For a long time, the rich bone industries of the Upper Palaeolithic were opposed to the opportunistic Neandertalian bone tools among which the bone retoucher was the most common type. The recent finding of a few shaped bone tools into Mousterian contexts has been taken as an emergence of a "modern behaviour". However, this outlook is based on biased corpuses. On one side, the large number of unshaped bone tools recently discovered in Upper Palaeolithic assemblages leads us to reconsider what a bone industry can be. On the other side, the increasing discoveries of bone tools in more ancient contexts indicates that this type of production is not strictly linked to Homo sapiens. Chagyrskaya cave, located in the Siberian Altai, brings us the opportunity to discuss this question. Dated around 50 000 years BP, the site yielded a local facies of Mousterian lithic industry associated to several Neandertalian remains. A technological and functional analysis of the faunal remains reveal more than one thousand bone tools. Most are retouchers, but a significant part belongs to other morpho-functional categories: intermediate tools, retouched tools and tools with a smoothed end. Even though these tools were mainly manufactured by direct percussion, their number and the recurrence of their morphological and traceological features lead us to consider them as a true bone industry. Far from the Homo sapiens standards, this industry has its own coherence that needs now to be understood.

Did Neanderthal produce a bone industry? The recent discovery of a large bone tool assemblage at the Neanderthal site of Chagyrskaya (Altai, Siberia, Russia) and the increasing discoveries of isolated finds of bone tools in various Mousterian sites across Eurasia stimulate the debate. Assuming that the isolate finds may be the tip of the iceberg and that the Siberian occurrence did not result from a local adaptation of easternmost Neanderthals, we looked for evidence of a similar industry in the Western side of their spread area. We assessed the bone tool potential of the Quina bone-bed level currently under excavation at chez Pinaud site (Jonzac, Charente-Maritime, France) and found as many bone tools as flint ones: not only the well-known retouchers but also beveled tools, retouched artifacts and a smooth-ended rib. Their diversity opens a window on a range of activities not expected in a butchering site and not documented by the flint tools, all involved in the carcass processing. The re-use of 20% of the bone blanks, which are mainly from large ungulates among faunal remains largely dominated by reindeer, raises the question of blank procurement and management. From the Altai to the Atlantic shore, through a multitude of sites where only a few objects have been reported so far, evidence of a Neanderthal bone industry is emerging which provides new insights on Middle Paleolithic subsistence strategies.

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In the course of the Upper Paleolithic, antler debitage techniques seem to have followed a linear evolution. The earliest one, fracturing by cleaving, appeared during the Aurignacian and is considered by some specialists to be ineffective. According to them, it was not until the invention of the groove and splinter technique during the Gravettian that antler debitage became efficient. Nonetheless, during the Solutrean, fracturing once again became the most common technique, but by splitting. Based on a study of 102 Solutrean pressure tools and experimentations, we reach the conclusion that splitting is a very effective technique that can produce blanks with the same qualities as those made by the groove and splinter technique. The splitting technique was nonetheless excluded in previous studies. We explore the reasons for this and the particularities of the different antler debitage techniques evidenced in the Western Upper Paleolithic.

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