Neanderthals used fire to make tools

Enlarge / The handle of a digging stick from Pogetti Vecchi. (credit: PNAS)

A collection of broken wooden tools unearthed in southern Italy offers new evidence that Neanderthals used fire to shape wooden tools as early as the Middle Paleocene, about 171,000 years ago. The find sheds important new light on the earliest use of fire, and it reveals how sophisticated Neanderthal technology was. The tools, called digging sticks, are still in use today.

If you're a hunter-gatherer, the digging stick is your version of the Swiss Army knife for foraging: about a meter long, with one end rounded to offer a handle and the other tapered into a blunt almost-point. They're useful for digging up roots and tubers, hunting burrowing animals, or pounding and grinding herbs. And the Neanderthals of Middle Pleistocene Italy created and used digging sticks that would be perfectly familiar to modern members of the Australian Bindibu people, the Hadza people of Tanzania, and the San people of southern Africa.

Wood is a popular material for tools in modern hunter-gatherer societies, mostly because it's available and relatively easy to work with. Archaeologists assume early humans, including Neanderthals, must have used it as well.

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