Cutting marks on fossil bones. Past and present, by Nathalie Richard

During my last stay in Argentina as part of the SciCoMove project, I had the opportunity to visit the collection of fossil bones that Richard Fariña and his team have collected near Montevideo (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 – Paleontological collection of fossil megafauna, Arroyo del Vizcaíno, Uruguay.

Among the bones discovered at the Pleistocene site of Arroyo del Vizcaíno, some display incisions whose regular patterns puzzle palaeontologists (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2 – Incisions on the rib of a Lestodon (giant fossil sloth).

These bones reminded me of older ones, whose discoveries have punctuated the debates on human antiquity in the 19th Century.

The first of these discoveries occurred in 1863, at a time when European naturalists were discussing new ideas concerning the geological antiquity of man, following the re-examination in 1859 of the sites studied by Jacques Boucher de Perthes near Abbeville in France. On June 8, Jules Desnoyers, a librarian at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, submitted to the French Academy of Science findings made at Saint-Prest near Chartres (Eure-et-Loire). In strata dated from late Tertiary (Pliocene), he had discovered numerous bones, some of which bore scratches whose shape could not, in his view, be attributed to accidental causes. He concluded that these bones, typical of the late Tertiary fauna, provided proof of the existence of man at geological period predating that of the sites in Abbeville and south-west France. While the age of the terrain was unanimously accepted, the anthropogenic origin of the striations was fiercely debated. Charles Lyell, the famous British geologist whose intervention in support of the antiquity of man had been decisive in 1859, was one of the main challengers of this view. After observing the marks left by the teeth of modern porcupines on bones, he concluded that the incisions were caused by the bites of one of the fossil animals found at Saint-Prest, the Trogontherium Cuvieri, a form of giant beaver. In 1863, the question remained open, and the nature of the marks is still debated, as the review of the Saint-Prest collections carried out a few years ago suggests [Vialet et al. 2021]. At the same time, in May 1863, Abbé Louis Bourgeois discovered other, more convincing remains at Thenay, near Pontlevoy (Loir-et-Cher, France). Some polyhedral flints were found in Tertiary soils, and Bourgeois considered that they had been carved by the human hand.  These discoveries were followed by similar ones in Otta, in Portugal’s Tagus Valley, and in Puy-Courny, in the French Massif Central, in the 1870s. This was the start of a long debate on the subject of “Tertiary man”, which most notably took place at the meetings of the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology organised since 1866.

Numerous views collided in the debate, none of which prevailing. The scientific community was divided between supporters and opponents of the existence of an intelligent being capable of making tools before the Quaternary era; and among the supporters, between those who believed that this intelligent being was similar to present-day man and the proponents of evolutionism, who thought that such a being was a simian ancestor of modern man [Richard 2008].  The debate was refuelled by new discoveries of flints regarded as carved, called “eoliths”, in the UK, Belgium and the Americas [Grayson 1986; de Bont 2003]. It continued until the First World War.

While flints seemed the most convincing evidence, other cut bones were put forward as arguments in favour of the existence of humans or proto-humans during the Tertiary era. In 1867, Abbé Alexis Delaunay discovered some indented bones of Halitherium, a fossil cetacean, in the Miocene shelly sands (faluns) of Chazé-Henry, near Pouancé (Maine-et-Loire) (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 – Rib fragments of Halitherium with incisions, faluns of Pouancé. In Gabriel & Adrien de Mortillet, Musée préhistorique, 1881, pl. IV.

A few years later, in 1875, the Italian geologist Giovanni Capellini, who was appointed to the first chair of geology in Bologna in 1860, entered the debate with the presentation of cut bones from fossil marine mammals discovered near Montaperti (near Siena, Italy). Capellini went to great lengths to have their significance recognized, as can be seen in the numerous letters preserved in the archives of the Archiginnasio of Bologna. As in the earlier cases, however, the bones elicited contrasting reactions, without succeeding in rallying unanimous agreement. Some of them can now be seen in the display cabinets of the Museo Giovanni Capellini, the geology and paleontology museum founded by Capellini in Bologna (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 – Shoulder blade of Balaenotus (pliocene fossil cetacean) with marks, discovered near Sienna in 1875 by Giovanni Capellini. @ Museo G. Capellini, Bologna, Italie

The debates over Tertiary man have thus been characterized by ambiguity of evidence and indecisiveness. But they also had positive consequences for archaeology, fostering the closer study of tools and bones presented as evidence. As far as the putative tools were concerned, attention was focused on identifying the features that would indicate that a flint was man-made. Percussion bulbs and flaking marks were described in greater detail, leading to an increasingly sophisticated technological and functional analysis of knapped flints. In contrast, until 1914, cut bones remained more difficult to analyse, and experiments were limited, as Charles Lyell had done, to comparing the marks on fossil bones with those left by the teeth and claws of modern animals on modern bones. Since then, the techniques applied to archaeological research have become much more sophisticated. Maybe the most recent technologies, enhanced by artificial intelligence, will help to settle the question.

References

Bont, Raf De, “The Creation of Prehistoric Man: Aimé Rutot and the Eolith Controversy, 1900–1920.” Isis, vol. 94, no. 4, 2003, p. 604–30.

Grayson, D. K., “Eoliths, Archaeological Ambiguity, and the Generation of ‘Middle Range’ Research”, In D. J. Meltzer, D. D. Fowler, & J. A. Sabloff (Eds.), American Archaeology Past and Future, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986, p. 71-133.

Richard Nathalie, Inventer la préhistoire. Les débuts de l’archéologie préhistorique en France, Paris, Vuibert, 2008, p. 185-195.

Vialet Amélie, Anne-Marie Moigne, Carole Vercoutère, Marie-Helene Moncel, Vanessa Coelho, et al., « Nouvelle étude du site de Saint-Prest : un témoin de la présence humaine en vallée de l’Eure autour d’un million d’années ? » in  F. Dugast ed., Formation et gestion des territoires de la Préhistoire à nos jours. Approches et perspectives exploratoires en Normandie et dans la vallée de l’Eure, 2021, p. 99-117.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
natrichard (January 9, 2025). Cutting marks on fossil bones. Past and present, by Nathalie Richard. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved April 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/131zr


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