Puzzling prehistoric artifacts served a practical purpose: ropemaking

In 2015, archaeologists working at a cave in southwestern Germany found an enigmatic perforated baton in a cave called Hohle Fels. It was a near-perfect match for an artifact found in 1983 in a cave down the road. Carved from single pieces of mammoth ivory, the Hohle Fels baton—roughly 20 centimeters long, about the length of a large paperback book—had multiple holes with spiraling grooves around the openings . Similar objects have been found elsewhere in Germany and in nearby France, often made from ivory or antler. They date from the last ice age, more than 35,000 years ago, a time when human hunters and foragers were flourishing across Europe and creating cave paintings, figurines, and other expressions of creativity . In the past, many archaeologists interpreted these batons as a noisemaker or ritual object, a sort of ice age magic wand or scepter. “Ritualism was something they used to ascribe everything to,” says Wei Chu, an archaeologist at Leiden University. In a new paper out today in Science Advances , researchers suggest the tools were used for a more prosaic purpose: to make rope . Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard, who has been excavating at Hohle Fels for more than 20 years, was convinced the batons served a practical function. Finding a well-preserved example of one in situ gave him a chance to explore what it might be. “The spirals are really precise—it looks...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research