This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
When an abstract-looking ivory artifact emerged from the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany in 2015, archaeologists didn’t know quite what to make of it. Previously, this same cave had yielded what may be the world’s oldest musical flutes, as well as one of humanity’s earliest pieces of figurative art, the iconic Venus of Hohle Fels. At first glance, this strange new discovery — a 20-centimeter rod perforated with four small holes — seemed comparatively unspectacular. But it has since revealed far more about the lives of Europe’s prehistoric hunter-gatherers than its unassuming appearance would have suggested.
Fashioned from the tusk of a mammoth more than 35,000 years ago, this perforated baton — a type of artifact called a lochstab — was initially interpreted as a symbolic object associated with prestige or power. But Nicholas Conard, whose team discovered the item, wasn’t so sure.
Noticing that each of the baton’s holes was lined with carefully carved spiral grooves, he began to suspect that the lochstab might have been a tool used by twisting some other material through these perforations. “If you’re pushing something through a hole and rotating it ... you’re very quickly in the world of fiber,” says Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Sure enough, when he and his colleagues tried threading cattail fibers through these holes, they found that the grooves helped to orient the strands. Within 10 minutes, the group had woven the fibers into five meters of thick, strong rope.
Yet while these experiments might have helped to solve one archaeological mystery, they also highlighted a much larger problem. The inhabitants of Hohle Fels must have manufactured significant quantities of rope, yet none of it has survived, and all that remains is the most durable component of this ancient production system — the ivory lochstab.
“There’s certainly a lot of bias in what we’re viewing in the archaeological record, because we are focusing on the things that preserve,” says paleoanthropologist Emma Finestone at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. As a consequence, archaeologists rely heavily on stone tools and bone artifacts to reconstruct our prehistory, while objects made from less durable plant and animal products remain largely overlooked. Yet these soft technologies played a huge role in shaping the survival strategies and daily lives of our ancestors.
“We’re missing 90 percent-plus of what is happening during a [prehistoric] day, and a lot of that uses technology that we don’t think about,” says Bruce Hardy, a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College in Ohio. The problem facing archaeologists, therefore, is how to study a technology that they can’t actually find.
The Rise of Soft Technology
The oldest surviving example of human-made fiber is a six-millimeter-long piece of string made by Neanderthals some 50,000 years ago. It’s an exceedingly rare example of preserved ancient fiber, and how it managed to withstand the ravages of time isn’t clear. Discovered by Hardy and his colleagues at the Abri du Maras rock shelter in France, this small length of three-ply cord indicates that fiber has deep roots in the human lineage.
“This is probably a very old technology that goes way back much further than this, back to an ancestor shared by modern humans and Neanderthals,” Hardy says. In other words, more than half a million years ago.
So far the oldest evidence of fiber use dates back about 250,000 years, inferred from markings on stone tools from France and the Netherlands. The marks suggest the tools may have been hafted, or attached to a handle with some type of string or cord. While the bindings have long since decomposed, the traces they left behind hint that fiber technologies aided the survival of the prehistoric human species that occupied Europe long before Homo sapiens got a foothold on the continent 45,000 years ago.
The invention of hafting may represent a “revolutionary moment” in our technological history, says Veerle Rots, an archaeologist at the University of Liège in Belgium who led the experimental work on the Hohle Fels lochstab. “It fundamentally changes the use of stone tools and allows a whole range of new possibilities in how you’re conceptualizing a tool,” she says.
A sharpened stone point, for example, suddenly becomes part of a hunting weapon when hafted onto a wooden shaft. A stone handaxe can be wielded with significantly greater force and from a wider range of angles once fastened onto a handle. What made cordage like rope, string and twine so transformative, therefore, was that it connected other technologies together to radically expand what prehistoric humans could build, carry and hunt.
The transport of stone for making tools, for instance, was an essential logistical operation that may have depended on soft materials from the very beginning. According to Finestone’s research, toolmaking hominins moved high-quality stones over long distances as early as 3 million years ago — cumbersome loads that would have been very difficult to move with bare hands alone.
