Tel Aviv University team finds early humans shaped tools around fossils

Archaeologists at Tel Aviv University reported in March 2026 that a survey of the Sakhnin Valley in Israel's Lower Galilee had turned up hundreds of Lower Palaeolithic handaxes, including an unusual group that early humans appear to have shaped deliberately around fossils, geodes and other striking natural features. The study, led by Professor Ran Barkai of the university's archaeology department together with local naturalist Muataz Shalata, was published on 17 March in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology and announced by the university on 23 March.

The project began when Shalata, a self-taught nature enthusiast from the town of Sakhnin, noticed knapped stones scattered across the valley and contacted Barkai, a specialist in early Palaeolithic cultures. A dedicated survey in 2025 recorded more than 200 handaxes, which the authors attribute to Homo erectus and date to roughly 500,000 to 200,000 years ago. Like tools from the famous site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, they were probably used to butcher elephants for meat and fat.

What sets the site apart is that around ten of the tools were made from flint nodules containing fossils, hollow geodes or rounded concretions. Working around such features makes it harder to produce a symmetrical, efficient tool and adds nothing to its cutting performance, so the researchers argue the toolmakers kept them on purpose. Isolated examples of this behaviour have been found elsewhere, but the team describes the Sakhnin Valley as the largest concentration of such tools known anywhere.

Barkai and Shalata suggest the makers saw these features as signs of the power and mystery of the natural world, giving the tools meaning beyond the practical. Some outside researchers have welcomed the finds as new evidence of early human perception while cautioning that symbolic interpretations of such ancient behaviour need further support.