The Neandertal bone industry at Chagyrskaya cave, Altai Region, Russia

Abstract

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.

Animals for Tools: The Origin and Development of Bone Technologies in China

“…Such criteria would allow zooarchaeologists and taphonomists to quickly identify faunal remains that should be subjected to a thorough technological analysis. Second, and in parallel with the first axis, more usewear studies, both experimental and archaeological, should be undertaken to establish the activities in which these tools served a purpose (e.g., Shipman and Rose, 1983;Baumann et al, 2020;Mateo-Lomba et al, 2020). The development of use-wear method in China, in particular, would allow archaeologists to move away from typological approaches when dealing with expedient tools (e.g., An, 2001).…”

“…Furthermore, the archaeological record attests to a noticeable increase in the diversity of expedient bone tool morphology and of the use-wear development on them, possibly reflecting an expansion in the behavioral spectrum for which they were used (Rosell et al, 2011;Julien et al, 2015;Di Buduo et al, 2020;Bonhof and van Kolfschoten, 2021). From the MIS9 onward, the use of expedient tools becomes a lasting aspect of Pleistocene technological systems alongside the multiple innovations that define the third and fourth tipping points (e.g., Daujeard, 2007;Burke and d'Errico, 2008;Verna and d'Errico, 2011;Mallye et al, 2012;Tartar, 2012;Abrams et al, 2014;Daujeard et al, 2018;Yeshurun et al, 2018;Baumann et al, 2020;Hallett et al, 2021).…”

A 115,000-year-old expedient bone technology at Lingjing, Henan, China

“…When osseous technology is concerned, and leaving aside bone retouchers, which have received much attention [e.g., 31-34, 36-39, 106-108 and references therein], the identification of expedient bone tools still heavily relies on the presence of use wear associated with flaking scars on both archaeological [42,[53][54][55] and experimental specimens [56], accidental fracture and crushing of the working edges and surfaces [51,52,109], or a combination of these factors [6,7,9,110]. Faunal remains bearing only flake scars, however, have been somewhat overlooked.…”

“…Finally, we do not find in our experimental material the high prevalence of long bone fragments observed in the PBT sample with numerous contiguous and interspersed series of flake scars. Considering the sedimentary context, the rarity of carnivore modifications on all examined samples and the fact that experimental deliberate flaking of bone fragments of the same type and size produce flake scars comparable to those observed on the archeological specimens [54,[157][158][159], we must conclude that a subsample of PBT and RCS should be interpreted as composed by bone fragments that were deliberately modified through percussion by Lingjing hominins. The most probable goal of this behaviour was that of using the resulting retouched bone fragments as tools.…”

“…Other instances of expedient bone tools from this region are reported in the literature, e.g., at Xujiayao [48], Zhoukoudian Upper Cave [49], and Yonggul Cave [50], but would require further assessment with modern methods to verify their chronology and the anthropogenic nature of the modifications. It has been proposed that these tools were used for cutting soft animal tissues, vegetal fibers, or as wedges for splitting wood, antler and bone [42,[51][52][53][54][55][56].…”