Now that we’ve recently learned Neanderthals may have been just as intelligent as Homo sapiens, it suddenly makes a lot of sense that a new study found they were carrying around sophisticated tool kits, including tools made from rhinoceros teeth.
According to research published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Neanderthals in what is now France and Spain hunted rhinos for food roughly 100,000 years ago, and they weren’t carving them up for their meat alone. They were extracting rhino teeth, particularly the molars, and recycling them into multipurpose tools to be used for shaping stone, processing hide, and manipulating plant fibers.
The researchers examined 281 fossilized rhino teeth found in a Paleolithic cave site, including El Castillo Cave and Pech-de-l’Azé II. A lot of the teeth had grooves, fractures, or scrape marks, or some combination of them, that didn’t come from a rhino’s natural chewing patterns. They had to have come from somewhere, so the researchers figured the molars must’ve been used as some kind of tool in the day-to-day life of a Neanderthal.
To test out this theory, the researchers did some Neanderthal cosplay. Using rhino teeth provided by French zoos, the researchers used the tools the way Neanderthals would and found that they worked quite well as a hammer and an anvil for shaping stone tools. The more they use them the way these ancient people used to, the more the researchers found that the rhino teeth started to develop the aforementioned signs of wear and tear that appear on the ancient rhino molars.
Earlier, I mentioned that a recent discovery from a separate team of researchers suggests that the Neanderthals were much more intelligent than previously thought, a real blow to anyone who has ever referred to a stupid person in their life as a Neanderthal. This study further supports that idea. Pair that with all the other evidence we have that indicate that Neanderthals were much more complex than once thought, like how they buried their dead in created art, often engaging in complex symbolic thought, a huge string of recent scientific discoveries about these ancient people are rapidly suggesting that the reason they eventually faded away and Homo sapiens remained, eventually turning into us, has more to do with their lack of sociability than it does their intelligence.
They weren’t dummies who were smashing random objects together. They were creating things that helped create other things. That sounds a lot like us.
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