Late last month, the Free University of Brussels reported that a team led by Ella Egberts has discovered hand axes that may go back 1.5 million years in the Iraqi desert:

The focus of the prospecting campaign was on an area that during the Pleistocene housed a large lake, now completely dried up, with ancient wadis or dry riverbeds crossing the landscape. Egberts collected over 850 artifacts, ranging from very old hand axes from the Early or Old Paleolithic to Levallois reduction flakes from the Middle Paleolithic, all surface material. “The other sites also deserve equally thorough systematic investigation, which will undoubtedly yield similar quantities of lithic material.”

“VUB researcher discovers hand axes that may go back 1,5 million years ago in Iraqi desert,” January 29, 2025

At Cosmos, science writer Evrim Yazgin reports,

Few fossils of the ancient humans who lived on the Arabian Peninsula have survived, making it difficult to pin down exactly which hominin species was responsible for the stone tools found by Egbert’s team.

Homo erectus lived 2 million to 110,000 years ago and were the first early humans to migrate out of Africa. Other human species including Homo heidelbergensis and Homo ergaster have been found in Europe and possibly lived in Asia.

Egbert says that the work in Iraq went smoother than expected given the country’s war-torn recent history.

“Hand axes in Iraq up to 1.5 million years old,” February 1, 2025

We know so little about life before people started writing things down but every such discovery is a sort of light going on.

You may also wish to read: Thinking back to the very beginnings of art. Art just appears, from great antiquity, and we really don’t know why. All we know is that animals don’t do it. The problem is, so much is lost that it is risky to draw conclusions. But what’s remarkable is how humans have expressed themselves with whatever was available.