LOS ANGELES - Scientists in Europe have dug up special, prehistoric tools made from bones. They said that the tools belonged to Neanderthals, who were a distant cousin to modern humans.

The tools add to the evidence that Neanderthals were more advanced than people thought. They may not have been the dumb ape-men shown in movies dragging clubs. Neanderthals lived about 28,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Archaeologists said they dug up of four pieces of bone tools known as lissoirs at two Neanderthal sites in southwestern France. They described the findings in a science magazine.

The pieces are the oldest specialized bone tools found in Europe, said archaeologist Marie Soressi of the Netherlands. Archaeologists study how humans lived in the past.

A Bone Tool To Work Leather

Before this, tools dug up where Neanderthals lived were almost always made of stone. Bone tools were more common where early modern-humans lived. So many scholars believe that Neanderthals had copied humans in making bone tools.

But the recently found lissoirs are about 41,000 to 51,000 years old. They could have been in Europe long before modern humans got there. Neanderthals might have figured out how to make the tools themselves, Soressi and her team wrote.

You should not think of Neanderthals as "stupid" anymore, said Paola Villa. She works at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

Ancient lissoirs were made from animal ribs. Leather workers probably scraped the tools against animal skins. This made the leather shinier and waterproof. Craftspeople still use lissoirs today.

Soressi's group found the first piece of a lissoir in southwestern France in 2005. Archaeologist William Rendu noticed the unusual piece of deer rib. It was examined under a microscope. The piece had a worn edge and a polished surface. These suggested that it had come from a tool.

"It was obvious it was a lissoir," Soressi said. Lissoirs in use today are sort of the same. The ancient piece was probably a tip that had broken off, she said.

Other Bone Tools Found

The researchers made their own lissoirs. They scraped them against animal hides. Using a microscope, they compared their tools to the piece they had found. The tools showed the same signs of wear.

Soressi shared her findings with Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist. He was researching Neanderthal behavior nearby.

McPherron and his coworkers began searching for lissoir pieces too. The group found three over the next seven years. They confirmed that they were from leather-working tools.

"We didn't expect to find these bones," said McPherron. "We were thrilled."

Archaeologists had discovered bone tools where Neanderthals had lived before. But these were the first that weren't just copies of existing stone tools, McPherron said. They were designed to take advantage of bone, McPherron said.

Ribs can bend a bit. Stone can't, he said. You want the bone to bend a little bit when working with an animal skin, he explained.

More Advanced Than Thought

Tests showed one of the lissoirs came from to 51,000 years ago. Modern humans did not come to Europe until thousands of years later. This suggests that our ancestors may have copied the practice of making bone tools from Europe's earlier Neanderthal inhabitants.

Or modern humans arrived earlier than previously thought, Soressi said.

"It's a hard call," said Donald Henry. He's an archaeologist from the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. Henry said most of the evidence suggested that Neanderthals copied bone tools from modern humans.

But that would not matter. It would not mean that modern humans are better, Henry said. "There are many examples of human societies adopting technologies from other societies," he said. That doesn't mean "that the ones who adopted it were stupid."

There is other evidence that Neanderthals showed advanced behavior. They used tree sap as glue. They waterproofed their boats, Villa said.

"Maybe they didn't have opera, but they weren't dumb," Henry added. "They survived hundreds of thousands of years. We haven't done that yet."