The Neandertal bone industry at Chagyrskaya cave, Altai Region, Russia

For a long time, the rich bone industries of the Upper Palaeolithic were opposed to the opportunistic Neandertal bone tools among which the bone retoucher was the most common type. The recent finding of a few shaped bone tools into Mousterian contexts has been taken as an emergence of a modern behaviour. However, this outlook is based on biased corpuses. On one side, the large number of unshaped bone tools recently discovered in Upper Palaeolithic assemblages leads us to reconsider what a bone industry can be. On the other side, the increasing discoveries of bone tools in more ancient contexts indicates that this type of production is not strictly linked to Homo sapiens. Chagyrskaya cave, located in the Siberian Altai, brings us the opportunity to discuss this question. Dated around 50,000 years BP, the site yielded a local facies of Mousterian lithic industry associated to several Neandertal remains. A technological and functional analysis of the faunal remains reveal more than one thousand bone tools. Most are retouchers, but a significant part belongs to other morpho-functional categories: intermediate tools, retouched tools and tools with a smoothed end. Even though these tools were mainly manufactured by direct percussion, their number and the recurrence of their morphological and traceological features lead us to consider them as a true bone industry. Far from the Homo sapiens standards, this industry has its own coherence that needs now to be understood.