle East.

In a study to be published Friday in the journal Science, researchers report that stone tools found in China have the same sophisticated shape and consistency in design as tools found in Africa and the Middle East.

The Asian tools, found near the Chinese border with Vietnam, were age-dated at about 800,000 years ago.

Richard Potts, a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said the discovery proves that the early humans of East Asia, the Middle East and Africa "had comparable abilities in flaking stones and adapting to the environment."

Potts said that there are some subtle differences between ancient stone tools from Africa and Asia, but the implements have generally the same teardrop shape with double sharp edges.

He said it is unlikely that one group copied another. More likely, he said, is that nature has "one right way" to make an implement and that the groups found that way independently.

"This was a common response to how nature allows you to do it," said Potts.

Most researchers agree that the first humans to make stone tools lived in Africa. Potts said the early, simple stone tools were small and flaked at random angles, as if there was more chance than planning in the tool making.

The later, more refined tools, seemed to have a specific target design and the same shape was made over and over again.

Such advanced tools have long been missing from the human geological record in East Asia, leading some anthropologists to speculate that early humans in Asia were less sophisticated and inventive than those elsewhere.

Fifty years ago, a Harvard University anthropologist, Hallam Movius, even divided the ancient world into halves based on stone age tool-making skill. What became known as the Movius line divided Africa, the Middle East and Europe from the presumed backwaters of India, China and Southeast Asia.

Potts said the new find thoroughly destroys that idea and proves that the East Asians of almost a million years ago had the same "behavioral and technical competence" as the ancients elsewhere.

The new stone tools were found in an area that may have been demolished by the impact of a meteor that flattened what is thought to have been a semitropical forest. The violence of the meteor's collision with Earth created glassy pebbles called tektites. Some were splashed far out into the Pacific Ocean, even as far as Australia.

Potts said it is believed the meteor impact revealed to ancient peoples a terraced outcropping containing rocks that were ideal for tool making.

"They were presented with this stone and they were able to respond in equivalent ways to what we see elsewhere," he said.

The find also suggests the people were tough and able to adapt to suddenly changed circumstances – the devastation caused by the meteor impact.

"They were presented with the worst ecological disturbance I have seen in the geological record of early humans," said Potts. "They had the environmental rug pulled out from underneath them."

But they responded to the disaster by finding an opportunity, in the uncovered stones, to make more sophisticated tools, he said.

Richard Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, said in Science that the discovery by Potts and his co-authors was an important find that "demonstrates that people 800,000 years ago in China were flaking tools that are as sophisticated as anything made in Africa."

Researchers precisely established the age of the stone tools by dating tektites that were recovered from the same geological formation. By measuring the chemical isotopic ratios in the glassy rock, the scientists established an age of 803,000 years, plus or minus 3,000. This is the most precise date ever found for advanced East Asian tools, said Potts.