We have known previously that early humans, so-called hominins, used bone fragments to get to delicacies in termite mounds. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, use sticks in the same way.
We also know that hominins in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania used simple stone tools over two million years ago. Bone tools, however, did not begin to be used systematically until 500,000 years ago – or so we thought.
For in the Olduvai Gorge, a research team has now found 27 tools made of bone from large mammals, mainly elephant and hippopotamus, made 1.5 million years ago.
The discovery "sheds light on a nearly unknown world of early humans' bone technology", the researchers state in a study published in the journal Nature.
With stones as hammers, the bones were shaped into tools up to 40 centimeters long, believed to have been used to butcher large animal carcasses. Evidence, it is thought, of early humans' impressive cognitive abilities.
One theory is that the knowledge of bone tools originated on the site and then disappeared from the planet for a million years, before re-emerging in places like modern-day Rome.
Another possibility is that the techniques survived through the years, but that the bones were not properly identified at other excavation sites, says Francesco d'Errico, archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux and one of the study's co-authors.
