![]() What the region might have had a lot of, however, were dead elephants. She explained that this region of Italy doesn’t have a lot of naturally-occurring, large pieces of flint, so ancient humans couldn’t make many large stone tools. Instead, these early humans simply used the resources they had lying around. Villa doesn’t think that the Castel di Guido hominids were any more intelligent than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. ![]() Something special, in other words, seemed to be happening at the Italian site. “At other sites 400,000 years ago, people were just using whatever bone fragments they had available,” Villa said. The curious thing: Lissoir tools didn’t become common until about 300,000 years ago. It resembles what archaeologists call a “lissoir,” or a smoother, a type of tool that hominids used to treat leather. “Then you hammer it, and at some point, the bone will break.”īut one tool stood out from the rest: The team discovered a single artifact carved from a wild cattle bone that was long and smooth at one end. “First you make a groove where you can insert these heavy pieces that have a cutting edge,” Villa said. Others were wedges that may have been helpful for splitting heavy elephant femurs and other long bones. That rich toolbox offered a wide range of useful items: Some tools were pointed and could, theoretically, have been used to cut meat. The findings represent the highest number of flaked bone tools made by pre-modern hominids that researchers have described so far. In their new study, Villa and her colleagues identified 98 bone tools from Castel di Guido, which was excavated from 1979 to 1991. “This is a very important period for Castel di Guido.” “About 400,000 years ago, you start to see the habitual use of fire, and it’s the beginning of the Neanderthal lineage,” Villa said. ![]() Villa suspects that Castel di Guido’s residents were Neanderthals. ![]() Right around 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis) were just beginning to emerge in Europe. ![]() These feats of ingenuity came at a significant time for hominids in general. “This kind of aptitude didn’t become common until much later.” Stone Age toolbox “At Castel di Guido, humans were breaking the long bones of the elephants in a standardized manner and producing standardized blanks to make bone tools,” Villa said. The researchers report that these Stone Age residents produced tools using a systematic, standardized approach, a bit like a single individual working on a primitive assembly line. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was the location of a gully that had been carved by an ephemeral stream-an environment where 13-foot-tall creatures called straight-tusked elephants ( Palaeoloxodon antiquus) quenched their thirst and, occasionally, died.Ĭastel di Guido’s hominids made good use of the remains, occupying the site off and on over the years. The study zeroes in on a site called Castel di Guido not far from modern-day Rome. Villa and her colleagues published their results this month in the journal PLOS ONE. Top: Elephant tusks and other bones at the Castel di Guido site during excavation middle: A series of pointed elephant bone tools from Castel di Guido bottom: A lissoir, or smoother, tool made from a wild cattle bone. ![]()
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