LION · L'industrie oubliée de Néandertal - The forgotten industry of Neanderthal

L'industrie oubliée de Néandertal - The forgotten industry of Neanderthal

In Western Europe, the arrival of Anatomically Modern Human (Sapiens) and the disappearance of the last Neandertals, around 40,000 years BP, marked the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition. Significant changes occurred in the material cultures. Anatomically Modern Human brought with him a great diversity of production attesting new practices. Bone material became widely used for manufacturing objects such as ornaments, figurines or weapons, whose functional and social specialisation was clearly expressed through a thorough shaping, mostly done by scraping or abrasion. This has resulted in types that are today intelligible to us. In contrast, the absence of bone objects shaped in the same way in the Middle Palaeolithic led to think that Neanderthal did not produce bone industry and that this deficiency was probably due to a cognitive difference between species. For a long time, the “retouchers”, used in lithic knapping, were the only Neanderthal bone tools frequently reported. Collected among butchery remains, unshaped and discarded in situ after a short-term use, they gave a picture of a poorly mastered and opportunistic use of bone. Other types of tool were identified from time to time, but the rarity of specimens, their minimal shaping, often done by percussion as for lithic tools, and the difficulty of determining their function, reinforced the idea that Neanderthal did not understand the specificities of the bone material. The recent discovery of more than one thousand bone tools at the Neanderthal site of Chagyrskaya cave in Siberia, by means of a technological and use-wear analysis applied to faunal remains, allowed to question this assertion. The number of tools, their diversity and recurrence are characteristic of an industry and show that these Siberian Neanderthals made a daily use of bone to meet specific needs. Nevertheless, we did not know if this isolated discovery was a regional particularity or if it could be a more general phenomenon, disregarded due to the lack of an adequate conceptual and methodological frameworks. To test these hypotheses, we searched, with the same analytical grid as applied at Chagyrskaya cave, for bone tools in Neanderthal sites located in Western Europe, where the first Neanderthal bone tools were mentioned more than a century ago.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union