Imagine for a moment a group of hunters who, after a day of hunting during which they have killed a group of large animals, gathers on the shore of a lake to chop them up, separate the meat and the skin and thus favor his transport. Once the quartering is done, the hunters leave the place but leave behind knives and other tools used, either due to forgetfulness or because they are useless, as well as the bones and remains of the animals that have been slaughtered. Now imagine that no one returns to the place for 60,000 years. After that time, a group of archaeologists unearths the remains and finds the tools, the knives whose wooden handles have disappeared deteriorated over time, bones of consumed animals and few other things. What can these archaeologists find out about life and customs? of the hunters exclusively analyzing those few remains?
I am not talking about fiction, what I have just recounted is what happened in a place in Israel, on the shores of an ancient lake, near the Jordan River. There, at a site known as the Nahal Mahanayeem Outlet, archaeologists have discovered the remains left behind by a group of hominids 60,000 years ago. The remains are reduced to a few stone tools that those distant relatives of ours left behind after hunting and butchering a few animals. No human remains have been found, but those of the animals that they hunted and slaughtered with their crude, but effective, utensils.
The site does not belong to a cave or a stable camp, it was simply a place of passage where they could do some work before continuing on their way, comments in “Talking with Scientists”, our guest, Juan Ignacio Martin Viveros, pre-doctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES). What is interesting is that there they abandoned some of the lithic tools used: flint knives, scrapers, projectile points, etc. It seems little to know the details of ancient hunters, however, thanks to what is known as “traceological analysis”, researchers have been able to extract information on the use and function of those tools, a result that also allows obtaining data on the way of life of the beings that made and used them.
Crafting a stone tool so that it can be used as a knife or spearhead requires a skill that has been honed over thousands of years. Depending on the period studied, the elaborate pieces preserve details that speak of the skill and knowledge of the craftsman who created them. But the traces left during manufacturing are not the only ones, use also leaves visible marks. Whether a knife is used to cut meat, as a hunting throwing object, or to cut wood or vegetables, the tool suffers from edge wear that depends on the activity for which it was used. These traces left by use are different depending on the material on which it has been used and can be identified, thanks to the study with high-magnitude electron microscopes and through laboratory simulations.
Laboratory simulations require in-depth knowledge and considerable skill in how to hit one stone with another to obtain sharp-edged flakes and give them the appropriate shape for each use. Furthermore, as hominids evolved, they developed increasingly complex manufacturing techniques, and simulations must mimic the techniques of each particular period. Once the lithic piece is made, it is necessary to imitate its use to cut and manipulate different materials, be it meat, leather or wood, in order to identify the marks that each action leaves on the tool. In other words, in order to identify the traces left by the hominids’ work on their tools 60,000 years ago, the process must be repeated today. This is how, a study like the one on the tools found at Nahal Mahanayeem Outlet requires the participation of numerous researchers both at the site and in the laboratory, where up to 100 different experimental activities have been carried out using the same flint that appears at the site. , coming from the Hula Valley.
This is how Juan Ignacio Martin Viveros and his colleagues have managed to find out that most of the pointed stone tools that have been recovered at the site were used as knives to cut meat. Even tools that are traditionally associated with projectile points were used in animal carcass processing activities and, to a lesser extent, in work related to skin and vegetables.
This aspect is very relevant since it breaks with the traditional schemes in which, when a pointed tool is found, it is usually associated with its use as a projectile. In the case of the Israeli site, these types of pointed tools were configured prior to arrival at the site and were not used for hunting the animals but for subsequent fleshing activities once they were already dead.
One of the most surprising data that has been extracted from the traceological analysis of the tools is that a good part of them had been coupled to a wooden handle, a handle that, over time, has disappeared, but left in the stone the typical marks of its presence.
I invite you to listen to Juan Ignacio Martin-Viveros, predoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES)
References:
Martin-Nurseries , JI , Oron , M , Ollé , A et al. Butchering knives and hafting at the Late Middle Paleolithic open-air site of Nahal Mahanayeem Outlet (NMO), Israel. Sci Rep 13, 112 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-27321-5