14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers now say that, contrary to popular opinion, recycling is by no means a modern idea. On the contrary, Neanderthals were the first to figure out that, rather than throwing away broken tools, it might not be such a bad idea to use their bits and pieces to make new utensils.
According to Daily Mail, evidence at hand suggests that our ancestors were quite keen on recycling items that they used in their everyday lives as far back as 1.3 million years ago.
Thus, tools dug out from caves all around the world, i.e. Spain, North Africa, Italy and Israel appear to have been made from pieces of flint or bone utensils that early hominids chanced to find lying around.
“Why do we recycle plastic? To conserve energy and raw materials. In the same way, if you recycled flint you didn't have to go all the way to the quarry to get more, so you conserved your energy and saved on the material,” Avi Gopher with the Tel Aviv University reportedly told the press.
Archaeologists say that, as far as they can tell, our ancestor started to systematically reuse discarded tools about 800,000 years ago, maybe later.
Thus, it was around this time when early hominids started using hand-axes and flint flakes that had passed their expiration date to make slightly smaller tools such as blades and scrapers.
Specifically, they reshaped these old tools into slightly smaller ones by chopping away any unnecessary material.
“We find several levels of reuse and recycling. The bones were shattered to extract the marrow, then the fragments were shaped into tools, abandoned, and finally reworked to be used again,” said Giovanni Boschian, a geologist from the University of Pisa.
“It was not an occasional behavior; it was part of the way they did things, part of their way of life,” added Avi Gopher.
Interestingly enough, it appears that 10% of the 200,000-420,000-year-old tools discovered in a cave near Tel Aviv used to be some other utensils that our ancestors recycled in one way or another.
The researchers talked about ancestors recycling behavior at a recent conference in Israel. The conference was titled “The Origins of Recycling,” and some 50 scholars from 10 different countries took part in it.