Evidence for the Use of Stone Tools for Grinding Found in Israeli Cave

By: TPS Staff

The earliest evidence for the use of stone tools for grinding, some 350,000 years ago, was found in the Tabun Cave in northern Israel by researchers at the University of Haifa, preceding the finds that were known until now by about 150,000 years.

A new study published by Dr. Ron Shimelmitz, Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Dr. Mina Weinstein-Evron, and Prof Danny Rosenberg, from the Zinman Institute of Archeology at the University of Haifa, identified the earliest tool to date, which was used to erode various materials about 350,000 years ago, even before the advent of Homo sapiens.

The vessel, a rounded dolomite rock with microscopic abrasion marks on it, was found in the Tabun Cave on Mount Carmel, one of the flagship sites of prehistory in Israel and around the world.

This discovery precedes by about 150,000 years any other vessel in the world that bears evidence of abrasion.

“The extraordinary discovery from Tabun Cave shows that hominins processed different materials through their erosion about 350,000 years ago, which means that at such an early stage a very significant technology was added to their ‘toolbox’ that teaches us that they could and wanted to process different materials in a variety of ways to improve and maximize the ways in which they utilized environmental resources,” the researchers said.

Tabun Cave, part of the complex of sites that make up the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Nahal Maarot in Carmel, is a unique site that has uncovered a sequence of archaeological strata that indicate hominin activity in the last half-million years and has been used for about 90 years as a key site for the study of human evolution.

The unique find was unveiled as part of a new project led by the Israeli teams and others around the world, in which findings from past excavations at the site were re-examined.

While scanning the excavations unearthed in the cave by Prof. Arthur Jelinek of the University of Arizona in the late 1960s and yet to be researched and published, Dr. Shimelmitz noticed that one of the stones showed clear abrasion marks, known from much later stone vessels but not from ancient vessels hundreds of thousands of years old.

A careful study of the item in the laboratories of the Zinman Institute of Archeology allowed a systematic characterization of the weathering and signs of use on its surface.

The results of the study showed that the pebble bears characteristic signs indicating that the ancient vessel was operated in a horizontal motion, from side to side, in a grinding motion.

To understand and interpret the patterns they identified under a microscope, the researchers conducted a series of grinding experiments using dolomite pebbles collected in the Carmel area and similar in their characteristics to pebbles from the Tabun Cave. In these experiments, different materials were ground over different periods of time with the help of the pebbles, which were immediately subjected to a microscopic examination in which the erosion models created in the experiments were documented.

“While the results did not show a perfect match between the abrasion patterns documented on the unique stone and those we documented in the experimental study we conducted, we found many similarities to the abrasion marks obtained as a result of animal skin abrasion and concluded that the ancient stone was used for the grinding of soft materials, although we do not yet know which one exactly,” said Groman-Yaroslavski.

“While the tool is ‘simple’, its early appearance and the fact that it has no parallel at such an early stage of human evolution gives it global importance,” the researchers said.

According to them, the early emergence of erosion technology demonstrates the depth and complexity of the chain of technological innovations associated with human evolution.

  (TPS)