“It would have been really helpful to them to have some mechanism for carrying cobbles,” she says. Such receptacles have never been found. But if they were used, they were probably made from perishable materials like leather and fiber.
Cordage likely also aided our ancestors by enabling passive hunting with snares and nets. Unlike handheld weapons, these tools could catch prey in the user’s absence, allowing hunter-gatherers to focus on other tasks. Rock art in Spain from around 7,500 years ago even appears to depict people climbing sophisticated rope ladders to access beehives, illustrating how fiber technologies opened up new foraging opportunities.
“Once you figure out this technology, you’re just going to keep applying it,” says Hardy. “You’re going to become dependent on it.”
Ties to Daily Life
As cordage became essential for survival, the need to continually produce it fundamentally shaped the daily routines of ancient hunter-gatherers, Hardy says.
“You find out very rapidly that you need a lot of footage of cord in order to make anything,” he says. One year in a class he taught, Hardy and his students built a raft out of sycamore saplings lashed together with what he estimates was 100 meters of rope. “It was hours and hours and hours of making cordage to do that.”
Ethnographic studies of present-day traditional societies attest to the labor involved. The Wola of New Guinea, for example, incorporate string or fibers into 95 percent of the items they produce, from hunting weapons to musical instruments. Anthropologists have found that it takes the Wola between 65 and 80 hours of twisting to generate enough string to manufacture a single bag — and that’s on top of 14 hours of foraging to collect the raw materials. Given that the Wola live in permanent villages, this time investment may not present any major issues, but for nomadic hunter-gatherers, the need to produce such enormous quantities of cordage would have significantly impacted their ability to move around.
The Neanderthals of Abri du Maras, for example, made their cord from the inner bark of pine or another conifer, which can only be harvested in the spring and early summer, when the sap begins to rise and the inner bark thickens. Once collected, the bark must be soaked in water for about two weeks before it can be broken up into usable fibers.
The lengthy nature of this process would therefore have dictated the seasonal work schedule of mobile hunter-gatherers, who would not be able to move on until a sufficient quantity of cordage had been manufactured. “It’s going to be impacting your daily life,” says Hardy. “You’re going to be making cordage all the time, at least during certain times of year, and storing it up.”
So while stone flakes for use as cutting tools, scrapers and weapons could be struck from larger chunks of flint whenever needed, activities like rope making, hide tanning and woodworking required seasonal planning, sustained labor and group decision-making.
The more researchers discover about these soft materials, the more they understand about how these technologies defined the rhythm of everyday life in the Stone Age, the large swath of human history from about 3.3 million until 4,000 years ago. “We’ll learn some new stuff from stone tools and from animal bones, but we’re not going to see this other side of daily life that is going on unless we can see the perishable material,” says Hardy.
That material isn’t just limited to fiber. At an ancient lakeshore exposed by a mine near Schöningen, Germany, archaeologists discovered a remarkable assemblage of 300,000-year-old wooden spears, along with bones of some of the horses and other animals they were used to kill. The spears survived because anaerobic conditions at the waterlogged site prevented microorganisms from breaking them down. Made by an extinct human species, these remarkable weapons were expertly worked into aerodynamic forms, thus enhancing their lethality and revealing a level of technological sophistication that stone tools alone fail to capture.
At Schöningen, “you see how the stone articulates with the animal resources and the botanical resources, so you can see that the connections between stone, plant and animal resources are all essential,” says Conard, who currently directs the excavation of the site.
Sites like Hohle Fels, Abris du Maras and Schöningen provide glimpses into a far richer technological world, reminding us of what’s missing from the archaeological record, says Conard. “It’s only called the Stone Age because all we find is stone, not because there was only stone.” 
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.
Lead image: N.J. CONARD & V. ROTS / SCIENCE ADVANCES 2024
