How it began
Contrebandiers Cave lies on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, about 250 meters from the present shore. In deposits dated between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago, researchers identified an assemblage of bone tools made by early Homo sapiens. The study, published in iScience in 2021, described the tools as intentionally shaped for specific tasks, including likely leather and fur working. The people who used the cave hunted 67 species of vertebrate animals for food and hides.
Before it existed
Older bone tools are known, such as bones used to dig termite mounds about two million years ago in southern Africa, but most were not deliberately shaped. Formal, shaped bone tools appear only occasionally in the African Middle Stone Age, and diverse bone and antler tool kits do not become common until about 48,000 years ago in Eurasia and 44,000 years ago in Africa.
How it works
The key tools are spatulates, smooth-ended bone pieces. Sheen and polish are restricted to their ends and sides, a wear pattern consistent with experimental and ethnographic leather-working tools. In the same layers were bones of foxes and other carnivores with cut marks consistent with skinning, which suggests that the animals were skinned for their fur rather than only for meat.
What changed first
Fur and other organic clothing materials almost never survive in the archaeological record, and no actual prehistoric clothing was found at the cave. The combination of skinned carnivore bones and bone tools likely used for fur processing gives what the authors call highly suggestive proxy evidence for the earliest clothing in the archaeological record.
What lasted
Together with bone tools from the nearby Moroccan caves of El Mnasra and Dar es-Soltan I, the finds show a tradition of bone tool technology in North Africa from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago. The authors argue that specialized bone tool making emerged across Africa well before it became abundant in Europe, and that earlier examples are likely to be found.
