Neandertals may have been forging projectile weapons out of animal bones 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.
A bone fragment unearthed from roughly 80,000-year-old rock in Europe shows signs of sharpening and bitumen residue — a sticky tar suggesting the point was once attached to some sort of shaft, perhaps to make a spear or other projectile weapon, archaeologist Liubov Golovanova and colleagues report in the July Journal of Archaeological Science.
Neandertals made wooden spears as early as 300,000 years ago, but evidence of bone-tipped projectile weapons before 40,000 years ago is scarce. That makes the new finding the oldest and only known Neandertal-made bone-tipped projectile, the researchers say.
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