April
26
/ 2021
Polish archaeologists exploring an ancient gold mine in Sudan in the eastern Sahara Desert struck an entirely different kind of “gold.” Acting on a rumor, they found hundreds of stone tools that were produced and used by the extinct hominin species Homo erectus, in an area they would have occupied hundreds of thousands of years ago. The Homo erectus tools were barely buried beneath a layer of earth and sand. Using a technology called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), the archaeologists definitively dated this layer to approximately 390,000 years in the past. The findings have recently been published in the PLOS ONE journal. “This means that the layers below are certainly older,” explained Professor Mirosław Masojć from the Institute of Archaeology
