Quest for Central Asia’s first hominins
(Image removed) Primitive stone tools made hundreds of millennia ago have been found on the windswept loess plateaux of Tajikistan. How old are they? What species of hominin created them? And how did past climate change affect scope for living here? An international research expedition is now seeking answers to these questions.
“We’ve been collecting sediment samples. Today, we have the methods and technology to find out how old an environment is. Tajikistan is a key area that can tell us how humans spread through Asia,” says Ramona Schneider, a PhD student at Uppsala University’s Department of Earth Sciences who joined the expedition.