Before Tools: How Neanderthals Used Rhino Teeth, Vulture Bones and Deer Antlers

SPEAKER_02 0:00 In the depths of some ancient Neanderthal caves in Europe, archaeologists have found rhino teeth, lots of them, all with a strange pattern. No one could explain what caused the strange markings on the teeth until now. In experiments using modern rhino teeth, a group of researchers have made the most incredible discovery.

SPEAKER_00 0:20 I mean, it was something that I have never seen before.

SPEAKER_02 0:24 Neanderthals were using these teeth as tools. I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before, the podcast that charts the history of everyday life.

SPEAKER_01 0:33 And I'm Matt, and today we're talking about the many ways that humans, Neanderthals included, have repurposed the bones and bodies of animals to remake the world around them.

SPEAKER_02 0:45 Yeah, we're gonna discuss this amazing new finding with the help of one of the lead researchers actually on the project, uh Alithia Sansroyo, but also some other ingenious tools that Neanderthals fashioned out of animals. They really did use every part of the animal body.

SPEAKER_01 1:01 Yeah, it's it's quite funny, isn't it? Like humans have squishy fingers and we're not that strong really, and yet we've built these incredible civilizations and machines and technologies. And it's all because we're able to fashion and create tools. But before we had Stanley hammers and power drills, our tools looked very different.

SPEAKER_02 1:26 Yeah, and I don't know about you, but you I kind of forget that uh tool use isn't strictly a Homo sapien thing. You know, Neanderthals were actually really adept at using tools. Um we've got antlers that they were using, vulture bones as well. We'll be discussing both of those. But first let's look at these rhino teeth.

SPEAKER_01 1:44 Yeah, so um Alythea Sans Royo and her team were examining the remains from a middle Paleolithic site in France. And this is a a cave rich in rhinoceros teeth, and all of them have these strange marks on the part of the teeth where you would bite down, and also some odd fractures.

SPEAKER_02 2:11 Yeah, and Alithia's um job, by the way, just to tell you it's very cool, uh she specializes in the chronology of the last Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. And she told me um that the director of the project was looking closely at the damage to the teeth, and um there have been loads of theories over the years as to uh to what caused that damage. But the the director of the project looked at them and thought, actually, this looks like it has to have been caused by anthropogenic activity.

SPEAKER_01 2:42 And by anthropogenic, you mean kind of like human activity, right? Yeah, basically human activity.

SPEAKER_02 2:50 I should have just said that to start with. And and there were um some other sites as well where rhino teeth had been found, and they all have these sort of similar markings that she was examining. There was one in France and also one in China.

SPEAKER_01 3:04 But these rhino teeth aren't the new discovery. So what did archaeologists think made the markings on them up until now?

SPEAKER_02 3:13 Yeah, so obviously the rhino teeth have sort of they've been found and they've been waiting for classification. It's only now that we're starting to like wonder was it was it tools? And there's some good evidence that we'll get onto the evidence to suggest that it probably was, but um there really wasn't a general consensus on on how they were being used up until this point. Some people wondered whether something happened to them after the rhinos had died to make the marks, maybe erosion or where just from like water, wind, sediment compaction, that kind of thing, or literally just damage that was caused during the fossilization process, because you know, these teeth are thousands of years old, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:54 Yeah, that's that's true. I guess it's only um recently it sounds that you can actually kind of identify that these markings were deliberate by humans, but how did they even kind of rule those things out? Well, uh they did a test.

SPEAKER_00 4:10 First of all, we developed these archaeological experiments. We obtained 15 rhinoceros teeth from extant animals, from the white rhinoceros.

SPEAKER_02 4:21 Just quickly, extant means not extinct, just in case you're wondering.

SPEAKER_00 4:25 Is the only is the species alive today in in some parts of Africa? Uh, and it's very, very similar to the fossil species that we found in the uh archaeological sites.

SPEAKER_01 4:37 Okay, so I've learnt a new word, and uh and they so what they did, they recreated what the Neanderthals would have been doing with the teeth to replicate the markings, yeah?

SPEAKER_02 4:51 Yeah, they tried like um things that Neanderthals would have typically done if they were trying to sharpen a stone tool, for instance. This is called retouching, and they also used the teeth um as like anvils, um, you know uh I guess like a chopping board almost to cut vegetable fibres and and other things like leather. So they would, yeah, the tooth would be like the base, and then they would get a a stone tool which may have been used by Neanderthals and started chopping the vegetables up on it.

