Chopper and reassembled flakes

About 400,000 years ago, a group of hominids hastily quartered, butchered and consumed part of the remains of an adult elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), an approximately 35-year-old female, on the banks of the River Jarama in Madrid. The stone tools and remnants of the animal were buried under silt and clay deposited by still waters when the river rose on successive occasions, preserving everything just as it was left by the human group that ate the elephant. The quartzite cobble must have been picked up nearby and turned into a tool on that very spot, beside the elephant’s remains, roughly knapping it with a hard hammerstone. The flakes that fit the cobble were found in a cluster, except for one which was used as a knife. This suggests that they are not the result of simply honing the chopper’s cutting edge but of a knapping process, and that the tool was made to serve an immediate, specific purpose and subsequently discarded.