Wedges made of limb bones may have been used for splitting soft, copper-bearing rock O. Zagorodnia Even with the technology to make metal tools, people in Bronze Age Britain still used animal bone tools alongside metal ones to obtain copper, a practice spanning at least nine centuries between 3700 and 2800 years ago. A study of 150 bones from the Bronze Age copper-mining complex at Great Orme in North Wales, UK, suggests the bones were deliberately chosen and shaped for specific mining tasks essential for copper extraction, especially in softer rock. “It’s exciting because it challenges assumptions that Bronze Age mining was dominated by metal and stone tools; instead, we are seeing a more diverse and adaptable toolkit,” says Olga Zagorodnia at the British Museum, London, who conducted the work with Harriet White, an independent archaeologist. Since the first archaeological excavations at the site in the early 1990s, over 30,000 bone fragments have been discovered. Previous studies focused on species identification, finding that over half belonged to cattle, with others mainly coming from sheep, goats …