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, however, prehistoric coastal archaeological sites are fragile, and have eroded or are now underwater. Given that the creation of whale bone tools necessarily required the presence of humans along the coast, they provide a valuable opportunity to study prehistoric interactions between humans and marine life, as well as ancient whale ecology.

The team—including researchers from The Autonomous University of Barcelona, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and the University of Vienna—analyzed 83 bone objects clearly modified by humans and 90 unworked bone fragments which still showed signs of human processing. Radiocarbon dating (which determines the age of organic materials) revealed that the oldest bones in the collection date back to around 19,000 to 20,000 years ago, “making it the oldest evidence of whale-bone working to our knowledge,” the researchers explained.

Furthermore, they discovered through mass spectrometry (which reveals the properties of molecules) that the bones came from species including blue whales, fin whales, sperm whales, right whales or bowhead whales, as well as gray whales. While today gray whales mostly exist in the North Pacific Ocean and the Arctic, the other species still inhabit France and Spain’s Bay of Biscay. Interestingly, the analyses also indicate that the prehistoric whales had marginally different feeding habits in comparison to their modern counterparts.

“Even though the Paleolithic seashore itself is no longer accessible, and the range of taxa (animal classifications) identified here might not reflect the full range of species present in the Bay of Biscay at that period, the analysis of these whale bones brought inland by the hunter-gatherers opens a unique window into whale ecology,” the researchers explained, “and the marine environments in the northeastern Atlantic at that period, and on the timing and nature of their utilization by human groups.”

The study provides new insight into prehistoric coastal technologies, specifically in relation to some of the marine animals that have fueled human industry for 20,000 years.