Experiments reveal that Neanderthals used rhino teeth as hammers - Ars Technica

Overview

Experiments reveal that Neanderthals used rhino teeth as hammersvar abtest_2157517 = new ABTest(2157517, 'click');

Neanderthals had some wild stuff in their toolkits.

Details

One way archaeologists learn how ancient people, including Neanderthals, did things is to attempt to do those things themselves, a process called experimental archaeology. Normally, that involves making stone tools, butchering deer, or distilling birch tar. But in a new study, it meant doing very destructive things to teeth from one of the world’s most carefully protected animals.

That’s because the archeologists suspected that Neanderthals once used rhino teeth as tools. By using the teeth to make stone tools, the researchers demonstrated that Neanderthals probably did the same thing, adding to what we know about the wide range of items in their toolkits.

We need to hit some rhino teeth with rocks for science

Some Neanderthal archaeological sites in Europe and Asia seem to have many more rhinoceros teeth lying around than you’d expect. We know Neanderthals hunted a now-extinct species of rhinoceros in Europe and eastern Asia, but the people who had inhabited these sites looked like they had been collecting rhino teeth for some reason.

Depending on the species, a rhinoceros has more than 260 bones but only 24 to 34 teeth. Yet at the 300,000-130,000-year-old cave site of Panxian Dadong in southern China, 74 percent of the rhino remains are teeth, not bones. And teeth make up 91 percent of the rhino fossils at Payre, a rock shelter in southeast France.

Many of those teeth had markings that looked suspiciously like what you’d get from using a piece of bone as a hammer: groupings of shallow pits and overlapping cracks, “produced by the accumulation of blows in the same zone.” There are also thin, shallow scratches from hitting the jagged edge of a stone tool.

To explore whether the markings really were the product of human tool-making and use, though, University of Aberdeen archaeologist Alicia Sanz-Royo and her colleagues needed something to compare them to. Which meant they needed to try their own bone-knapping on actual rhino teeth. But since rhinos are at best a threatened species and trade in rhino parts is heavily regulated under international law, getting those teeth was not easy.

“Obtaining rhinoceros teeth for the experiments proved to be an extremely difficult but indispensable exercise for this study,” wrote Sanz-Royo and her colleagues in their recent paper. But only the real thing would do, “due to the unique structure and exceptional hardness of rhinoceros teeth,” she wrote. In other words, the exact properties that would have made rhino teeth an appealing material for hand tools in the first place.

It was pretty easy to get access to modern-day rhinoceros teeth—if all the researchers wanted to do was look at them. The National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris has a collection of 236 teeth for comparative anatomy research, which Sanz-Royo and her colleagues examined closely to learn what kinds of marks form on teeth during a lifetime of chewing tough grasses mixed with dust and grit. But for some reason, the museum was oddly reluctant to let a bunch of archaeologists hit their anatomical collection with sharp rocks to document the results.

In the end, Sanz-Royo and her colleagues got 18 white rhino teeth from three French zoos. Expert knapper David Pleurdeau of the MNHN, a co-author of the recent study, then set to work on the teeth with an assortment of quartz and flint tools (knapping is the ancient art of carefully striking a rock with another rock to shape it into a tool). The goal was to see what kind of marks his work—standard steps in making, maintaining, and using stone tools—left on the teeth.

David Pleurdeau making and retouching stone tools using a rhinoceros tooth. Bottom: the results of Pleurdeau’s work.

Pleurdeau used some of the teeth to retouch flakes: sharp bits of stone that would have been used for cutting or drilling. He used some teeth as hammers to knap flint and tried using quartz hammers to knap the teeth themselves. A few served as anvils, on which he used quartz and flint tools to cut leather and plant fibers.

Meanwhile, Sanz-Royo and her colleagues also put three of the teeth into fancy lab machinery to simulate millennia of burial. The team spun them in rotors filled with dirt and rock to mimic falling down slopes and tumbling through sediment-laden floods. They also very scientifically squashed them with a mechanical press designed to put precise pressure on a column of material (in this case, dirt and pebbles with a rhino tooth buried in it) to mimic burial.

When Sanz-Royo and her colleagues compared their results to the marks on teeth from sites like Payre, El Castillo in Spain, and Peche-de-l’Aze II in France, they noticed striking (not sorry) similarities. Like the experimental teeth, the ones from Neanderthal archaeological sites had the same overlapping small fractures, shallow indentations, and shallow scratches. Tellingly, none of those marks showed up on rhinoceros teeth from paleontological sites, where scientists had unearthed animal remains but no signs of human (of any sort) presence.

In other words, the experiments strongly pointed to Neanderthals having used the rhinoceros teeth as tools, most likely for hammering rock.

The chewing surface of the molars of an extinct Florida rhino.

Rhinoceros-tooth hammers, elephant-bone scrapers, and wooden spears

When we think about the literal stuff of Neanderthals’ day-to-day life, stone tools usually come to mind first because they’re what most often survive tens or hundreds of millennia to be unearthed by archaeologists.

We’re learning that Neanderthals made and used items from a surprising range of materials. Some aren’t that surprising: wood for digging sticks and spears, plant fibers for string, grasses and leaves for bedding, hides for clothes or bags, birch tar for glue or antiseptic, and antler or deer bone for scraping, knapping, drilling, and hide-working—even shells or eagle talons for jewelry. But some of the items in a Neanderthal’s toolkit seem surprising and unusual to us now because of how the world has changed. Neanderthals would have seen using materials like mammoth bones for building shelters and elephant bones and rhinoceros teeth for tools as mundane, even though no elephants or rhinos walk in those parts of the world today.

Tooth enamel is the hardest part of the entire mammal skeleton; 97 percent of it is hydroxyapatite, the hard mineral component of bone (most bone tissue is only about 40 to 70 percent hydroxyapatite). That means, compared to bone, enamel is less likely to crack under pressure or the shock of a hard impact, such as whacking a piece of rock with it (we beg you not to try this at home with your own teeth). Rhino enamel is thicker and harder than that of most other animals because it has evolved to do a lot of very tough chewing.

Sanz-Royo and her colleagues say that based on their experiments, Neanderthals at sites across Europe and Asia were apparently using rhinoceros teeth as soft (compared to rock) hammers for knapping or retouching stone tools or as anvils paired with harder stone hammers or cutting tools. It makes sense, especially at sites like Panxian Dadong, where good-quality stone like flint, chert, or quartz may have been hard to come by; basalt and limestone aren’t great for making sharp tools.

During his experiments, Pleurdeau even worked out the most comfortable way to hold a rhino tooth while working, so paleo-ergonomics is officially a thing now. So not only do we know that Neanderthals used rhino teeth to make and maintain their stone tools, but we also know how they probably held them and what that experience would have felt like.

Journal of Human Evolution, 2026. DOI: j.jhevol.2026.103829. (About DOIs).

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Key Takeaways

• Experiments reveal that Neanderthals used rhino teeth as hammersvar abtest_2157517 = new ABTest(2157517, 'click');

• Neanderthals had some wild stuff in their toolkits

• One way archaeologists learn how ancient people, including Neanderthals, did things is to attempt to do those things themselves, a process called experimental archaeology

• That’s because the archeologists suspected that Neanderthals once used rhino teeth as tools

• We need to hit some rhino teeth with rocks for science