Sophisticated bone technology leading to the production of fully shaped bone artefacts, often called formal bone tools 23, 24, was considered until the beginning of this century an innovation of anatomically modern humans colonizing the European territories some 40 thousand years ago (ka) 25, 26, 27. The application of these techniques to bone, antler and ivory allows the maker to determine the tool’s final shape and size with a high degree of accuracy. A relevant, related question is when bone tools emerged that were entirely worked with techniques adapted to shaping osseous material, such as grinding, scraping, grooving and gouging. It was suggested that despite their low degree of modification, some of these tools were used for specific functions 14, 21, 22.
Unmodified or marginally modified bone tools remained part of the technological repertoire of prehistoric hominins in Africa and Eurasia until relatively recently e.g., 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. It is only by 1.8 Myr that large bone fragments were modified by knapping, the technique used to produce flaked stone tools 7, 8, and by 1.4 Myr that knapping was used to shape bone bifaces similar to their contemporary Acheulean stone counterparts 9, 10, 11.
These first bone tools consisted of unmodified or minimally shaped weathered bone fragments and horn cores used as digging implements. Members of our lineage have used bone to interact with their environments since at least 2 million years ago (Myr) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. We demonstrate that technological and texture analyses are effective means by which to infer past behaviors and assess the significance of prehistoric cultural innovations. Our results support a scenario in which some southern African early modern human groups developed and locally maintained specific, highly standardized cultural traits while sharing others at a sub-continental scale. This tool type is associated with three different Middle Stone Age cultural traditions at Sibudu that span 20,000 years, yet they are absent at contemporaneous sites. Debarking trees and digging in humus-rich soil produce use-wear patterns closely matching those observed on most Sibudu tools. We analyzed the texture of use-wear on the archaeological bone tools, and on bone tool replicas experimentally used in debarking trees, processing rabbit pelts with and without an ochre compound, digging in sediment in and outside a cave, and on ethnographic artefacts. We report the discovery of 23 double-beveled bone tools from ~ 80,000–60,000-year-old archaeological layers at Sibudu Cave in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Fully shaped, morphologically standardized bone tools are generally considered reliable indicators of the emergence of modern behavior.
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