Cavemen were the first recyclers, researchers say

Israel – Recycling is anything but new. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our prehistoric ancestors learned to recycle the objects they used in their daily lives, researchers claimed at an international conference held last week in Israel.

‘For the first time, we are revealing the extent of this phenomenon, both in terms of the amount of recycling that went on and the different methods used,’ Ran Barkai, an archaeologist and one of the organisers of the four-day ‘Origins of Recycling’ conference at Tel Aviv University told the AP press agency.

Just as today we recycle materials such as paper and plastic in order to make new items, early hominids would collect discarded or broken tools made of flint and bone to create new utensils. From caves in Spain and North Africa to sites in Italy and Israel, archaeologists have been finding such recycled tools in recent years.