Neanderthals who lived 130,000 years ago crafted their tools from the bones of one of their deadliest predators.
In fact, not only did they make their tools from the bones of cave lions and cave bears, the inhabitants of Scladina Cave in what is now Belgium made adaptations to their tools that allowed them to be reused for a different purpose than its original design.
“The faunal assemblage [in the cave] provides the earliest evidence of bone tools crafted from cave lion remains,” writes a team of archaeologists led by Grégory Abrams of Ghent University in Belgium.
“A tibia was deliberately processed into multifunctional tools, initially serving as an intermediate tool before being repurposed as retouchers.”
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Neanderthals, a hominid species closely related to Homo sapiens, were remarkably intelligent. Not only were they able to craft elaborate tools and technology, they were richly creative, using their skills to adorn their lives with beautiful art. They were also highly adaptable, able to change up their survival strategies to make the most of the resources available to them.
We don’t know much about the Neanderthals, in part because they lived so long ago. Neanderthals went extinct some 40,000 years ago, and most of the detritus of their lives has succumbed to the ravages of time, decay, and erosion. Only in protected places such as caves have Neanderthal artifacts survived, buried deeply under layers of sediment, to be excavated by human scientists many thousands of years later.
Scladina Cave is just such a place. There, 120 distinct layers preserve a jaw-dropping 400,000 years of habitation. In one layer, dated to around 130,000 years ago, archaeologists have found a plethora of tools, predominantly of worked flint, indicating a robust tool manufacturing pipeline.
Among the assemblage is also a number of bones, including 29 bones that would have been used for retouching, a technique for shaping flint. Most of the bones were consistent with the chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) that the Neanderthals primarily hunted, but several, Abrams and his colleagues previously ascertained, were from a cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
Now, they have discovered, through proteomic analysis, that one of those purported cave bear bones, and several other retouchers, were actually made from the bones of cave lions (Panthera spelaea).
The researchers made a careful study of these bones, and found that they had been deliberately shaped in such a way that they could be used as tools. In fact, the researchers were able to ascertain that all four tools were crafted from the same cave lion tibia.
Indeed, two of the tools even fit together perfectly.
“The basal end has been intentionally shaped by bifacial retouching, resulting in a bevel form, contrasting with what appears to be a shattered splinter from a blow to the apical part of the blank,” they write in their paper. “This bone fragment could have functioned as an intermediate bone tool, such as a chisel.”
This bone also shows signs of polishing, from repeated handling. The pattern of the polishing is suggestive of the manner in which the bone was handled, but it’s impossible to tell precisely what it was used for, before it was repurposed as a retoucher. The refitted tibia, however, shows just how intentional the process was, and indicates the level of care with which Neanderthals crafted their tools.
We can’t know, based on the available evidence, exactly how the inhabitants of the cave came by the lion bones – whether the lion was scavenged or hunted.
Certainly the two species must have had an uneasy coexistence and complicated relationship. Whether hunted or scavenged, however, the use of the skeleton suggests a high degree of adaptability and a powerful understanding of the material properties of the bones involved.
“The discovery at Scladina of bone retouchers crafted from cave lion remains represents an extraordinary and unparalleled finding within the Paleolithic archaeological record. It not only demonstrates the Neanderthals’ capacity to selectively exploit available resources, including those derived from large carnivores, but also reflects their ability to transform such remains into multifunctional tools following a structured operational sequence,” the researchers write.
“Beyond their rarity, these artifacts prompt a reevaluation of Neanderthal interactions with large carnivores, emphasizing that these animals were not merely ecological competitors but could also serve practical and possibly symbolic purposes in Neanderthal lifeways.”
The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.
