https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/31/5821022....

Levallois encompasses a huge variety of different traditions. The headlining article here is talking an Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) tradition. It's one of those technical terms that everyone uses a little differently, but usually means something along the lines of "uses middle paleolithic techniques (like levallois) to make upper paleolithic designs". They're associated with the entrance of anatomically modern humans into Eurasia (caveats apply).

This site is notable because it's the oldest such site in China. We already know of older sites from the same broad pan-Gobi region (e.g. Tsagaan Agui), they're just not in China.

>The people inhabiting the region had a remarkably advanced tool kit, with a range of innovative tools from the Upper Paleolithic, including end-scrapers, awls, and tools of former times, including Middle Paleolithic Levallois points, various tanged tools, denticulates, and borers.

Sounds noteworthy not necessarily for being the oldest example of any particular tool/technique so much as using all of them together, as well as making use of graphite and collecting toolmaking materials from hundreds of kilometers away. Apparently this diverse toolkit allowed them to thrive by specializing in hunting horses.

What I found especially remarkable was that the hominid that made all those tools in India wasn’t even Homo sapiens and it is kind of unknown who made them at this point. What’s even more interesting is that these tools were found significantly under the layer of deposits left behind from the Toba eruption 74,000 years ago. There’s so much we don’t know, it’s all very interesting.

https://askananthropologist.asu.edu/stories/chipping-away-to...

I don’t think Levallois started until around 300kYa (the error bars are huge, 385k is another interpretation).

> About 500,000 years ago, Acheulean technology began to disappear, and our ancestors started making tools using a trickier method. The Levallois technique was an important development, as flakes of an exact size and shape could be made.

Acheuleun “began to disappear” is not the same as “evidence of Levallois starting”. The whole paragraph is vague and poorly written. There are several intermediary industries like Sangoan and the aging on the first Levallois tools is controversial and based on sedimentary layers, not more precise methods.

This is a junk layman article, not a precise description of the evolution from Acheuleun to Levallois

Levallois tool at 500kYa isn’t backed by any science whatsoever.

Like in this case, who has the burden of proof?

I'm an outsider to this field so all I can glean is that apparently the vast majority of summaries I can find cite 200-300 kYa and one reference citing an "unambiguous" find that places the technique at 400 kYa.

So if somebody says that "there doesn't seem to be enough evidence for a claim that the levallois technique is 500 kYa" (I'll soften the more incendiary phrasing of "no scientific basis whatsoever" because after all that's just an emphatic raetoric device and I think filtering them out is conducive to more fruitful discussion), do they have to back it up with references?

Or is the person who claims 500 kYa that has to provide arguments as to why that number is not yet part of the scientific consensus?

I mean, there could be simple explanations like "yes I know, the result is relatively new so you may still find a lot of references to 200-300 around until stuff gets updated but working scientists in the field are mostly on board with 500 kYa". I mean for me, a casual reader, this kind of argument would be enough for a thread of HN.

What if somebody claims that the technique is 10 million years old, and somebody replies "there is scientific data backing that up", would it be reasonable to counter that with "please provide proof for your dismissal"? Obviously not, because the claim would be so outlandish, right? But 1M, 800 kYa?

In this case, it seems you're overlooking that I provided an actual expert, an anthropologist, who provided an answer. IMHO, amatuers' (a group that includes me) attempts to interpret evidence may be interesting, but we are highly error-prone and our offerings pointless beside expert judgment.

Also, you're not proving the negative (no reason to say 500 kya), just offering non-contradictory evidence that those tools appearing later also. Proving a negative, of course, is very difficult, but here we have an expert who apparently thinks otherwise.

It would be hard to ignore the expert because another amatuer doesn't know of any evidence for it. To prove that negative, we'd need an expert saying so - e.g., 'the evidence says it began 350 kya at the earliest'.

I think the answer is, we want comments to add value, be worth everyone's time to read. The standards of evidence will depend on what evidence is available and already posted - sometimes any shred of evidence helps; for topics drowning in misinformation, only high-quality evidence is worthwhile IMHO. Having said that, I'll have to look at mine and see if I met that standard!

You can just email it in and they get fixed.

->"Our new study identified an Initial Upper Paleolithic archaeological assemblage from the Shiyu site of North China dating to 45,000 years ago that includes blade technology, tanged and hafted projectile points, long-distance obsidian transfer, and the use of a perforated graphite disk," said associate Prof. Yang Shixia, first and corresponding author of the study and a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).