Scientists find oldest bone knife in North Africa in Morocco

Rabat- Scientists have discovered a 90,000 year old bone knife made from an animal's rib Morocco.

The os tool, recovered in 2012 in the cave of Dar es-Soltan 1 south of Rabat, is the oldest tool to have been shaped and used as a knife by the Aterian culture of the Middle Ages of Stone in North Africa, announced the Ministry of Culture and Communication on 3 October.

According to the Natural History Museum, the bone, 13 cm long, came from a large mammal and had been shaped and sharpened for cutting soft materials.

"This discovery is important because it shows how sophisticated bone tool technology already existed about 100,000 years ago … It also shows the existence of a new type of bone tool. , without further example in the rest of Africa, "said researcher Silvia Bello scientist at Oxford University.

Moroccan scientist Abdeljalil Bouzouggar of the National Institute of Science and Technology (INSAP) suggested that Aterians was manufacturing specialized bone tools earlier than we thought and more than 40,000 years before the Neanderthals.

According to the scientific journal PLOS One: "This tool and the technology used to create it are distinct from bone tools of the same age in southern Africa, but similar to two known tools on the site of the El Mnasra cave in Morocco, which is also of the same age. "

One of the latest scientific discoveries published in Morocco took place in March.

Alongside Bello and Bouzouggar, an international team of researchers from INSAP Rabat and the Natural History Museum of Oxford University, including Louise Humphrey and Simon Parfitt, discovered this artifact.

An international team of researchers sequenced the DNA Homo sapiens in Morocco dating back about 15,000 years to the Pigeon Cave, in northeastern Morocco, near Oujda.

Homo sapiens, which dates back to the end of the Stone Age, has a genetic heritage similar to that of the populations of the Near East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In June 2017, fossils of Homo sapiens known for more than 300 000 years were also discovered in Morocco, suggesting that Homo sapiens has evolved in various places in Africa.