SPEAKER_01 5:25 Oh, okay. So they think that this was a potential kind of way that it caused those markings actually to bash it with another tool in in the use of like producing kind of materials or food and things. Could you explain kind of what would they be retouching?

SPEAKER_02 5:45 Uh yeah, so retouching basically to make a stone tool, Neanderthals had to smash pieces off a rock um like flint until it formed a sharp edge. And you know, that might uh be so that they could create something like a scraper, which they could use to scrape things, you know, maybe scrape meat off bones or clean animal hides so they can make some clothing or work wood, that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 6:09 And sometimes they'd need to sharpen those tools like we do or some of us do with knives today. Yeah, I just have a kitchen full of blunt knives. Me too. I keep thinking I need to get some sharpening, like a whetstone or something.

SPEAKER_02 6:23 But just get a rhino tooth. That might be the way. Yeah. Massively, hugely accessible, as as we know. Um, and I'm sure you're capable of hunting rhinos. Um but no, yeah, the rhino, the rhino tooth would come in for the sharpening process. Um, and they could sort of be used to touch up the rough edges and and yeah, make them make them work a bit better.

SPEAKER_01 6:46 I'm trying to also imagine a rhino tooth as an anvil. Um, because I'm imagining obviously like a modern anvil. Like, were these tiny? You you compared them kind of to more like a chopping board. I'm not really sure how big a rhino tooth is in in all seriousness.

SPEAKER_02 7:04 Yeah, I don't know. Like for me, I it just didn't come to mind that a rhino tooth could be big because I'm I'm just thinking about our teeth. But I actually asked Alithia because this really surprised me, and this is what she said.

SPEAKER_00 7:18 So it's it's uh like a hand.

SPEAKER_02 7:20 Wow, so so it's it's it's just bigger, it's bigger than your grip of your hand then.

SPEAKER_00 7:25 Yeah, so you can grip it um in in a comfortable way, but um it's more or less like your hand. So it's is it's very big, yeah. And it's quite heavy.

SPEAKER_02 7:36 Yeah, so rhino teeth are absolutely massive and quite flat. And we're talking about something the size of your hand, um, so they make quite a good surface for smashing against.

SPEAKER_01 7:48 It's quite surprising to me that rhinos, you know, they're big, they're sturdy. I imagine they're quite hard to hunt. I've never tried myself. Um you may be doing soon. Well, you said I might be good at it, so uh just a disclaimer I'm not going to hunt rhinos after this episode. No, I think they might be endangered. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um it but it's just surprising to me that these would be kind of regular prey for Neanderthals, or maybe did they collect these after they died, or yeah, Alithia um spoke to me about this as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:28 Yeah, so this is a very good question because we uh know that Neanderthals hunted uh rhinoceros because we have evidences about uh this activity in several Middle Paleolithic sites. There are works uh that uh identified cut marks or even bone tools on rhinoceros bones. So we know that this was a not very common prey, but it's not surprising. They could hunt these prey and even larger preys. But we don't know very well uh how they do it because of course to hunt a rhinoceros is not as easy as a medium-sized ungulate like a deer. Probably this activity will need to involve several individuals and a good knowledge of the environment and the um activities with the rhinoceros. So we don't know if Neanderthals hunted these rhinoceros and later they used their teeth, or maybe these animals were dead, were already dead, and they scavenged these animals and reuse parts of their carcasses for a specific purposes like bone tools.

SPEAKER_02 9:48 Quite impressive, right, if they were killing rhinos. And you can imagine perhaps if they killed like a woolly rhino, they may have used its hide to keep them warm in the depths of winter, um, and then obviously its tooth as a tool and various other things, and kind of using the whole animal and getting as much out of it as possible.

SPEAKER_00 10:08 We know that Neanderthals uh use everything in the animal carcasses, not only meat, of course, skin and even the marrow inside the bones.

SPEAKER_01 10:20 Yeah, so it's it's interesting because through this podcast I'm learning more and more about Neanderthals. And one of the things that I probably erroneously thought about them was that the benefit that Homo sapiens had was that they were better with kind of weapons and tools and they could throw spears fervor and things like that because of their uh biological kind of makeup. But if they were hunting rhinos, I I I don't think they were doing that by hand. And we're we're learning that we're also they were producing tools.

SPEAKER_02 10:56 That would be a sight to watch in that hunting a rhino by hand.

