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About 400,000 years ago, pre-modern hominids – probably Neanderthals – at a Middle Pleistocene site in Italy appropriated elephant carcasses to produce an unprecedented array of bone tools – some made with sophisticated methods that would only become common 100,000 years ago, according to new research by archaeologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Elephant tusks with straight tusks (Paleoloxodon) and small items at the Castel di Guido site in Italy. Image credit: Villa et al., doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0256090.
“We’re seeing other sites with bone tools right now. But there isn’t that variety of well-defined shapes, ”said Dr. Paola Villa, assistant curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and researcher at the Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana.
Dr Villa and his colleagues examined artifacts from Castel di Guido, an open-air archaeological site about 20 km from Rome, on the south side of the Monti Sabatini volcanic complex.
The site was excavated between 1979 and 1991 over an area of 1,100 m2. The excavations produced a large number of faunal remains and artefacts (all small and large tools plus cores, hammers and unretouched shards).
“Hundreds of thousands of years ago, this was the location of a ravine that had been carved out by an ephemeral stream, an environment where straight-tusked elephants (Paleoloxodon) quenched their thirst and, at times, died, ”archaeologists said.
“Hominids from Castel di Guido have made good use of the remains, occupying the site intermittently over the years.”
“They produced tools using a systematic and standardized approach, much like a single individual working on a primitive assembly line.”
In the study, researchers identified a total of 98 elephant bone tools from the Castel di Guido site.
Some tools were sharp and could theoretically have been used to cut meat. Others were wedges that might have been useful for splitting heavy elephant thighbones and other long bones.
But one tool stood out above the rest: a single artifact carved from a bone of a wild cattle that was long and smooth at one end.
It looks like what archaeologists call a “smoother,” or smoother, a type of tool that hominids used to process leather. Smoother tools did not become mainstream until about 300,000 years ago.
“At other sites 400,000 years ago people were just using the bone fragments they had,” Dr Villa said.
The authors suspect that the hominids of Castel di Guido were Neanderthals.
“About 400,000 years ago you start to see the usual use of fire, and that’s the start of the Neanderthal lineage. It is a very important period for Castel di Guido ”, noted Dr Villa.
“The people of Castel di Guido had cognitive intellects which enabled them to produce complex bone technology.”
“In other assemblies, there was enough bone for people to make a few pieces of it, but not enough to start a standardized and systematic production of bone tools.”
The results were published in the journal PLoS A.
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P. Villa et al. 2021. Elephant bone for the Middle Pleistocene toolmaker. PLoS A 16 (8): e0256090; doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0256090
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