Archaeologists have discovered an enormous Neanderthal flint workshop in Poland which is believed to be the largest of its kind to be found outside of a cave in Central Europe.

Archaeologists have unearthed a massive 60,000-year-old Neanderthal flint workshop in Pietraszyno, Poland which is so far the largest of its kind that has ever been discovered outside of a cave in Central Europe. While estimates will no doubt continue to shoot up, archaeologists have so far recovered a whopping 17,000 stone products that were once created and used by Neanderthals here.

As Science in Poland reports, Dr. Andrzej Wiśniewski from the Institute of Archaeology, University of Wrocław, explained, “On the bank of the river in Pietraszyno, we discovered an unprecedented amount of flint products – 17,000 – abandoned by Neanderthals approximately 60,000 years ago.”

For the past year, Dr. Wiśniewski has been working with scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to learn more about this Neanderthal workshop in Poland. This research is crucial to our understanding of Neanderthals as up until very recently it was believed that they only began working with large numbers of flint tools much later and between 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.