Oldest-known whale bone tools discovered in a Spanish cave
Prehistoric stone tools are among some of the oldest and important pieces of evidence we have of a time when our species began to evolve a higher level of intelligence. Many of these tools were also made from animal bones–including the bones of some of the biggest animals on the planet. New research finds that humans living up to 20,000 years ago may have been making tools out of whale bones. The discovery not only adds more to the story of early human tool use, but gives a glimpse into ancient whale ecology. The findings are detailed in a study published May 27 in the journal Nature Communications.
'That humans frequented the seashore, and took advantage of its resources, is probably as old as humankind,' Jean-Marc Pétillon, an archaeologist at the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès in France and study co-author, tells Popular Science. 'There is evidence of whale scavenging at the site of Dungo 5 in Angola dating to 1 million years.'
For our Paleolithic ancestors living in coastal areas, the sturdy bones of large whales were potentially an excellent resource for various tools. However, many prehistoric coastal archaeological sites are fragile and are at risk of rising sea levels, making reconstructing the past interactions between marine mammals and humans a challenge for scientists..
'The tools were dated between 20,000 and 16,000 years before [the] present, a period way before the invention of agriculture, and during which all human groups in the world lived a life of nomadic hunter-gatherers,' says Pétillon. 'Climatically, this is the last part of the last glaciation, with a climate much colder than today.'
That colder climate brought a sea level that was roughly almost 400 feet lower than it is today. With this change in sea level, we have no direct evidence of the human occupations on the shore, since the rise in sea level either wiped them out or the settlements lay buried under 300 or so feet of water.
With this lack of evidence Paleolithic people have historically been viewed as inland hunters. Those living in present day western Europe would have hunted red deer, reindeer, bison, horse, and ibex. While they did hunt inland, there is a growing body of evidence from the last 20 years showing that they also took advantage of the Paleolithic seashore.
'There are studies showing that people also gathered seashells, hunted seabirds, fished marine fish, etc., as a complement to terrestrial diet, and these studies were made possible because Paleolithic people carried remains of marine origin away from the seashore, into inland sites,' explains Pétillon. 'Our study adds whales to the lot. It is one more contribution showing that Late Paleolithic humans also regularly frequented the seashore and used its resources.'
[ Related: Ice age humans made needles from animal bones, archeologists discover. ]
In the new study, the team analyzed 83 bone tools that were excavated from sites around Spain's Bay of Biscay and 90 additional bones uncovered from Santa Catalina Cave in Spain. They used mass spectrometry and radiocarbon dating to identify which species the bones belonged to and estimate the age of the samples.
The bones come from at least five species of large whales–sperm, fin, blue, gray, and either right whales or bowheads. The latter two species are indistinguishable using this technique. The oldest whale specimens are dated to roughly 19,000 to 20,000 years ago, representing some of the earliest known evidence of humans using the remains of whales to make tools. Some of the whale bone points themselves were over 15 inches long.
'Most of the objects made of whale bone are projectile points, part of the hunting equipment. They can be very long and thick, and were probably hafted on spear-style projectiles rather than arrows (and the use of the spearthrower is documented in this period),' says Pétillon. 'The main raw material used to manufacture projectile points at that period is antler, because it is less brittle and more pliable than bone, but whale bone was preferred in certain cases probably because of its large dimensions.'
Most of these whale species identified in this study are still found in the Bay of Biscay and northeastern North Atlantic to this day. However, gray whales are now primarily limited to the North Pacific Ocean and Arctic. Additional chemical data from the tools also suggests that the feeding habits of the ancient whales were slightly different than those living today. According to the authors, this is likely due to behavioral or environmental changes. That the whales in the area have stayed relatively the same was particularly intriguing for Pétillon.
'What was more surprising to me—as an archeologist more accustomed to terrestrial faunas—was that these whale species remained the same despite the great environmental difference between the Late Pleistocene and today,' he says. 'In the same period, continental faunas are very different: the ungulates hunted include reindeer, saiga antelopes, bison, etc., all disappeared from Western Europe today.'
Importantly, the findings here do not imply that active whaling was occurring. The techniques at the time would not allow humans to hunt sperm, blue, or fin whales and the team believes that these populations took advantage of whale strandings to harvest the bones for tools.
'The earliest evidence of active whaling is much younger, around 6,000 [years] before present in Korea (site of Bangudae) and maybe around 5,000 before present in Europe (Neolithic sites in the Netherlands),' says Pétillon.
Future studies could look at the systematic way that these ancient Atlantic Europeans systematically used the seashore and how they developed their ocean hunting techniques.
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