Rock crystal scraper: 45,000-year-old Neanderthal tool that shows they had an 'eye for beauty of form and color'

A century ago, American archaeologists excavating at a cave site in France unearthed a cache of seven rock crystal tools made by Neanderthals. The discovery was one of the first to prove that Neanderthals were not the unintelligent brutes that many scientists of the time believed they were.

This rare quartz scraper was found at the archaeological site of Abri Des Merveilles in the Dordogne region of France in 1924 by a team from the American ...