University Of Tübingen And Senckenberg Center Researching On Findings Of Schöningen
Small chips of flint, dropped while cutting tools were resharpened 300,000 years ago, provide evidence of how ancient humans worked on wood. The pieces were discovered at the Old Palaeolithic site in Schöningen, Lower Saxony. The research work on the unusually old waste was carried out by an interdisciplinary team led by the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) in Tübingen. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports .
The examined 57 small stone artefacts and three bone tools for resharpening stone tools were discovered around the skeleton of a Eurasian forest elephant that died on the shore of a lake around 300,000 years ago. “With these finds, among other things, we can prove that people stayed near the elephant carcass, probably of the species Homo heidelbergensis or early Neanderthals,” says Dr. Jordi Serangeli, the local director of the archaeological excavation in Schöningen. “This site is about two meters below the famous site of the world’s oldest spears,” he adds.
conclusions about past lifestyles
Tübingen researcher Flavia Venditti, the study’s first author, says Stone Age stories are mainly known through studying the objects worked by our ancestors. “One tends to think that large tools like knives, scrapers and points are more important than simple chips, especially when they are small and really just leftovers from processing. But even microscopic splinters can tell us a lot about the way our ancestors lived in the context of the whole finding,” she says.
Most of the chips examined are less than a centimeter, reports Venditti. “Through a multidisciplinary approach that included technological and spatial analysis, the study of signs of wear and debris, and methods of experimental archaeology, we were able to make the stone fragments speak, so to speak,” says the scientist. “The splinters come from knife-like tools, they were created when resharpening.” They were left behind while people took their tools back with them.
This is how the scene could have played out when people discovered the carcass of the elephant 300,000 years ago in today’s Schöningen. They brought their tools with them.
Evidence of working wood
Fifteen pieces showed signs of wear, such as typically occur when fresh wood is processed. “Microscopically small pieces of wood also stuck to the former working edges of the tools,” says Venditti. Eventually, marks on a sharp-edged, natural flint fragment proved that humans used it to carve fresh animal tissue. “It’s likely that flint was used when cutting up the elephant,” she says.
Venditti summarizes that these results are further proof of the combined use of stone, bone and plant technologies 300,000 years ago, as has already been documented several times in Schöningen. The Tübingen professor Nicholas Conard and head of the Schöningen research project emphasizes: “This study shows how detailed analyzes of signs of use and micro-remains can also provide information on small stone artefacts that are often not given much attention. It is the first time that such comprehensive results are presented. The prerequisite, however, is that the stone artefacts are treated with the utmost care from excavation to examination.”
The archaeological excavation at the Paleolithic sites in Schöningen and the scientific investigation are a long-term project of the University of Tübingen in cooperation with the Senckenberg Society for Natural Research and the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation. The project is financed by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture in Hanover.