Neandertals take out their small blades
By Bruce Bower
From San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting
Excavations of Neandertal artifacts at two caves in northern Spain have yielded an unexpected discovery—a trove of thin, double-edged stone blades that researchers usually regard as the work of Stone Age people who lived much later.
In 2005, Federico Bernaldo de Quiros of the University of Léon in Spain and his coworkers unearthed small stone blades, which they called bladelets, lying amid larger, characteristic Neandertal stone implements in a cave called El Castillo. All the finds came from sediment that had previously been dated to 47,000 to 42,000 years ago. Later, the researchers found nearly identical bladelets in soil at another cave, Cueva Morin, which also contains 50,000-year-old Neandertal tools.