SPEAKER_01 11:02 I mean, I don't think they'd be extinct now if they could do that. I think they would be the apex predator of the world. Giant beasts, yeah. Um but but why would they use teeth in this way? Like, you know, they've had to hunt a rhino, presumably they use the other parts of the rhino, as we uh we we saw in that clip. But um why would they go to the effort to use the teeth instead of stone tools? You you said they were literally using these teeth to sharpen their stone tools. So they had them, weren't they better?

SPEAKER_02 11:38 Yeah, I wondered this as well. And Alithia says rhino teeth actually offer a particular advantage over stone tools.

SPEAKER_00 11:45 I don't know if people know that teeth are a super hard material, so of course flint and quartz, which is the raw material that normal line use with the lithic tools, of course, is very hard, but also teeth are very very hard, and specifically rhinoceros teeth have a a thicker uh enamel and a specific structure which probably uh were more suitable for these type of activities.

SPEAKER_01 12:16 It sounds like these teeth were incredibly strong actually, um which I guess makes sense from what rhinos are like. Um this tells us quite a lot then about Neanderthal tool use that it's it's possible that they used a lot more than we've previously given them credit for, as I said earlier.

SPEAKER_00 12:37 This is amplifying the range of raw materials that humans and our ancestors could use in in their day by day, you know.

SPEAKER_01 12:49 Uh so on that note, let's discuss some of the other tools they used then.

SPEAKER_02 12:54 Yeah, Alithia mentioned that Neanderthals also used deer antlers as as tools, and there's evidence of this at sites like Gross Grot, which is a cave in Germany, and that dates back to around three to four hundred thousand years ago. And it's also possible that Homo Heidelbergensis, which is an earlier human ancestor, may have been using antlers as far back as 500,000 years ago. Um and there's actually evidence of that from Box Grove in in southern England.

SPEAKER_01 13:22 It makes sense, right? Antlers are naturally more kind of springy than bone, for example. So they're presumably less brittle and resistant to breaking.

SPEAKER_02 13:34 Exactly. And rather than using stone-on-stone action to make stone tools, which could be quite imprecise, it was often better to use a deer antler because it was a bit of a lighter touch. They could be a bit more delicate in the, you know, when they're shaping their tools, and also a bit more precise as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:52 And then there's there's digging. The the tines, the the pointy branches that stick out of the antler, they were pretty great at digging holes in the ground. And that might be to find edible roots or for extracting things like flint. So, like for mining, like a pickaxe. Yeah, yeah, basically like early mining, or even they could be used for creating traps, although that's not totally clear. And maybe toilets as well, like digging holes for toilets. Well, this might be a bit more on the sort of conjecture side. Uh, finding prehistoric toilets has been proving kind of hard, but maybe.

SPEAKER_02 14:32 Uh they could have also been used for working wood, like reshaping wooden spears and handles, that sort of thing. The problem is wood rarely survives archaeologically. Um, but you can imagine, you know, antlers would have been the perfect tool for reshaping wood. So it's possible this was part of the widespread use of antlers. And if it was why they were keeping antlers, like the wooden tools was like maybe a primary reason, it's possible there's way more wooden tools, uh, or there were a lot more wooden tools in use hundreds of thousands of years ago than we'll ever know because we just simply can't find them, they've all rotten away. In fact, we'll be speaking to a researcher whose team has found evidence of um wooden tool use in Greece from 430,000 years ago. Um and now this is unusual because again, wooden tools don't last. And this discovery could push back the timeline of human wooden tool use by at least 40,000 years, so it's quite big.

SPEAKER_01 15:31 That's interesting. And actually, this all adds up because some Neanderthal sites contain antlers that show clear wear marks from repeated use rather than kind of butchery. This suggests that they weren't just leftovers from dinner, they were kept as valued tools and they were reused.

SPEAKER_02 15:53 Yeah, it's amazing to think uh that some of humanity's most important stone tools um might have actually been sort of finished up using deer antlers, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 16:02 Yeah. Now, Ollie, one of my favourite examples of how our view of Neanderthals keeps changing involves vultures. Yeah, vultures is one that really surprises me. Yeah. At sites such as the Fumane Cave in Italy, archaeologists noticed something quite curious. That Neanderthals seem to have deliberately selected and processed parts of large birds of prey, and this is particularly vultures and other raptors. What sort of parts of these vultures were they using? Well, they they were using um wing bones, feathers, even talons. And this is what makes it so interesting. The question isn't really whether they were using vulture bones as tools. The bigger question is why were they specifically choosing vultures in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 16:56 Yeah, because I mean they could have used bones from plenty of other animals. I don't imagine I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that vultures have like specifically amazing uh bones that are you know tailored for tool use.

