A team of archaeologists from Germany and the Netherlands has found evidence that Neanderthals were making leather-working bone tools before modern humans.

The team unearthed four Neanderthal tools at two Paleolithic sites in southwest France: the classic Neanderthal cave site Pech-de-l’Aze I and the site of Abri Peyrony.

These 50,000-year-old tools appear very similar to a kind of tool called a lissoir (leather smoother), known from later modern human sites and still in use today by leather workers.

“For now the bone tools from these two sites are one of the better pieces of evidence we have for Neanderthals developing on their own a technology previously associated only with modern humans”, said Dr Shannon McPherron from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who is a second author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“If Neanderthals developed this type of bone tool on their own, it is possible that modern humans then acquired this technology from Neanderthals,” added study lead author Dr Marie Soressi of Leiden University.

“Modern humans seem to have entered Europe with pointed bone tools only, and soon after started to make lissoirs. This is the first possible evidence for transmission from Neanderthals to our direct ancestors.”

Dr Soressi added: “however, we cannot eliminate the possibility that these tools instead indicate that modern humans entered Europe and started impacting Neanderthal behavior earlier than we can currently demonstrate.”

“How widespread this new Neanderthal behavior was is a question that remains. The first three found were fragments less than a few cm long and might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools. It is not something normally looked for in this time period.”

Dr McPherron said: “however, when you put these small fragments together and compare them with finds from later sites, the pattern in them is clear.”

“Then last summer we found a larger, more complete tool that is unmistakably a lissoir like those we find in later, modern human sites or even in leather workshops today.”

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Bibliographic information: Marie Soressi et al. Neandertals made the first specialized bone tools in Europe. PNAS, published online before print August 12, 2013; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1302730110