Un résumé
NEANDERTHAL STRING THEORY
Article created on Tuesday, November 19, 2013
In a further study of Neanderthal occupation at Abri du Maras, Ardèche in France, the evidence is stacking up to support the view that this group was behaviourally flexible and capable of creating a variety of sophisticated tools including projectile points and more importantly, cord and string.
Fibrous materials that can be used to create cords are difficult to find in the archaeological record and have usually rotted away, so the oldest known string dated back only 30,000 years. However, perforations in small stone and tooth artefacts as well as shells from other Neanderthal sites in France suggested the pieces had once been threaded on string and worn as pendants.
Bruce Hardy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, explains that “The wear patterns provide circumstantial evidence of early use of string, but the evidence is not definitive.” These items could also have been threaded onto animal sinew.90,000 years ago
A new article in the journal
Quaternary Science Reviews examines much of the material recovered from the Abri du Maras site and appears to provide compelling evidence that twisted fibres were being created by Neanderthals at least 90,000 years ago.
At this site, Neanderthals also exploited a wide range of resources including large mammals, fish, ducks, raptors, rabbits, mushrooms, plants and wood.
However, Hardy and his colleagues have found slender, 0.7-millimetre-long plant fibres that are twisted together and were found near to some stone artefacts. Such fibres are not twisted together in nature, says the team, suggesting that the Neanderthals were responsible.
Twisted fibres: photo-mosaic of twisted vessel element (N6 583) O.M. 100×; twisted plant fibre . Image: Hardy et al
Experiments
As these fibres are not twisted in their natural state experiments were carried out involving incising, planing, whittling, scraping and boring. In all cases, no twisted fibres resulted.
Further experiments conducted by Bruce Hardy involved the scraping, cutting and slicing of a variety of non-woody plants (roots, tubers, reeds, etc.), and again these also produced no twisted fibres such as those observed.
While not definitive, the lack of twisted fibres in these experiments lends some credence to the hypothesis that these derive from cordage.
“If they are indeed remnants of string or cordage, then they would be the earliest direct evidence of string,” says Hardy.
“Albeit very fragmentary evidence.”Pre-dates arrival of Homo
sapiensThe date of 90,000 years is important, as the material that the researchers are suggesting is string predates the arrival of Homo
sapiens in Europe by at least 45,000 years.
This in turn suggests that the Neanderthals occupying the Abri du Maras site had learned the complex act of making and using cordage, rather than imitating modern humans. The uses and potential of this material has greater implications for understanding Neanderthal behaviour.