When humans learned to twist natural fibers together to make string or rope, it opened up a new world of useful inventions, from animal traps to clothing to sailboats. But natural fibers tend to decompose, and the oldest rope found, in a French Neanderthal cave, dates back only to around 50,000 years ago. But while we cannot yet pinpoint who invented rope, archaeologists in Israel have found evidence that manmade string existed more than 120,000 years ago. It comes from seashells found in Qafzeh Cave near Nazareth that had been populated by humans that long ago.
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The shells, some of which had been painted with red ochre, belonged to the species Glycymeris nummaria, a bivalve mollusk common throughout the Mediterranean and the northeastern Atlantic. What was particularly interesting was that the people of Qafzeh, which is 40 kilometers from the sea, had purposely brought back to the cave only naturally perforated clams – that is, shells that had developed a hole due to erosion from the sand and sea.
The researchers also compared the finds to shells unearthed at Misliya Cave, a site on Israel’s northern coast that was inhabited much earlier than Qafzeh, between 240,000 and 160,000 years ago. There archaeologists had also found a small cache of Glycymeris – but in this case the shells were whole.
The study notes that if you take a walk on a beach, about 40 percent of the Glycymeris you come across will be naturally perforated, meaning that both the Misliya and Qafzeh shells were selected deliberately, not randomly. But why? The difference only made sense if the shells at Qafzeh were intended to be strung up, Bar-Yosef Mayer suspected, but the evidence just wasn’t there.
Without the string, it was difficult to say that the shells were tied, but a team led by archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer of Tel Aviv University conducted an experiment to find more clues. Read what they did to determine whether the shells were actually jewelry at Haaretz. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Iris Groman-Yaroslavski)
Source: neatorama