Archaeologists Find 250,000-Year-Old Tool Used To Butcher Rhinos

Science taught us that early hominins started using tools as early as in the Stone Age - before we even started being totally human. However, we haven't been sure exactly when these tools were used to butcher and prepare animals for meals.

Although not 'British' archaeology, ... you'll find this fascinating! https://t.co/lC72IBQtuy

— Archaeology for All (@archaeologyuk) August 9, 2016

A new study from the Journal of Archaeological Science found that hominins actually used tools to butcher their prey as early as 250,000 years ago, or at the very least, about 50,000 years before the earliest modern humans appeared in Africa. This discovery was made by a group of researchers from the University of Victoria in Canada, when lead scientist April Nowell and her team went on to look for ancient artifacts in the arid lands northeast of Jordan - to a spot called the Azraq Oasis - despite being a desert today, its name indicates that once upon a time, it was in-fact wetland.

According to Time, the disappearance of the water revealed multiple geological strata in the area, from deep bedrock and through nine layers of dry silt and sediment. However, Nowell and her colleagues hit the archaeological payload when they found thousands of different tool artifacts made from flint, river stones, and other materials, the most intriguing ones being projectile points, scrapers, and ax heads, which they jokingly call the Swiss Army knives of the Paleolithic period - tools used to kill beasts as large as rhinos.

Nowell shared with The Washington Post, "On a lot of archaeological sites you'll have stone tools, and you'll have bones, and in rare cases you'll have bones that have been cut marks on them from the stone tools, and you can make some logical assumptions about what happened."

They then discovered these artifacts for microscopic bits of tissue to find the different animals that fell victim to these tools, and of those they tested, 18 came back positive for rhinos, ducks, horses, bovine or wild cattle, and camel - the world's oldest identifiable proteins, as Nowell noted.

However, Nowell noted that for each tool, only one protein can be found, as if the hominids used them as a kind of disposable knives - they were barely retouched, as if they were cast aside after a single butchering episode. With their finding, Nowell hopes that other archaeologists will test tools as well, so that we can finally learn more about the lives of early humans - and how they survived their arid and challenging environments.