Discovery of Neanderthal Tools from a Group of Primate Known as Hinnins at a Cape of Kenyan Stones
Gaps in the archaeological record have made it challenging to study toolmaking in our earliest ancestors. A group of primate, known as hinnins, started using tools 3.3 million years ago. Researchers know this because of stone tools unearthed at a single site in northern Kenya.
The site in Kenya is now offering some fresh insights. Stone tools and animal fossils were found near the home of a worker who told researchers he had seen them in the early 2000s.
The crew started excavating at the new site in 2015. Over the course of several years, they found 330 items, including stone tools and bones from an ancestral Hippo. Some of the hippo bones, as well as other animal remains at the site, bore signs of being cut and scraped by stone implements.
A cave site in southern France has hundreds of tiny stone points, which resemble other known arrowheads and were tested on dead goats.
The bow-and-arrow technology of the Neanderthals is unknown, and it is not sure if they picked it up or not. Neanderthals lack the cognitive capacity to use projectiles, a difference that might have helped humans to out-Compete them for scarce game.
Neanderthal teeth, genetic material and stone tools have been found beneath Grotte Mandrin’s layer E. The team says that layer E refers to an incursion of Homo sapiens into Neanderthal territory at least 10,000 years before the species settled in Europe. Not all archaeologists agree.
A horse’s leg that is similar to an arrow head found in Grotte Mandrin buried in the Rhône Valley after a human-caving expedition
The tools included hundreds of tiny points, many of which were as small as 1 centimetre wide, and weighed only a few grams. The smallest points were similar to other arrowheads made by ancient and modern humans, and some contained similar fractures and other damage at their tips, which could have been created by high-velocity impact.
Grotte Mandrin contains many horse bones, and Metz suspects that humans sheltering in the cave hunted these animals as well as bison migrating through the Rhône Valley. The team has discovered a damaged horse’s leg that is very similar to a stone point and hopes to find an arrow point in the animal bone.