Bone tools 51,000 years old

Neanderthals have created the oldest tools in Europe, and modern people may have learned how to make this tool from them.

Neanderthals are one of the closest relatives to modern humans. Their habitats are large areas from Europe to the Middle East and West Asia. This ancient lineage of extinct people was 40,000 years ago.

Bone tools are found.(Photo: Abri Peyrony & Pech-de-l'Azé)

Neanderthals created objects such as small ornaments or blades. The scientific community had many heated debates about whether this ability of Neanderthals developed before or after contact with modern people.

Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute, Germany and colleagues discovered that Neanderthals created the earliest bone-making tool in Europe dating back about 51,000 years, before modern humans appeared.

This bone tool is called Lissoir . Their surfaces are sharpened and smoothed. Archaeologists unearth the fragments of four tools at two locations that once inhabited the Neanderthals in southwestern France.

McPherron said: 'We have found new things about Neanderthals. Bone tools look like stone tools for scraping, slitting or using as hand axes. "

"They used their ribs, made them into the same tool with the tools of modern people found 40,000 years ago ," McPherron added.

The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.