An unseen industry: when Neanderthals turned bone into tool
Is Homo sapiens the only one who knew how to turn bone into tools? An international team, led by researchers from Tracéolab at the University of Liège, has discovered an authentic bone industry at the Chez-Pinaud Neanderthal site in Jonzac (France), which may help to settle the question. The results of this study, published in the journal PLOS One, shed light on a little-known aspect of Neanderthal technology.
F
rom 45,000 years onwards, anatomically modern humans are present in Western Europe, eventually replacing the last Neanderthal populations. This moment also sees important changes in material cultures, particularly the large variety of bone objects, including hunting weapons, ornaments and fully-shaped figurines introduced by modern human groups. Their absence from Neanderthal sites has led to the assumption that these groups did not produce bone tools and implements, sometimes inferred to reflect cognitive difference between the two populations. Since the Neanderthal did not know how to process this raw material, they were limited to picking up bone fragments amongst butchery remains, using them uniquely as retouchers for shaping flint tools.
New excavations at the Neanderthal site of Chez-Pinaud at Jonzac (Charente-Maritime), carried out by an international team since 2019, have made it possible to reconsider this assumption. “Current studies have shown that bone tools are as numerous as flint ones, explains Malvina Baumann, a MSCA post-doctoral researcher at ULiège's Traceolab and first author of the scientific article. Moreover. Their diversity provides evidence for a genuine industry that consists not only of retouchers but also of cutting tools, scrapers, chisels and smoothers, used for various activities and on multiple materials. These bone tools are identifiable based on traces of manufacture and use present on their surfaces as well as within the tools themselves using X-ray microtomography. Unlike examples made by modern humans that are generally shaped by scraping and abrasion, these tools were primarily made by percussion.”
The discovery of a bone industry at Chez-Pinaud-Jonzac is consistent with evidence uncovered a few years earlier by the same team at the Neanderthal site of Chagyrskaya, in the Siberian Altai. “These two sites, located on either side of the Neanderthal range, testify to the fact that, like modern humans, Neanderthal made and used bone tools for their daily needs. They had the know-how to process bone using their own techniques and for their own purposes, concludes the researcher.»
Bone tools represent a new means for exploring and understanding Neanderthal technology, which has apparently not yet revealed all its secrets.
Scientific reference
Malvina Baumann, Hugues Plisson , Serge Maury , Sylvain Renou , Hélène Coqueugniot , Nicolas Vanderesse , Ksenyia Kolobova , Svetlana Shnaider , Veerle Rots , Guillaume Guérin , William Rendu, On the Quina side: A Neanderthal bone industry at Chez-Pinaud site, France, PLOS ONE, June 14, 2023
Find out more about Malvina Baumann's research
Partners
- TraceoLab, University of Liège, Liege, Belgium
- PACEA UMR 5199, CNRS, University of Bordeaux,Pessac, France
- Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, France
- Hadès, Agence Atlantique, Bordeaux, France,
- Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes-PSL University, Paris, France
- Paleolithic Department, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation
- ZooSCAN, International Research Laboratory 2013, CNRS, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation
- Ge´osciences Rennes UMR 6118, CNRS, University of Rennes, Rennes, France
