Archaeologists have dug up a collection of mass-produced bone tools, the earliest ever discovered, suggesting that hominins systematically made tools out of bone around 1 million years earlier than previously thought. Described in a Nature study, the collection contains 27 fossilized tools that were fashioned around 1.5 million years ago.
According to the archaeologists, this tool “factory” indicates that hominins exhibited advanced abstract thought early on in their history.
“The tools show evidence that their creators carefully worked the bones, chipping off flakes to create useful shapes,” said Renata F. Peters, an archaeologist at University College London who was involved in the discovery, according to a press release. “We were excited to find these bone tools from such an early timeframe. It means that human ancestors were capable of transferring skills from stone to bone, a level of complex cognition that we haven’t seen elsewhere for another million years.”
