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Prehistoric bone tool ‘factory’ of 1.5 million years ago revealed
5 March 2025
A new study, involving Renata Peters (UCL Institute of Archaeology) and Ignacio de la Torre (CSIC), of prehistoric bone tools has revealed that human ancestors were likely capable of more advanced abstract reasoning much earlier.
The paper, published in Nature, describes a collection of 27 now-fossilised bones that had been shaped into hand tools 1.5 million years ago by human ancestors.
The tools were discovered in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, a site renowned for its long history of important archaeological discoveries revealing the origins of humans. It is the earliest substantial collection of tools made from bone ever found, revealing that they were being systematically produced one million years earlier than archaeologists once thought.
Hominins (early human ancestors who could walk upright) had been making tools out of stone in some capacity for at least a million years, but there has been scant evidence of widespread toolmaking out of bones before about 500,000 years ago. The hominins who shaped the recently-discovered bone tools did so in a manner similar to how they made tools out of stone, by ‘knapping’ - chipping away small flakes to create sharp edges.
This transfer of techniques from one medium to another shows that the hominins who made the bone tools had an advanced understanding of toolmaking, and that they could adapt their techniques to different materials, a significant intellectual leap. It could indicate that human ancestors at that time possessed a greater level of cognitive skills and brain development than scientists thought.
The very earliest stone tools come from the “Oldowan” age which stretched from about 2.7 million years ago to 1.5 million years ago. The bone tools reported in this study were from the time that the ancient human ancestors were progressing into the “Acheulean” age which began as far back as about 1.7 million years ago.
It is unclear which species of human ancestor crafted the tools. No hominin remains were found alongside the collection of bone artefacts, though it’s known that, at the time, our human ancestor Homo erectus and another hominin species known as Paranthropus boisei were inhabitants of the region.
Because these tools were such an unexpected discovery, the researchers hope that their findings will prompt archaeologists to re-examine bone discoveries around the world in case other evidence of bone tools has been missed.
This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC).
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Image credit: CSIC
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