It emerged half a million years ago, flourished and then vanished: Hungarian researcher helps date Central Asia’s enigmatic ancient culture

Based on stone tools preserved in the loess records of Tajikistan, including some discovered only recently, the study shows that the Karatau Culture emerged in the region around 580,000–600,000 years ago and persisted for approximately a quarter of a million years. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Central Asia played a key role in the dispersal of Homo erectus out of Africa, serving as a natural corridor linking the Caucasus and the Near East with Northeast Asia. Until now, however, no paleolithic site in Central Asia had been precisely dated, leaving a major gap in our understanding of early human migration. An international team of researchers has now helped to fill that gap.

The study focuses on the Khovaling Loess Plateau in south-eastern Tajikistan, where wind-blown dust accumulated over millions of years to form thick sedimentary sequences known as loess–palaeosol sections, reaching depths of 100 to 200 metres. Thick layers of loess formed during cold, dry glacial periods, while soils developed during warmer, wetter intervals. These layers follow one another much like the pages of a calendar: the deeper the layer, the further back in time it dates. Some of the ancient soil horizons preserve thousands of stone tools.

The richest assemblage, comprising around 6,500 stone tools, is associated with three of the plateau’s palaeosols. The Soviet archaeologist Vladimir Ranov first named this assemblage the Karatau Culture. Its characteristic artefacts include choppers, side-scrapers and denticulated tools made from pebbles. In the present study, the researchers examined 3,534 artefacts in detail.

To determine the age of the culture, the team analysed three loess sections using three complementary methods. Luminescence dating determines how much time has passed since individual mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight. Cosmogenic nuclide analysis is based on measuring the concentrations of beryllium-10 (¹⁰Be) and aluminium-26 (²⁶Al), isotopes that accumulate in quartz minerals embedded in the stone tools themselves. The magnetic record preserved in the sediments also enables researchers to identify additional, well-defined chronological markers in the form of geomagnetic polarity reversals.

In total, the researchers combined 286 luminescence ages, 16 pairs of cosmogenic nuclide measurements (²⁶Al/¹⁰Be) and numerous palaeomagnetic measurements in a single probabilistic age–depth model.

The results show that the Karatau Culture emerged around 580,000–600,000 years ago and flourished across three successive interglacial periods, approximately between 500,000 and 400,000 years ago. It then disappeared from the region around 375,000–380,000 years ago, coinciding with the onset of a new glacial period.

Remarkably, the toolkit changed very little over more than 200,000 years. This suggests that the people who carried this tradition arrived on the plateau with an already fully developed set of skills, although exactly where they came from remains unknown.

Using the same methods, the team also dated the earliest known traces of human presence in the region: the deepest layers at the Kuldara site are around 930,000 years old. The small number of simple flakes recovered from these layers are not diagnostic stone tools, meaning that they are insufficient to define a distinct, well-characterised culture. Nevertheless, they provide clear evidence of human presence and constitute the earliest precisely dated evidence of humans yet identified in Central Asia.

No human remains have survived, but chemical traces preserved in the soils suggest that the people of the Karatau Culture used fire and may also have used it to shape the surrounding landscape. The researchers suspect that climate change contributed to the culture’s disappearance. The main source of precipitation during interglacial periods appears to have shifted from summer monsoon rainfall to winter westerly systems, potentially transforming local vegetation and animal populations, as well as the living conditions of the people who depended on them.

The new chronology not only places the Karatau Culture securely in time, but also provides a firm foundation for future research into the population history of Asia. Moreover, because loess deposits preserve evidence of both human presence and climate change over hundreds of thousands of years, they represent an exceptionally valuable resource for archaeology and climate science alike.

The project was funded by NordForsk as part of The Timing and Ecology of the Human Occupation of Central Asia.

Project website: https://www.thoca.org/