Stone tools beneath the Toba ash (Kota Tampan)
Herramientas líticas bajo la ceniza del Toba (Kota Tampan)
- Date
- c. 74 ka · confidence low
- Place
- Kota Tampan, Lenggong Valley, Perak, Malaysia
- Credited to
- Late Pleistocene hominins (makers undetermined)
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
A quartzite flake workshop buried under an ash layer linked to the Toba supereruption (c. 74 ka). Found in 1938 and re-excavated in the 1980s, it shows the Malay Peninsula was inhabited before the event.
The ash identification with Toba and the age of the tool-bearing levels have been revised several times; whether Toba had a severe demographic effect in the region is debated. Much older dates (c. 1.8 Ma) have been proposed for the Bukit Jawa tools, still controversial.
What it led to
- debate over the real impact of Toba on human populations in southern Asia
- the Lenggong Valley as a reference for Southeast Asian Palaeolithic (World Heritage, 2012)
- the search for older tools (Bukit Jawa) in the same valley