About 11,000 years ago, Stone Age hunters crafted sharp weapons out of human bone, a new study finds.
These hunter-gatherers lived in Doggerland, a now-underwater region in the North Sea that connected Europe to Britain. At the end of the last ice age, when sea levels were lower, it was inhabited by herds of animals and humans. Although these people are long gone, artifacts from their culture, including bone weapons, often wash ashore in the Netherlands.
An analysis of 10 of these bone weapons revealed that eight were carved from red deer (Cervus elaphus) bone and antlers, and two were crafted from human bone. "We expected to find some deer, but humans? It wasn't even in my wildest dreams that there would be humans among them," study lead researcher Joannes Dekker, a Master's student of archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.
Read Full Article »