A team of archaeologists from University College London and the Natural History Museum, London, have just described the discovery of an extraordinary prehistoric tool made from elephant bone.
The ancient artefact was found at an archaeological site in Boxgrove, near Chichester in West Sussex, in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until recently that it was identified as more than just a fragment of bone.
The hammer is the oldest tool made from elephant bone ever found in Europe and its discovery provides a rare glimpse into the minds of those who made it. At 500,000 years old, it’s roughly 200,000 years older than the origin of Homo sapiens, which indicates it was made by an earlier species of human.
