Researchers found an ancient bone tool that suggests Neanderthals may have been more advanced than was previously believed.
It has been a long-time debate whether tools and ornaments came before or after contact with modern humans, LiveScience reported.
"There is a huge debate about how different Neanderthals were from modern humans," Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told LiveScience.
Modern humans took over Europe about 4,000 years ago, but this new research suggest the earlier Neanderthals were not the "brutes" we once thought they were, a Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology press release reported. Others believe cultural advances such as tool-making didn't appear until after the appearance of humans.
"For now the bone tools from these two sites are one of the better pieces of evidence we have for Neanderthals developing on their own a technology previously associated only with modern humans," McPherron said in the news release.
The tools in question are called lissoirs, which were most likely used to smooth out and strengthen hides, LiveScience reported.
"If Neanderthals developed this type of bone tool on their own, it is possible that modern humans then acquired this technology from Neanderthals. Modern humans seem to have entered Europe with pointed bone tools only, and soon after started to make lissoirs. This is the first possible evidence for transmission from Neanderthals to our direct ancestors," Marie Soressi of Leiden University in The Netherlands, said in the news release.
The research could also point to modern humans entering Europe and introducing the tools earlier than researchers have suggested.
"The date we have of approximately 51,000 years old is earlier than the best evidence we have of modern humans in Europe, but it is still close enough that we have to mention the possibility," McPherron told LiveScience. "What we need to do now is look in even older sites for these same tools, to see if Neanderthals had been making these tools for much longer."
