Today, leather workers for the luxury brand Hermes use a tool called a lissoir to transform animal hides into lustrous bags. It turns out the tool has a long history: About 51,000 years before the expensive Birkin bag, Neanderthals were crafting and using similar lissoirs to soften and waterproof skins. Researchers reported in August that they had found four examples of the leather-working tool at two sites in southwestern France. Neanderthals fashioned them by grinding pieces of reindeer ribs against rocks, leaving a rounded tip that could be rubbed against a hide to polish it.
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