How do archeologists know that old tools they find were made by Homosapiens and not another species of homonid?
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Other archaeologist here. I work on pretty old stuff (around 50k-500k years old) in Southern Africa. The truth is that at least where I work we typically don’t know for sure what species made a particular assemblage of tools. Younger than 100k or so it’s a safe bet it’s sapiens, but when you go older to time periods when we know for sure that other human species were running around it’s very difficult if not impossible to determine a species unless tools are found in direct association with fossils. We have vastly higher numbers of artifacts that are *not* associated with fossils compared to ones that are.
In North or South America to date we have no evidence whatsoever of any non-sapiens species so we can be pretty damn sure it was us who made everything. In other places like Europe we have a fairly good idea of when sapiens got there, but there was definitely a period of overlap and coexistence with other species so it’s not always clear who made any
individual artifact. A good example would be the chattelperronian industry that was long thought to have been made by early sapiens in the region, but now is thought to have been made mostly by Neanderthals.
The big overarching point is that stone tools themselves don’t carry reliable markers of what species made them. We can only make hypotheses based on the evidence of what hominins we know were around, and when there were multiple types of hominin in the same area at the same time, it’s very difficult to tell.
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