The other thing this article made me think of: the stone tools get stored in a cave and forgotten (the small band of users get wiped out for some other reason), then another band finds the cave (because of a rainstorm) and the tools and the broken bones nearby. They figure it out and “own” the cave and the tools for a few years/generations until history repeats. Over the 200,000 year use of the cave, maybe it sat dormant for 1-5,000 years at a time. Imagine finding a cave in a mostly empty land, and finding useful artifacts inside.
