Ancient hominins needed the right stone tools to butcher their meals, a long-lived technique of food preparation that helped our ancestors’ bellies stay full. A 430,000-year-old set of stone tools found in Greece shows just how sophisticated meat-cutting was in the Middle Pleistocene.
A new study published in PLOS One details the discovery of stone tools at Marathousa 1, located in the Megalopolis Basin of the Peloponnese region, and is among Greece's oldest archaeological sites. The site also contained remains of the extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), implying that the hominins who once lived there had used the tools for butchery.
The World's First Butchers
Meat-cutting has been a mainstay of the human skill set for over 2 million years. Evidence suggests that early hominins used simple stone tools to carve smaller slices of meat from animal carcasses as early as 2.5 million years ago. Research has even proposed that the ability to butcher meat may have caused early humans to evolve smaller teeth and jaws than their chimpanzee relatives, who could easily gnaw on tough foods.
The tools of the early Stone Age — part of the Oldowan archaeological industry — were simpler than later tools, but they still got the job done; hominin toolmakers often used a hammerstone to strike and chip flakes off another stone. The sharpened edge of this stone would turn it into a “chopper,” able to cut, scrape, and butcher animals.
The next era of toolmaking emerged around 1.7 million years ago when the Acheulean archaeological industry began to replace Oldowan tools. Acheulean tools were known for more refined hand axes that had a pear or teardrop shape and were better at butchering wild game. The Acheulean industry would go on to endure for 1.5 million years, ending somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand years ago.
Read More: 20,000-Year-Old Whale Bone Tools Discovered in Europe Considered World’s Oldest
Preparing an Elephantine Meal
Researchers involved with the new study examined the stone tools from Marathousa 1 with the hopes of learning what their appearance could convey about human behavior in southern Europe during the Middle Pleistocene.
“We wanted to find out how Middle Pleistocene hominins made their tools and organized the production. We were also interested in how the resource-rich environment of the Megalopolis Basin — with abundant water, raw materials, and animals — influenced their behavior,” said first author Dalila De Caro, a doctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen’s Department of Palaeoanthropology, in a statement.
The researchers noticed cutmarks and percussion damage on the elephant bones found alongside the tools, showing them how humans in the area exploited megafauna.
To understand how these stone tools were made, the researchers recreated the manufacturing process that would have been used 430,000 years ago at the site. They determined that the tools were mostly made of local radiolarite, a hard sedimentary rock capable of creating lithic flakes and abundant in the resource-rich environment of the Megalopolis Basin. Other small tools were made of limestone, flint, and quartz.
The Techniques of Toolmaking
One of the primary objectives of the study was to examine two toolmaking techniques: freehand and bipolar knapping. Striking stones with the freehand method created small, sharp-edged flakes, whereas the bipolar method was particularly useful for producing small tools from small cores and opening rounded pebbles that lacked convenient angles to strike. Bipolar knapping was distinct for its use of anvils — a core was rested on a platform so that it would be easier to strike flakes off.
Although the tools were small, the authors state that this is not synonymous with a lack of refinement.
“Our findings clearly show that small tools are not a sign of simplistic technology — on the contrary, they reflect a well-thought-out adaptation to the requirements of the respective environment,” said last author Vangelis Tourloukis from the Universities of Tübingen and Ioannina.
The stone tools at Marathousa 1 were perfect for making a meal out of elephants and other animals — they prove the resourcefulness of ancient humans, who knew how to take full advantage of the materials around them.
Read More: Ancient Temple Ruins Shed Light on Life of Tiwanaku, a Thriving Pre-Inca Civilization
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
The University of Missouri. Oldowan and Acheulean Stone Tools
Jack Knudson is an assistant editor at Discover with a strong interest in environmental science and history. Before joining Discover in 2023, he studied journalism at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University and previously interned at Recycling Today magazine.
