Archeology:50 thousand-year-old Neanderthal tools laying on the ground---why arent they buried?

Factual Questions
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First, the short version:I recently gathered some 50,000-year-old prehistoric flint tools . I simply picked them up where they were laying on the ground in the Negev Desert of Israel.
My question is: why are these these ancient tools so easy to find? Why did they not get buried while they were sitting there for 50,000 years?
Now for the details:
I live in a little country in the Middle East. I work in the construction industry, and the law requires that new construction projects must be approved by the national government 's department of archeology.
The official archeologist’s report states that my company’s project, located in the Negev Desert , has been found to have several spots of archeological interest, (only one of which is valuable enough that it must remain undisturbed.) The spots are small—mostly about 100 square yards.

One of those spots is a collection of prehistoric flint stones.
There are hundreds of these flints laying around on the ground, at one of the spots which the archeologists do not consider worth preserving, ( because there are lots of other sites just like it). They are Mousterian flints, about 40 to 80 thousand years old.So I went there and picked me up a bunch of flints! (Pretty cool, huh?)
Here is a picture of one of the flint tools

And here is a picture of the site where I found it and many others.

Now , back to my question: Why are these tools so easy to find, laying exposed on the surface of the desert?Fifty thousand years is a long,long time --enough time for the flints to “disappear”… Either covered up by weather(rainfalls, floods, earthquakes and sandstorms), or just picked up and taken away for use by other Neanderthals or early homo sapiens.

Presumably, there was an outcrop of the raw material (the right type of stone) at this spot, and so it became a valuable center of production, where the tools were made and traded. And so they left a lot of “industrial waste” on the ground.
When the tools were made, the area was not a desert–it was cooler and wetter, and easier for the Neanderthals to inhabit. So the ground would have been softer, greener, and more organic–not the hard,dry rock we see there today. But softer ground with flowing water would seem to make it even easier for the rocks to get buried by the forces of nature.

Yet these flints are easy to find, at sites that are widespread throughout the Negev desert. Why?

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Things tend to appear on the surface in deserts, thru wind and the occ rainstorm, then stay there. We also find a lot of fossils that way.

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I tried to get them to clean up, instead of leaving their broken tools and chips all over the place. You know, spruce the place up so it didn’t look like so much of a mess, but they were too lazy.
“You’re living like cave men!” I screamed at them, but they just laughed at me…

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All soils are dynamic to some degree (even in a desert), and churn themselves due to processes such as weather and bioturbation, which is the movement through the soil caused by plants, earthworms, ants, burrowing animals, etc. Over time bioturbation generally makes larger items sink deeper and brings smaller items to the surface. Bioturbation is far from the only process causing artifact movement in soil, but it’s a significant one most people aren’t aware of. Here’s a technical article explaining more in depth:

Buried Artifacts in Stable Upland Sites and the Role of Bioturbation: A Review

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In our town lives an elderly man who used to be (he unfortunately is almost blind now) an amateur archaeologist who has published several books and who is respected in the academic world.

Over the decades, he systematically and slowly walked the fields and searched for flint tools. I once asked him the same question, i. e. how is it possible that these artefacts are still to be found on the ground, even though our neck of the woods has been settled since at least the Middle Ages.

He explained that he finds the flint tools mainly after the fields have been ploughed or after the harvest. Most artefacts all over the country remain undetected and are lost forever since these are more or less invisible to the untrained eye and there are simply no resources to look for them systematically.

This gentleman’s research was the result of the tedious work of a single, dedicated hobbyist.

BTW, I live less than 5 miles from the Neandertal, the place were the original Neanderthal man was found (for some weird reason, when I talk to people face to face and I tell them about it, they never seem surprised).

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Because they really aren’t 50,000 years old. The entire world is only about 6,000 years old to begin with!

But seriously, I think it’s a combination of the current arid conditions of the site, the large volume of artifacts produced at the site, and the long period of time that the site was active. Even though the artifacts were likely buried in the past when the site was more lush, the current erosive effects of the wind are constantly uncovering them. I suspect that if you dug into the earth you would discover even more tools, and if you collected all the flints on the surface, then came back a decade later you would discover a fresh crop had been uncovered.

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..or maybe there is still a small band of Neanderthals still living otherwise undetected in the area. That would be my bet.

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Do you have a protruding brow? :wink:
:smiley:

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I’ve seen several. Folks with European ancestry have Neanderthal genes.

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10

What was the use of that tool?

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Some archeologists have learned to make flint tools themselves. Its called flint knapping.

If you ever get a chance to see a demonstration it’s worth a look.

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It allows you to post more often than once a minute.

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:smiley:

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We must be practically neighbours, then! (It’s around 20 km away for me…)

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There you go. We may have even crossed paths at Grog’s mammoth hunting gear store!

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Nah, the girlfriend does the hunting, I’m more for foraging… We’re progressive nontraditional gender roles cavepersons!