Ancient rope and tools reveal lost technologies
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Archaeologists in Germany examined a 35,000-year-old ivory lochstab from the Hohle Fels cave and determined it was likely used to twist fibers into rope.
Nicholas Conard and his team successfully created five meters of rope using the tool and cattail fibers, revealing the sophistication of prehistoric technologies. This discovery highlighted how little evidence remains of these “soft technologies”, items made from perishable materials like plants and animal products, because they decompose over time.
Emma Finestone of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History explained that the archaeological record is biased towards durable materials, obscuring the prevalence of these crucial technologies. Researchers found a six-millimeter piece of string created by Neanderthals 50,000 years ago in France, indicating a long history of fiber use potentially stretching back over half a million years.
Evidence from France and the Netherlands suggests people used fiber to attach tools to handles as early as 250,000 years ago, changing how they built and hunted. The invention of hafting, attaching a stone point to a wooden shaft, revolutionized tool use, and cordage facilitated long-distance transport of stone and enabled passive hunting with snares and nets.
Studies of present-day societies like the Wola of New Guinea show that creating cordage is extremely labor-intensive, requiring dozens of hours to make even a single bag, and would have significantly impacted the daily routines of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Archaeologists also uncovered 300,000-year-old wooden spears at a German lakeshore, demonstrating the interconnectedness of stone, plant, and animal resources in prehistoric technology.
