What is going on? If you were alive as a Neanderthal and I had asked you for a hammer, there's an extremely good chance your best option was literally a rhino tooth! Kiona N. Smith covered some absolutely fascinating work in Ars Technica today (June 2nd) revealing that experimental archaeology has just confirmed what many have suspected: our ancient cousins were actually using rhinoceros teeth as multi-purpose hammer tools, and the evidence is pretty spectacular once you see it. Alicia Sanz-Royo from University of Aberdeen led researchers who managed to get hold of 18 white rhino teeth from French zoos — a genuinely difficult exercise since rhinos are protected under international law for trade in their parts — and then watched expert knapper David Pleurdeau hammer away at the specimens with quartz and flint tools, producing exactly that distinctive pattern of shallow pits, overlapping cracks produced by accumulation of blows in one zone, plus thin scratches from hitting jagged stone edges. When they compared these results to actual teeth recovered from sites across Europe and Asia like Payre in southeast France (where 91 percent of the rhino fossils are just *teeth*) to Panxian Dadong's cave site at a staggering 300,000–130,000 years old showing that jawbone teeth make up an impressive 74 percent — and El Castillo in Spain — they found those same overlapping marks.
What really gets me is how comprehensive this whole study was: not only did the experimental teeth develop all these characteristic grooves from use as hammers for flint-knapping, but some were also put into fancy lab machinery to simulate millennia of burial by spinning them on rotors filled with dirt and rock before being pressed in mechanical presses designed to mimic sediment-laden flood conditions — yet when they compared the worn molars after this rigorous treatment against Neanderthal cave specimens from places like Peche-de-l'Aze II, none of those distinctive marks showed up at all where paleontological finds only had natural animal remains. So yes: rhino teeth functioned as anvils too for cutting leather and plant fibers alongside hammers that struck rocks into flakes used later as knives or scrapers! And the jawbones with their grooves? Those are literally telltale signs of repeated human tool use rather than chewing rough grasses over thousands of years. What I love most about this kind of deep dive in experimental archaeology is how it turns speculation solidly grounded evidence — we've thought for a long time that Neanderthals made and used all sorts of stuff from bird bones, elephant tusks to wooden spears or digging sticks but now knowing exactly which materials actually survived with tool-use marks helps us picture their toolkit much more clearly as this complex ecosystem where one tooth could serve multiple purposes depending on need rather than being limited solely for chewing.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/experiments-reveal-that-neanderthals-used-rhino-teeth-as-hammers/
What really gets me is how comprehensive this whole study was: not only did the experimental teeth develop all these characteristic grooves from use as hammers for flint-knapping, but some were also put into fancy lab machinery to simulate millennia of burial by spinning them on rotors filled with dirt and rock before being pressed in mechanical presses designed to mimic sediment-laden flood conditions — yet when they compared the worn molars after this rigorous treatment against Neanderthal cave specimens from places like Peche-de-l'Aze II, none of those distinctive marks showed up at all where paleontological finds only had natural animal remains. So yes: rhino teeth functioned as anvils too for cutting leather and plant fibers alongside hammers that struck rocks into flakes used later as knives or scrapers! And the jawbones with their grooves? Those are literally telltale signs of repeated human tool use rather than chewing rough grasses over thousands of years. What I love most about this kind of deep dive in experimental archaeology is how it turns speculation solidly grounded evidence — we've thought for a long time that Neanderthals made and used all sorts of stuff from bird bones, elephant tusks to wooden spears or digging sticks but now knowing exactly which materials actually survived with tool-use marks helps us picture their toolkit much more clearly as this complex ecosystem where one tooth could serve multiple purposes depending on need rather than being limited solely for chewing.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/experiments-reveal-that-neanderthals-used-rhino-teeth-as-hammers/