SPEAKER_01 17:08 Well, yes or no. Large bird wing bones are actually hollow and lightweight, so they may have been used as kind of like fine piercing tools or um awls, which are pointed tools used for piercing like hides and leather and even bark and things like that. Like a like a sewing needle. Yeah, kind of, like that, yeah. Um, and also they could be used as containers since they're naturally hollow. Or also it's theorized they could be used as components in more complex tools.

SPEAKER_02 17:43 Uh yeah, I hadn't really thought about this, like combining different uh tool technologies um from the past. So they weren't just making like a wooden tool and and keeping it as wood. They they may have been making something more um composite, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 17:59 Exactly. Now it's it's also important to say that this is very hard to definitively prove, and the evidence is inconclusive here. It is clear that there's strong evidence to suggest that Neanderthals were indeed deliberately selecting and processing the wings of vultures, but it could be that this is for cultural reasons. They might have been using the feathers for something symbolically important. But there is some evidence to suggest that the bones may have been used in a more practical sense as well.

SPEAKER_02 18:30 Yeah, the symbolic thing um makes more sense to me in a way, just because vultures weren't super common around these sites, right? So, you know, they were focusing quite intently on these birds in particular, so they must have been going out deliberately to find vultures uh rather than just grabbing whatever happened to be lying around.

SPEAKER_01 18:51 Yeah, presumably they weren't just, you know, pigeons and seagulls and stuff that they were uh they were using. They were uh specifically targeting vultures for something, and that is selection. And selection tells us something quite important about how Neanderthals must have thought. You know, they appear to have recognised that certain materials had particular properties and a particular value, whether that's symbolic or whether that's practical, that's debated, but they they were seeking out certain creatures for this reason.

SPEAKER_02 19:27 Yeah, and it's quite clear from a previous episode of the podcast that Neanderthals actually had cult, you know, really rich culture burial practices. They um shared a lot of their knowledge potentially, as we discovered from the cave in um the Tinshamath cave in Israel, that sort of modern humans or Homo sapiens learnt from Neanderthals and Neanderthals learnt from humans. So we can see that a cultural value in vulture bones or vulture feathers isn't out of the realms of possibility for Neanderthals. Now we're starting to understand them more and more. But on the topic of other humans' use of these bones, uh it may not be a tool per se, but and maybe maybe a conversation for our music episode with Steve Pritty. But we can't talk about vulture bones without uh mentioning the Hollerfels flute. Um, so this flute was found in the Hollerfels cave in Germany and was made from a vulture radius bone, uh, taking advantage of this sort of hot hollow vulture um bone thing that we were talking about earlier. And it was dated to um some 35,000 years ago. They even theorized that the placement of the holes was tuned to play a scale very close to the modern minor pentatonic scale.

SPEAKER_01 20:40 Yeah, that's amazing, actually. There's a reproduction I've seen of this flute uh that actually is playing sort of our minor, I think E flat pentatonic scale, and it sounds amazing. Um obviously that's produced with that in mind, but I think that the original one they theorized or they saw just from the placement that yeah, it's it's pretty close to what we call a pentatonic scale now. And to be honest, Neanderthals were were just quite proficient at their repurposing of animals for tools. They also used eagle talons, maybe even as jewelry or for status symbols, not just as tools.

SPEAKER_02 21:22 Yeah, and things like animal sinew um for sewing and making bowstrings, that kind of thing, and stomachs and bladders as well, probably, you know, for for maybe water storage or as containers, um and shells as scrapers and also potentially as containers as well. So they were highly advanced. Um, and I I love these sorts of conversations because it just continues our trend of challenging the the whole Neanderthals were less intelligent narrative from the past. Although I do think that we are moving away from that narrative quite distinctly now, at least especially in the sort of last couple of decades.

SPEAKER_01 21:57 Yeah, and uh just just to add on that, I'm pretty sure that that the evidence suggests that they had uh potentially larger brains than Homo sapiens. And we keep saying they, but as we we've spoken about, we are part Neanderthal. So um, so that concludes it for today, I think. Uh, you've been listening to what we did before. I'm Matt.

SPEAKER_02 22:22 And I'm Ollie. Please subscribe to the show, it really helps us out, and let us know what you'd like us to cover in the next one. And we will see you soon.