If I had a hammer… it might actually be a rhino tooth

如果我有一把锤子……它可能其实是一颗犀牛牙

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.

考古学家了解包括尼安德特人在内的古人生活方式的一种方法，就是尝试亲身实践，这一过程被称为“实验考古学”。通常，这涉及制作石器、屠宰鹿肉或蒸馏桦焦油。但在最近的一项研究中，这意味着要对世界上受保护最严密的动物之一的牙齿进行极具破坏性的实验。这是因为考古学家怀疑尼安德特人曾将犀牛牙齿当作工具使用。通过利用这些牙齿来制作石器，研究人员证明了尼安德特人很可能也做过同样的事情，这丰富了我们对他们工具箱中各种物品的认知。

We need to hit some rhino teeth with rocks for science

为了科学，我们需要用石头敲击犀牛牙齿

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.

在欧洲和亚洲的一些尼安德特人考古遗址中，犀牛牙齿的数量似乎远超预期。我们知道尼安德特人在欧洲和东亚曾猎杀过一种现已灭绝的犀牛，但居住在这些遗址的人们似乎出于某种原因一直在收集犀牛牙齿。根据物种的不同，犀牛有超过 260 块骨头，但只有 24 到 34 颗牙齿。然而，在中国南方距今 30 万至 13 万年的盘县大洞遗址中，74% 的犀牛遗骸是牙齿而非骨骼。在法国东南部的一个岩棚遗址 Payre，犀牛化石中牙齿的比例更是高达 91%。

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.

这些牙齿中有许多带有看起来非常可疑的痕迹，就像是用骨头当作锤子敲击后留下的：成组的浅坑和重叠的裂纹，“这是在同一区域反复敲击产生的”。此外还有因撞击石器锯齿状边缘而留下的细浅划痕。然而，为了探究这些痕迹是否真的是人类制造和使用工具的产物，阿伯丁大学的考古学家 Alicia Sanz-Royo 和她的同事们需要一些东西来进行对比。这意味着他们必须亲自尝试在真正的犀牛牙齿上进行“打制”。

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.

但由于犀牛充其量属于受威胁物种，且犀牛制品的贸易受到国际法的严格管制，获取这些牙齿并不容易。“为实验获取犀牛牙齿被证明是这项研究中极其困难但必不可少的环节，”Sanz-Royo 和她的同事在最近的论文中写道。她写道，只有真正的牙齿才行，因为“犀牛牙齿具有独特的结构和极高的硬度”。换句话说，正是这些特性使得犀牛牙齿最初就成为了手持工具的理想材料。

Teeth as tools

牙齿作为工具

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.

如果研究人员只是想观察现代犀牛牙齿，获取它们是相当容易的。巴黎国家自然历史博物馆 (MNHN) 收藏了 236 颗牙齿用于比较解剖学研究，Sanz-Royo 和她的同事仔细检查了这些牙齿，以了解在咀嚼混有灰尘和沙砾的坚硬草料的一生中，牙齿上会形成什么样的痕迹。但出于某种原因，博物馆非常不情愿让一群考古学家用尖锐的石头敲击他们的解剖学藏品来记录结果。

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.

最终，Sanz-Royo 和她的同事从三家法国动物园获得了 18 颗白犀牛牙齿。该研究的合著者、MNHN 的打制专家 David Pleurdeau 随后使用各种石英和燧石工具对这些牙齿进行了加工（打制是一种古老的艺术，通过用一块石头小心地敲击另一块石头将其塑造成工具）。其目的是观察他的工作——即制作、维护和使用石器的标准步骤——会在牙齿上留下什么样的痕迹。

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.

Pleurdeau 使用一些牙齿来修整石片：即用于切割或钻孔的锋利石块。他用一些牙齿作为锤子来打制燧石，并尝试用石英锤来打制牙齿本身。有几颗牙齿被当作砧座，他在上面使用石英和燧石工具切割皮革和植物纤维。与此同时，Sanz-Royo 和她的同事还将三颗牙齿放入精密的实验室机器中，以模拟数千年的埋藏过程。团队将它们放入装满泥土和岩石的转子中旋转，以模拟从斜坡滚落和在泥沙洪流中翻滚的过程。他们还非常科学地使用机械压力机将它们压碎，该压力机旨在对材料柱（在本例中为埋有犀牛牙齿的泥土和鹅卵石）施加精确压力，以模拟埋藏环境。

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 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.

当 Sanz-Royo 和她的同事将他们的实验结果与来自 Payre、西班牙 El Castillo 和法国 Peche-de-l’Aze II 等遗址的牙齿痕迹进行比较时，他们注意到了惊人的相似之处。与实验牙齿一样，来自尼安德特人考古遗址的牙齿也有相同的重叠小裂纹、浅凹痕和浅划痕。值得注意的是，在古生物学遗址的犀牛牙齿上并没有出现这些痕迹，在这些遗址中，科学家挖掘出了动物遗骸，但没有发现任何人类（任何类型）存在的迹象。换句话说，这些实验有力地表明尼安德特人曾将犀牛牙齿用作工具，最可能是用来敲击岩石。

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

犀牛牙齿锤、象骨刮削器和木矛

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…

当我们思考尼安德特人日常生活中的实物时，首先想到的通常是石器，因为它们最常在经历数万或数十万年后被考古学家挖掘出来。我们正在了解到，尼安德特人……