Some 480,000 years ago, a group of 30 to 40 early hominins met at a rocky gravel pit in what is now southern England for a sumptuous feast. As detailed in a statement, the crowd—equipped with stone hammers and sharpened flint hand axes—gathered around the carcass of a large female horse and started breaking it down, stripping the creature of every ounce of flesh, harvesting its internal organs and even cracking its bones to suck out the fatty marrow.

Now, reports Paul Rincon for BBC News, archaeologists have identified the millennia-old bone tools crafted out of the horse’s remains as the oldest ever found in Europe. Excavations at Boxgrove, a Middle Pleistocene site in West Sussex, unearthed the instruments in the 1980s and ’90s.

Boxgrove’s main claim to fame is a handful of bones thought to be the earliest hominin remains found in England. The remains belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominin species that may have been an ancestor of modern humans.

Per the Conversation, the ancient hominins active at Boxgrove needed bone hammers to make flint blades, as well as other stone tools discovered at the site. Some of the butchered horse’s knee and leg bones bear signs of such use. “They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape.”

“Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence that early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated,” she says in the statement.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/europes-earliest-bone-tools-hint-early-hominin-sophistication-180975564/

PermeateFree said:

Some 480,000 years ago, a group of 30 to 40 early hominins met at a rocky gravel pit in what is now southern England for a sumptuous feast. As detailed in a statement, the crowd—equipped with stone hammers and sharpened flint hand axes—gathered around the carcass of a large female horse and started breaking it down, stripping the creature of every ounce of flesh, harvesting its internal organs and even cracking its bones to suck out the fatty marrow.

Now, reports Paul Rincon for BBC News, archaeologists have identified the millennia-old bone tools crafted out of the horse’s remains as the oldest ever found in Europe. Excavations at Boxgrove, a Middle Pleistocene site in West Sussex, unearthed the instruments in the 1980s and ’90s.

Boxgrove’s main claim to fame is a handful of bones thought to be the earliest hominin remains found in England. The remains belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominin species that may have been an ancestor of modern humans.

Per the Conversation, the ancient hominins active at Boxgrove needed bone hammers to make flint blades, as well as other stone tools discovered at the site. Some of the butchered horse’s knee and leg bones bear signs of such use. “They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape.”

“Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence that early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated,” she says in the statement.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/europes-earliest-bone-tools-hint-early-hominin-sophistication-180975564/

I am constantly surprised at how bone tools are so much more recent than stone tools. I would have expected earlier.

> The remains belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominin species that may have been an ancestor of modern humans.

Change “may have been” to “is”.

mollwollfumble said:

PermeateFree said:

Some 480,000 years ago, a group of 30 to 40 early hominins met at a rocky gravel pit in what is now southern England for a sumptuous feast. As detailed in a statement, the crowd—equipped with stone hammers and sharpened flint hand axes—gathered around the carcass of a large female horse and started breaking it down, stripping the creature of every ounce of flesh, harvesting its internal organs and even cracking its bones to suck out the fatty marrow.

Now, reports Paul Rincon for BBC News, archaeologists have identified the millennia-old bone tools crafted out of the horse’s remains as the oldest ever found in Europe. Excavations at Boxgrove, a Middle Pleistocene site in West Sussex, unearthed the instruments in the 1980s and ’90s.

Boxgrove’s main claim to fame is a handful of bones thought to be the earliest hominin remains found in England. The remains belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominin species that may have been an ancestor of modern humans.

Per the Conversation, the ancient hominins active at Boxgrove needed bone hammers to make flint blades, as well as other stone tools discovered at the site. Some of the butchered horse’s knee and leg bones bear signs of such use. “They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape.”

“Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence that early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated,” she says in the statement.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/europes-earliest-bone-tools-hint-early-hominin-sophistication-180975564/

I am constantly surprised at how bone tools are so much more recent than stone tools. I would have expected earlier.

> The remains belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominin species that may have been an ancestor of modern humans.

Change “may have been” to “is”.

Change “is” to “currently believed to have been”

sibeen said:

Senior sprog has been making lemonade. The tree out the back is still chockers with fruit and the one out the front isn’t far off.