Archaeologists discovered a prehistoric hand ax made out of the femur of a hippopotamus, an unusual non-stone material found only once before.
Archaeologists say stone-made hand axes are a pretty common find. But researchers were stunned when they found that a prehistoric hand ax unearthed in Ethiopia had been carved out of the thigh bone of a hippopotamus.
According to Ars Technica, Katsuhiro Sano, an archaeologist from Japan’s Tohoku University, and his team identified a 1.4-million-year-old hand ax buried underneath ancient layers of sediment.
The discovery happened while the team was working at the Konso Formation, an exposed stone formation from the Pleistocene era, between 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, located at the southwestern end of the southern part of the Main Ethiopian Rift. The site is a famous source of prehistoric tools that were largely crafted by the Homo erectus species who walked upright, similar to modern humans.
“Finely-shaped bone tools like bone hand axes are extremely rare,” the researchers wrote in the study which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2020.