How do archaeologists know what stone tools were used for?
Archaeologists have made many attempts to figure out the uses of stone tools. We know from experimental archaeology that stone tools can be used to scrape, cut, saw, and chop. In the time of the Neandertals, stone tools seem to be used mainly for meat and hide processing, as well as for woodworking (perhaps to make spear shafts). Most individual archaeological stone tools, however, appear to have been used for a variety of tasks, and therefore there is no one-to-one match between a task and a specific shape of a stone tool. A scraper, for example, might be used to scrape a hide, but might later be used to cut meat.
