Thread by @LeMoustier

#FlintFriday
Flint and clay-ironstone resharpening flakes, Ash Tree Cave, Derbyshire.

Even tiny objects show #Neanderthals moving around their land.
These two artefacts were waste from tool edge maintenance (scrapers or bifaces), but don't match anything in the cave.
1/n

But a few kms from Ash Tree Cave is @CreswellCrags, where scrapers & bifaces made of these stones were found in Church Hole and Robin Hood Cave.

We can't know if they were directly connected, but #Neanderthals were using the caves at Creswell & Ash Tree differently.

2/n

Clay-ironstone is a local, quite soft stone, probably used casually.
Flint however is trickier; there are occasional glacial cobbles of northern-type flint, but southern-type flint – which the scraper looks like – was probably brought into the region by #Neanderthals.

3/n

To be certain flints were moved north perhaps 80 km+, we'd need a full sourcing study looking at microfossils in the flint, as well as its chemistry.

Vast 'lithoteques' (stone libraries) have been built up in France to do this, but not yet for Britain.

4/n

I looked at these for my PhD (over a decade ago!), curated by @McrMuseum @MuseumSheffield @CreswellCrags and others.

For my postdoc I worked on a silcrete quarry for a French project, where the lithoteque has 100s of flint sources just in SE Fr ! 5/5