Ancient Secrets Unearthed: Whale Bones Reveal Humanity’s Earliest Tool-Making Mystery
Discovering The Oldest Known Whale Bone Tools
As described in a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers made their discovery by examining 83 bone tools that had been previously discovered in 26 caves and rock shelters along the Bay of Biscay in France and Spain. Researchers had long suspected that these bone tools were made from whales, but they set out to confirm this theory, to identify the whale species, and to calculate the tools’ age.
Nature CommunicationsA sample of the whale bone tools collected from along the French and Spanish coasts.
“The discovery of the whale bone objects in itself is not new,” Jean-Marc Pétillon, one of the study’s authors, explained to All That’s Interesting in an email. “What is new in this study is the identification of the whale species and the direct dating of the objects, which was not technically possible when the identification was first made.”
Researchers thus analyzed collagen protein sequences to determine what animal the tools came from. They found that, of the 83 bone tools, 71 were “confirmed as cetaceans,” which includes dolphins, porpoises, and whales. Eight of the bones, meanwhile, were from “large terrestrial mammals,” and there were four bone tools that the researchers were not able to identify.
Furthermore, the scientists were able to identify specific whale species among the cetacean bone tools. Analysis revealed that they were made from the bones of sperm whales, fin whales, blue whales, and gray whales. The bones also included either right whales or bowhead whales, which could not be differentiated.
