February 21, 2014

Oldest signs of Japanese using tools uncovered in Okinawa



Archaeologists have unearthed shell tools around 20,000 years old that could help clear up mysteries surrounding the ancestors of modern Japanese people, a museum said Feb. 15.

The Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum said the shell tools--the first uncovered in Japan from the Paleolithic Age--were dug up at the Sakitari-do cave site in Nanjo, Okinawa Prefecture, near the site where the country’s oldest whole skeletons were found.