China was home to Neanderthals, not just Europe or Middle East, Stone Age find suggests

Artefacts unearthed in Yunnan province display key features of toolmaking technology associated with Neanderthals much further west

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The find “not only demonstrates the existence of a Middle Paleolithic technology in the region but also shows large-scale analogies with Neanderthal behaviours in western Europe”, a recently published paper says. Illustration: Shutterstock

Published: 8:00pm, 8 Apr 2025

Neanderthals might have lived in today’s southwestern China during the Middle Stone Age, newly discovered tools similar to those previously found only in Europe and the Middle East suggest.

An international scientific team unearthed some 3,500 stone artefacts at a site in Yunnan province, and dated them to between 60,000 and 50,000 years old.

Some stone tools showed key features of Quina technology – a tradition associated with Neanderthals living in cold, arid European environments around 70,000 to 40,000 years ago.

The team of archaeologists, based in Australia, China, France, Italy, Spain and the United States, published their findings last week in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The Middle Paleolithic, or Middle Stone Age, which lasted from around 300,000 to 40,000 years ago, was a critical period in human evolution. In Africa, it was closely associated with the origin and evolution of early modern humans, while in Eurasia, it was linked to the development of different archaic human groups, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, the team said in contextualising its findings.

It was previously believed that early hominids in China showed slow technological development, particularly in adopting Middle Paleolithic advancements. But the new discoveries might change this idea, according to the paper.