Archaeologists have finally solved the mystery of the hand-size stone balls crafted by ancient humans about two million years ago. A recently published study has explained for the first time the function of these enigmatic stone balls.
Archaeologists find out that ancient people used them as tools to get at the tasty marrow within animal bones. In other words, if a bone were a can of soup, these ancient stone balls were like can-openers, according to Live Science.
The archaeologists have found “these enigmatic, mysterious artifacts” in some of the world’s oldest archaeological sites in Africa, Europe, and Asia, but no one in modern times had figured out how these ancient round stones were used.
Accordingly, the archaeologists dug further to discover 30 stone balls in the Qesem Cave in Israel, where humans lived in that region 400,000-200,000 years ago.
Moreover, archaeologists explained that among the newly found balls, 29 were made of limestone or dolomite, unlike the hundreds of thousands of stone tools found in the cave that were made of granite.
Archaeologists clarified that to solve the mystery of the stone balls; they examined the stone balls microscopically. They discovered wear marks and organic residues indicating that the stones were used by the cave inhabitants to break animal bones and extract the nutritional marrow.
