The world was booming with technology before Homo sapiens.

(NLDO) - A series of 600,000-year-old objects are shocking evidence of a great technological boom period not created by us modern humans.

The technological explosion of 600,000 years ago did not occur in the form we are seeing in the 21st century, but it served as the foundation for our own species' remarkable development hundreds of thousands of years later.

According to Science Alert, this technological explosion was a quantum leap in the complexity of stone tools, showing that human knowledge increased dramatically around 600,000 years ago.

Ancient humans created a great technological explosion of stone tools - Photo AI: Anh Thu

A research team led by anthropologists Jonathan Paige of the University of Missouri and Charles Perreault of Arizona State University analyzed a range of ancient tools from Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania (including the Sahul shelf) and the Americas (including Greenland).

A total of 62 different Stone Age tool-making technologies have been classified from the data collected at 57 archaeological sites.

They found that until 1.8 million years ago, stone tool production sequences ranged from 2 to 4 process units in length. Over the next 1.2 million years, tool complexity increased, reaching up to 7 process units.

However, it wasn't until about 600,000 years ago that our ancestors took this to the next level: Tools suddenly became incredibly complex, some crafted through as many as 18 different process units.

According to the authors, such a major technological advance depends on knowledge passed down from previous generations.

In the following generations, the complexity of stone tools continued to increase rapidly, not unlike the way our world has been completely "transformed" in a short time thanks to digital technology today.

This leap also shows that at that time, the humans that existed on Earth had evolved to the point of being willing to experiment and discover new things from the mistakes they accidentally made in the process of making tools.

In other words, it's like a kind of primitive scientific research.

The improvement of the tool production process on a large scale also shows that the human brain at that time had evolved to the level of knowing how to take advantage of collective knowledge and cultural exchange.

This allows individuals to use and improve technology without having to fully understand every aspect of its development, paving the way for an ever-growing and adaptive knowledge base that is the foundation for today's ever-evolving society.

As collective knowledge and related behaviors evolve, genes that influence learning may also be selected for.

The products of this cultural and genetic "coevolution" may include increases in relative brain size, the complexity of individual lives, and other key features that underlie human uniqueness.

Although the new findings provide strong evidence for the presence of cumulative culture near the beginning of the middle Pleistocene of the Pleistocene, this type of cultural intelligence may have emerged even earlier in human history.

Our species Homo sapiens, also known as modern humans or wise men, only appeared about 300,000 years ago.

That means that this technological explosion was not created by our direct ancestors, but by ancient, extinct human species.

According to previous studies, at the time our species was born, there were still at least 8-9 other species of the genus Homo living in the world.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/the-gioi-bung-no-cong-nghe-tu-truoc-khi-homo-sapiens-ra-doi-196240619083623341.htm