Hunter-gatherers living along the shores of the Bay of Biscay crafted hunting tools from the bones of at least five different whale species 20,000 years ago, marking the oldest evidence of manufacturing objects from whale remains.
Although there is evidence of in what is now southern Spain around 150,000 years ago, current findings suggest that ancient humans didn’t regularly use coastal resources for food and raw materials until around along the Bay of Biscay.
But we have limited evidence of how early humans used marine resources because the sea level has risen by around 120 metres since the Late Palaeolithic in Europe, says at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in France. “We can’t excavate the seashore from 20,000 years ago, so everything we have is what was brought inland,” he says.
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PĂ©tillon and his colleagues analysed 83 previously unearthed bone tools from 26 inland caves and rock shelters in south-western France and northern Spain. These tools, which were mostly projectile points and spear shafts used for hunting animals such as bison and reindeer, had been based solely on their visual characteristics, such as being particularly porous.
To confirm these classifications, and to identify the whale species exploited, the team took tiny samples from each bone to analyse the chemical makeup of the collagen proteins. This revealed that only 71 tools were crafted from cetacean bones, of which 66 were definitely whales. About half of these were made from sperm whale bone, while the others were carved from fin, grey, blue and right or bowhead whale bones.
The team speculates that ancient humans might have selectively sought out sperm whale bones. “Sperm whales have very long, straight and narrow jaw bones, which are very usable and kind of an ideal block of material when you want to make long, straight implements,” says Pétillon.
The researchers then took further minute samples from 37 of the whale bone objects to determine their age. The oldest object, from northern Spain, was dated to around 20,200 to 19,600 years ago, making it the oldest known evidence of humans working with whale bone.
Pétillon says he was surprised that these tools weren’t evenly distributed through time, with most being from 17,500 to 16,000 years ago. “It’s a kind of fashion effect,” he says. “What we have is a few objects in the beginning and then a kind of boom and stop.”
Crucially, however, these hunter-gatherers weren’t actively whaling and instead capitalised on opportunities to scavenge from beached whales.
“The news of a stranding travels fast first, because it smells a lot [from a] long distance away, so people would concentrate from quite far,” Pétillon says. “So it might not have been the main driver of people going to the seashore, but when that happened, it probably had an influence on the movement of the people who probably changed their planned pattern of movement to go there.”
at the University of Valencia in Spain says that this study is important because archaeologists usually study tools made of land mammal bones. “It’s very innovative because we can see that every single resource available is used by these groups.”
Nature Communications
