Ancient toolmakers enjoyed the aesthetics of their work

Image Credits: Gemini For decades, the narrative was clear: Neanderthals were crude toolmakers who relied on luck and imitation. Any refined artifact found in their layers must have been traded, stolen, or misplaced by modern humans. That story is collapsing. New dating methods and microscopic analysis now show that many “impossible” tools were made by Neanderthal hands tens of thousands of years before our species arrived.

ARM's Peter Hodges for a conversation about toolmaking for game developers and improved lighting tech for mobile games.

Forget the old stereotype of the Neanderthal brute. Decades of archaeological discoveries have shown that Neanderthals were capable toolmakers with complex technologies and behaviors once thought unique to Homo sapiens. But sometimes, the evidence is very easy to miss. Take, for instance, a rock shelter in Romania’s Eastern Carpathians. Archaeologists now examined more than 10,000 animal-bone fragments and found 83 which seemed to have been used as tools. They suggest that prehistoric people turned ordinary scraps of bone into tools for maintaining stone implements, working hides and possibly processing plants. But they also looked like regular pieces of bone. The Neanderthal Toolkit The site, called Abri 122/1200, lies in the Vârghiș Gorges of central Romania, amid the limestone landscapes of the Eastern Carpathians. Archaeologists know this region is interesting. They’ve excavated it for decades, recovering Middle Paleolithic stone tools and the fragmented remains of animals including large herbivores. Dating indicates that people occupied the site during several phases of Paleolithic, extending from roughly 230,000 years ago into much later periods. The assemblage contains more than 1,000 stone artifacts made mostly from locally available quartzite, basalt and lydite or argillite. Researchers have identified some evidence of Levallois technology at the site...