Sunday, July 24, 2016

40 thousand year old tool to make rope discovered in Germany.

 Via the always good History Blog, we learn that archaeologists excavating the Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany have discovered a 40,000-year-old tool used to make rope. The piece was unearthed in August of last year by an international team led by Prof. Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen. Carved from mammoth ivory, the object is eight inches long and the wider side is dotted with four holes 7-9 millimeters in diameter. The holes are incised with deep spirals which are not decorative, but practical features that help thread plant fibers into strong rope.


The mammoth rope maker tool in situ


Excavators found the rope-making tool in archaeological horizon Va near the base of the Aurignacian deposits of the site. Like the famous female figurines and the flutes recovered from the Hohle Fels, the rope-making tool dates to about 40,000 years ago, the time when modern humans arrived in Europe.  I for one would like to see more information as to how they think they have accurately dated this for so long ago, but ten thousand years ago, or forty, it is still a startling find.

The pieces assembled together. 


The spiral carving was made to guide the plant fibers through the tool. Rope or string prints have been found before in Paleolithic clay and there are some depictions of ropes in artwork from this period, but next to nothing is known about the process by which the first anatomically modern humans in Europe produced rope.



Swabians demonstrating how the tool was used to make rope.  Works quite well.  There is a YouTube video, but the Swabians don't get the internet and have actively prevented its embedding.  You can nevertheless see it here.


This innovative tool demonstrates, I believe, how truly modern humans were even 40k years ago. This is a sophisticated device that required quite a bit of thought and planning to build and use.  I imagine it is the product of a lot of trial and error by many people over many years, likely named something like "Thag" or "Grond."

6 comments:

  1. It's made of bone so the carbon 14 test should get it to within 1000 years or maybe even less. I saw an article on this elsewhere and it's very interesting. Some of the nerds thought that it might be a musical instrument until a guy familiar with the craft, said, "no, it's for twisting rope".

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    1. The bone is that old, but how do we know the tool is that age? The cavemen may have used really old bone to make their tool.
      I'm sure there is a reliable way to date it, I'd just like to see more info on how they did it and what their level of certainty is.

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    2. You'd want to make the tool out of fresh bone because it's easier to carve without being brittle. Old dried bone tends to crack. I know of this myself from trying to carve old bone. Getting those grooves in the bone would be much more accurately done with a fresh bone. There is no way to tell when they carved it, though. It comes down to speculation. Remember, they were likely using flint knives, not metal, to do the carving.

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    3. Yeah, amazing considering what they had to work with. Their most impressive tool was their brain.

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  2. C (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by radiocarbon dating are around 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally permit dating of older samples.

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    1. Is this really true? I'm no expert, but given the math, and the flatness of the exponential decay curve, I'd guess nothing over 10,000 years could be fixed with any certainty at all.

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