An elephant bone instrument, the oldest in Europe, has been found in England - it is about 500,000 years old

Archaeologists from University College London and the London Museum of Natural History have studied in detail an unusual find from southern England - a hand-held "hammer" made of elephant bone, which is estimated to be about half a million years old.

According to the researchers, this is the oldest tool in Europe, made of elephant bone, and it shows how inventive were the early people who lived in Britain in the middle Pleistocene.

The artefact was discovered back in the early 1990s at the famous Boxgrove archaeological site (near Chichester, West Sussex), but for a long time it was not thought of as a tool. Only recent detailed revision of material from the excavation has helped to recognise in the bone fragment traces of deliberate handling and use.

The 'hammer' itself appears as a triangular fragment about 11 cm long (about 6 cm on the other axis and about 3 cm thick). It consists mainly of the dense outer layer of bone, the cortical tissue. According to the thickness and structure, the researchers concluded that the bone belonged to a large animal - an elephant or a mammoth, but it was not possible to determine the species and part of the skeleton more precisely: the fragment is too incomplete.

The key thing is the surface. Using 3D scanning and electron microscopy, the team found characteristic notches and percussion marks typical of a tool used to repeatedly strike the stone. They even found tiny fragments of flint "imprinted" into the bone in some of the depressions. This is a direct hint that the object was used as a soft hammer-retoucher: it was used to gently tap the edge of blunted chippers and other stone tools to knock off small chips and restore cutting sharpness - a process known as flint retouching/knapping.

Why is elephant bone so valuable? Bone is softer than stone, so it is suitable for more "fine work" where it is important to control the shape of the chipping. And elephant bone, because of its thickness and strength, could be far more durable than the bones of most animals available in Britain at the time. The authors describe elephants and mammoths as rare visitors to the local landscape, which means that such material could have been deliberately saved and reused as a tool for more than one use.

The researchers link the tool to the earliest representatives of the human lineage in the region - most likely, it could be early Neanderthals or Homo heidelbergensis. A separate intrigue - how exactly the bone was extracted: the animal could have been killed, as well as cut up already dead carcass. However, deformations on the surface hint that the object may have been shaped and used while the bone was relatively "fresh".

The authors also remind us that tools made from elephant bone are also known in Africa - for example, from the Olduvai Gorge, where finds date to a much earlier time. But for Europe, such artefacts are extremely rare, especially in such ancient layers.