Humans Were Making Tools From Whale Bones 20,000 Years Ago, Study Reveals

Perhaps the greatest challenge to studying coastal prehistoric communities is the fact that, because of erosion and changing sea levels, those coastlines simply no longer exist. However, there are still ways to study them indirectly. After investigating whale bone tools and fragments from prehistoric sites in France and Spain, a team of researchers revealed that the oldest specimens in the collection date back to around 20,000 years ago. That places them among the oldest known examples of humans using whale parts as tools. Before whaling greatly reduced their populations, “whales were a valuable source of food and other resources,” the researchers wrote in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications. “They were thus a key part of subsistence for many coastal human groups worldwide, including hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers, with acquisition methods that included scavenging freshly beached animals, opportunistic killing and organized whaling.” Unfortunately, h ... Read full article.