How Ice Age ancestors made ropes

2024-02-03 08:29:18

Life in the Stone Age was primarily an outdoor activity and, as such, difficult to imagine without ropes and cords. Especially during the Ice Age, which only ended 12,000 years ago. Tendons or leather straps may have been sufficient to sew animal skins into warm clothing, but back then our ancestors also killed huge animals and had to transport the prey away somehow. Long, strong ropes were definitely an advantage. But how were they made back then?

The archaeologists Nicholas Conard from the University of Tübingen and Veerle Rots from the Université de Liège in Belgium, who work on Paleolithic sites, have now im specialist journal Science Advances a Paleolithic find is presented, in which they see evidence that it must have been a rope-making tool.

From a famous site

It is an 8-inch-long board-shaped piece of ivory with four holes, the walls of which have been carefully decorated with spiral grooves. Broken into 13 fragments, it was found during excavations in Hohle Fels in the summer of 2015. This is a cave in the Ach valley in the Swabian Alb not far from Blaubeuren, in which a number of ivory artifacts have already been found, including the “Venus from Hohle Fels” in 2008, which is up to 35,000 years old and is the earliest known representation of a human body may apply. Their creators, the bearers of a cultural stage called the Aurignacians, were probably the first members of anatomically modern humans aka Homo sapiens, who, 40,000 years ago, had permanently penetrated into Central Europe, which had previously only been inhabited by Neanderthals – whether they recently reported from Thuringia It is not certain that older traces of H. sapiens already indicate a permanent presence.

The fragments of the perforated rod – the technical term for such a structure – found in Hohle Fels are also between 35,000 and 40,000 years old. The layer found at a depth of around 3.5 meters below the modern cave floor level cannot be dated more precisely. Now this is not the first perforated ivory board from the Aurignacian period that came to light in the Swabian Alb. In 1931, three pieces of this category were found in the Vogelherd Cave in the Lone Valley.

If you can’t think of an interpretation, it must be a cult

However, the chief archaeologist at the time, Gustav Riek, did not interpret them as tools. In one he saw a kind of chest ornament, in the other a symbolic object and in the third, which only had a hole, a whirring device, like the one that members of some peoples in Australia still use today to produce whirring sounds in cultic contexts. A fourth perforated rod was found in 1983 in Geißenklösterle, also in the Achtal, and was also considered something like art by its excavator Joachim Hahn.

Most other known hole sticks only have one hole and are made of reindeer antlers. They appear particularly frequently at the very end of the Ice Age in the Magdalenian cultural stage, where they are sometimes interpreted as symbols of prominent rank and are referred to as “Bâton de commandement” (command staff). However, their true function is unclear.

• Ulf von Rauchhaupt

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• Ulf von Rauchhaupt

• Published/Updated:

• Ulf von Rauchhaupt

• Published/Updated:

• Recommendations: 2

Conard and Rots now have evidence that at least their hole stick from Hohle Fels – and probably the other four from the Aurignacian period in the Swabian Alb – is actually a tool, even if it is made of the material At that time people mainly carved beads for decorative necklaces and magical little animal figures. Could it be that it was used to turn ropes? Using only a replica of the find from Hohle Fels, the researchers carried out experiments with various raw materials: deer tendons and plant fibers from flax, hemp, cattail, linden, willow and nettle. It worked with linden, willow and cattail – with the latter even particularly well.

Further experiments with it then suggested that the perforated rod was used to twist thick ropes from this marsh plant, which most likely thrived in sheltered locations in the Aurignacian Epoch Valley. “The number of holes determined the strength of the rope,” the researchers write. “Because each strand required one person to turn and maintain tension and one person on the hole rod, it would have taken three to four people to turn a rope with a four-hole hole rod. In our experiments with cattails and four to five participants, we created five meters of strong, supple rope in ten minutes.”