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Tibetan stone artifacts shed light on ancient life

Researchers led by Zhang Xiaoling, an archaeologist at China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, have found more than 3,600 stone artifacts in Nwya Devu, a part of the central Tibetan Plateau. The site is rich with black slate - not the ideal raw material for stone tools. But the ancient toolmakers, the Denisovans, took advantage of what they had, expertly crafting bladed flakes of stone up to 20 cm long. Most of the buried tools last saw sunlight 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, making Nwya Devu the oldest site of human activity on the plateau. And at a towering 4,480 meters above sea level, Nwya Devu is also the world's highest-altitude archaeological site that's more than 10,000 years old.