A RARE cache of wooden tools created by Neanderthals suggests our cousins knew how to make implements with fire and used them to dig up plants buried underground for food.
of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism in Florence and her colleagues have excavated a site in Italy known to have been inhabited by Neanderthals, called Poggetti Vecchi. They found 58 wooden artefacts mixed in with stone tools and animal bones.
“Historical wooden tools are very rarely found,” says Aranguren. They normally rot away.
Advertisement
Most of the wooden artefacts are made of , and 39 are clearly tools: sticks about 1 metre long, with a point at one end and a rounded “handle” at the other. Radiometric dating shows they are at least 171,000 years old.
“The most important finding is that they have been partially charred,” says Aranguren. The Neanderthals probably did this to remove twigs and the outer bark from the tough boxwood. When her team tried to make similar sticks out of boxwood, they could only do it using fire.
That Neanderthals used fire at this time is “not surprising”, says of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “The archaeological record says fire use became common… from 300,000 to 400,000 years ago,” he says. The evidence for earlier fire use is much more sporadic.
However, it isn’t clear whether they could create fire at will. In 2016, Roebroeks and his colleagues pointed out that . This compound may have been used as a pigment, but it is also an effective firestarter. Nobody knows for sure what Neanderthals used it for, he says.
The wooden tools found at Poggetti Vecchi are similar to “digging sticks”, which some hunter-gatherers still use today. “Digging sticks are multi-purpose tools,” says Aranguren. “They were used for gathering plants like tubers and roots, but also for hunting small game.”
Finding digging sticks is further evidence that Neanderthals ate lots of plants. “We have very little evidence of the plant component of Neanderthal and other hominin diets,” says Roebroeks. “They don’t fossilise as well as the remains of the animal part.”
Nevertheless, traces of plant material on Neanderthals’ teeth suggest they played a key role in their diets. Buried tubers may have helped them survive cold winters. “To get tubers you need digging sticks,” says Roebroeks, “and here is the smoking gun.”
PNAS
This article appeared in print under the headline “Neanderthals used fire to make tools”
