NHM Photo Unit
The hammer, which was first excavated in the 1990s, was a “retoucher,” a type of soft hammer used to resharpen stone tools.
Archaeologists identified the oldest elephant bone tool known in Europe, a hammer dating back around 500,000 years, which reveals a surprising technological sophistication among the first humans who lived in what is now southern England.
The fossilized tool, analyzed by researchers from University College London (UCL) and the Natural History Museum in London, was discovered at the Boxgrove archaeological site in West Sussex, near Chichester.
Their findings, in the journal Science Advances, suggest that the first human populations carefully selected and shaped rare materials such as elephant bones to improve your stone tools.
The object measures approximately 11 centimeters longsix centimeters wide and about three centimeters thick, with an approximately triangular shape. Researchers say marks on its surface show it was deliberately modified, rather than formed by natural breakage.
Although the bone fragment was first excavated in the early 1990s, was only recently identified as a tool following a detailed reanalysis of the archaeological site’s artefacts.
Using 3D scanning and electron microscopy, scientists examined the surface of the object and discovered impact marks and small fragments of flint embedded in it. These remains indicate that the bone was used repeatedly to strike stone tools during its manufacture or maintenance.
The researchers concluded that the object functioned as a “retoucher”, a type of soft hammer used to resharpen stone tools. Unlike stone hammers, bone is slightly softer, allowing toolmakers to remove small flint chips with greater control. This technique, known as chipping, helped restore the edge of hand axes and other cutting tools after they had lost their edge through use.
The choice of elephant bone is particularly significant because elephants and mammoths were relatively uncommon in prehistoric southern England. This suggests that early humans recognized the material’s value and deliberately collected it to make tools, says the .
The discovery also indicates that these populations — probably the first Neanderthals or their ancestors, the A man from Heidelberg — were able to produce more refined tools than previously assumed previously.
Elephant bone tools have been documented in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, dating back as far as 1.5 million years ago. In Europe, however, Such artifacts are extremely rare before the arrival of modern humans, around 43 thousand years ago. The Boxgrove hammer thus provides rare evidence that the continent’s earliest human groups were already experimenting with specialized tool-making technologies hundreds of thousands of years earlier.
