Bones.
There’s an amazing archaeological dig that was done in the Eighties and Nineties in a place called Boxgrove in West Sussex. We heard a talk about it once. One of its exciting features were eight piles of stone chips from the manufacture of flint tools showing various levels of skill. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, the speaker thought it was maybe the remains of a school for novice flint nappers.
Og’s College of Bang Rocks.
According to a BBC article Uncle B sent me a link to, they’ve re-examined some of the artefacts from the site and they’ve decided the bone tools they found are the oldest known bone tools in Europe.
A shinbone they found is the oldest human remains ever found, at 500,000 years, and belonged to a kind of human that was ancestor to both modern humans and Neanderthals. Whoa.
Scroll down and look at the patchwork rock. Some poor grad student had to take all those chunks of rock and put them back together, so they could pour something into the cracks and discover the shape of the tool made from it. Which, irritatingly, the BBC doesn’t show us.
The bone in the picture doesn’t have anything to do with it, though. It’s just a mammoth bone I nicked off Wikimedia.
Posted: August 12th, 2020 under plague.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 12, 2020, 8:01 pm
The BBC article was confusing, though. It seems to imply a hunting party killed a horse, and then eight people stood around flaking flints to make knives to cut it up…? And then one of the horse’s bones was made into a well-used tool, and that was found on the site, too…?
They tease a book about it, but Amazon hasn’t got it.
Comment from durnedyankee
Time: August 13, 2020, 12:35 am
How disappointing.
That’s not the shin of my ‘nuncle Tim that Old Troll was gnawing?
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: August 13, 2020, 12:36 pm
Wow! Was the site anywhere near Piltdown?
Comment from weasel again
Time: August 13, 2020, 3:53 pm
Same county, but opposite ends. So, close by American standards but not by British standards.
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