If I had a hammer…it might actually be a rhinoceros tooth

One way that archaeologists study how ancient people, including Neanderthals, did things is to try to do those things themselves, a method called experimental archaeology. Often, this involves making stone tools, killing a deer, or pouring birch sap. But in a new study, it meant doing some serious dental damage from one of the world’s most carefully guarded animals.

That’s because archaeologists suspected that Neanderthals once used rhinoceros teeth as weapons. By using teeth to make stone tools, the researchers showed that Neanderthals may have done the same thing, adding to our knowledge of the many types of objects in their records.

We have to beat rhinoceros teeth with rocks to get science

Some Neanderthal archaeological sites in Europe and Asia seem to have more rhinoceros teeth lying around than you might expect. We know that Neanderthals hunted the now-extinct species of rhinoceros in Europe and eastern Asia, but the people living in these areas seemed to collect rhinoceros teeth for some reason.

Depending on the type of rhinoceros, the rhinoceros has more than 260 bones but only 24 to 34 teeth. Yet at the 300,000-130,000-year-old Panxian Dadong cave site in southern China, 74 percent of rhino remains are teeth, not bones. And tusks make up 91 percent of the rhino bones at Payre, a rock shelter in southeastern France.

Many of those teeth had marks that looked suspiciously like what you’d find using a piece of bone like a hammer: groups of shallow pits and horizontal cracks, “made by multiple blows in the same area.” There are also thin, shallow scratches from striking the edge of a stone tool.

To determine whether the inscriptions were indeed made by the production and use of human tools, however, University of Aberdeen archaeologist Alicia Sanz-Royo and her colleagues needed something to compare them to. This meant that they had to try themselves to scrape the bones off real rhinoceros teeth. But since rhinos are an endangered species and trade in rhino parts is heavily regulated by international law, finding those teeth was not easy.