Nearly a hundred stone tools excavated from multiple layers at a site in China point to hominins — our ancestors and closest kin — being in East Asia about 2.1 million years ago. The find is the oldest evidence of hominins outside of Africa by more than 200,000 years and begs the question: what species made them?

Hominins are those species in the greater primate family tree that are more closely related to us than to other apes. That includes members of our own genus, Homo: Neanderthals