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.
August 12, 2020 — 7:59 pm
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