Romania Had No Neanderthal Bone Tools for Decades. Then Someone Looked at the Small Bones.

Neanderthal bone tools have turned up from the Altai Mountains to the Atlantic coast. The Carpathian region, sitting squarely in between, had produced none — a gap that looked like a genuine cultural boundary until researchers went back through the discard piles.

A study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science reports the first evidence of Neanderthal bone tool use in Romania, from Abri 122/1200, a Middle Paleolithic rock shelter in the Vârghiș Gorges of the Eastern Carpathians occupied between roughly 230,000 and 60,000 years ago. The site had been dug before, including 2014 excavations by Marian Cosac and George Murătoreanu of Valahia University of Târgoviște, and had yielded stone tools and the bones of the animals its occupants hunted — woolly rhinoceros and bison among them — but never a bone implement.

The explanation turned out to be a sampling artifact rather than a cultural one. "I don't mean to be overly critical of the methods used in the past by archaeologists," said Stefan Vasile, a lecturer at the University of Bucharest, "but many times, only the larger or more complete bones were recovered." Small fragments were routinely ignored. Those fragments are precisely where use-wear shows up.

So the team, led by Monica Mărgărit, went through every bone fragment from the site under a microscope, looking for faint scratches, rounded edges and the glossy polish that develops when bone is worked repeatedly against another material. To be sure they were reading the marks correctly, they manufactured their own bone tools and used them on the same kinds of tasks Neanderthals would have — stroke for stroke — then compared the experimental wear against the ancient pieces.

Out of more than 10,000 bones, 83 carried unmistakable signs of human handling. The researchers sorted them by function: tools for sharpening stone edges, tools for working hides and plants, and wedge-like implements for splitting things apart. Some were hybrids used for more than one job. Two had simply been used as hammers.

None of them were curated objects. These were expedient tools — grab whatever bone is at hand, use it, drop it — which fits a pattern of Neanderthals optimizing for speed and immediate usefulness rather than investing in tools meant to last. Vasile argues that makes them more interesting, not less: "Neanderthals using bone tools, and small ones ... to perform a wider array of actions, represents a piece of evidence that supports a distinct ingenuity and inventiveness, a complexity of the Neanderthal thought process many people still find hard to believe."

The finding implies Romania likely holds far more of this material, already excavated and sitting unrecognized. "It is possible that some Neanderthal bone tools lie somewhere in some drawers," Vasile said, "and may even lie in the sediment dump excavated by previous researchers." The team's next target is harder: despite years of digging, no Neanderthal remains have ever been found at the site. They are now testing sediment for Neanderthal DNA and sending bones out for analysis, a search Vasile compared to looking for a needle in a haystack.