Prehistoric tools reveal how humans survived the Ice Age

Small artifacts discovered at an archaeological site in Wyoming, United States, where a mammoth was slaughtered 13,000 years ago, are revealing intriguing details about How Prehistoric Americans Survived the Last Ice Age .

Archaeologists found 32 fragments of needles made from animal bones buried almost 5 meters underground at the La Prele site in Converse County. Although they are not the oldest needles in the archaeological record, for the first time scientists have been able to identify what the needles were made of by analyzing protein information contained in bone collagen.

“We assumed they would be made from bison or mammoth bones, which make up most of the animal bones found at La Prele and other sites of the same age in the Great Plains and Rockies of North America,” said Wyoming State Archaeologist Spencer Pelton, lead author of the new needle study published Nov. 27 in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

Instead, the study found that the needles were created from the bones of red foxes, bobcats, cougars, bobcats, the extinct American cheetah, and hares or rabbits.

“It was extremely surprising that these needles were made from the bones of small carnivores,” Pelton said.

The scientists reached their conclusions by extracting collagen from the artifacts and analyzing its chemical composition, specifically short chains of amino acids known as peptides, and then comparing these results with peptide data from animals known to have existed during that period in North America. It is a technique known in zooarchaeology as mass spectrometry, or ZooMS.

The La Prele Mammoth site was discovered in 1986, and archaeologists believe that a group of prehistoric people killed or found a dead young mammoth there, establishing a temporary camp to process its carcass. Given the age of the site and some distinctive artifacts, the people who camped at La Prele were likely from the Clovis culture, one of the oldest known human populations in North America.

A needle in the haystack

Finding the tiny needles required thorough and precise excavation, Pelton said. The team identified concentrations of buried artifacts by digging multiple 1-square-meter test pits until they identified relatively dense concentrations of artifacts. Larger excavations of 25 to 30 square meters revealed the floors of dozens of temporary dwellings.

However, the team only found the needles when they used a fine 1.6 millimeter sieve to filter the excavated sediment. “Relatively few archaeological sites are excavated with this level of precision, so it is possible that bone needles were lost during previous excavations at other sites,” Pelton said.

Prehistoric individuals occupied the site at the end of the last Ice Age, and temperatures would have been 5 to 7 degrees Celsius colder than they are today, Pelton said. To survive such low temperatures, humans likely created custom-made clothing with tight seams to protect themselves from the elements.

However, clothing is perishable and virtually invisible in the archaeological record of this period, except for the needles that produced the clothing.

“This type of climate would have required robust, tailored parkas of the type produced by historic Inuit,” Pelton said. “[As roupas] They probably incorporated fur fringes around the sleeves and hood, so we believe people were hunting animals like foxes, cats and hares in the first place.”

Before the invention of needles, humans likely wore looser, more drapey clothing made with pointed tools called awls, which created more widely spaced, coarsely perforated seams, the study noted. Needles also made it possible to decorate clothing, and the oldest bead, made from hare bone, found in the Americas was previously discovered in the same location.

For thread, early Americans likely used tendon from the connective tissues of large mammals, Pelton said.

Evidence of animal capture

Foxes and wild cats are difficult to kill using traditional hunting tools like spears, so Pelton suspects that Stone Age hunters captured the small carnivores with traps, although direct evidence of this practice has not been found at sites from that time in North America. North.

It makes sense that early humans used the thin paw bones of dogs, cats and hares to make needles, said Ian Gilligan, honorary associate of archeology at the University of Sydney in Australia. He was not involved in the research, but is the author of a recent study on the development of needles with an eye – the hole in the needle through which the thread is threaded.

“These distal limb and paw bones are usually the right size and shape and need relatively little work to be turned into needles, mainly by sharpening one end and drilling a hole in the opposite end,” he explained.

“Other bones from these animals are thicker or not as straight, and comparable bones from larger animals like bison would require more work to form into needles,” he added. “For hunter-gatherers, making needles to sew custom clothing is a time-consuming task, so any strategy that makes needle manufacturing more efficient will have survival advantages.”

Once equipped with warm, tight-fitting clothing, humans had the ability to expand their territory into places they were previously excluded from due to the threat of hypothermia or death from cold exposure, the study found, making eye needles a pre-war innovation. extremely important history.

It’s no “coincidence” that needles are found at the oldest sites in North America — the continent likely remained unoccupied until humans had the ability to make custom clothing, Gilligan noted.

“Regardless of how good they were as hunter-gatherers, humans could never advance into regions like northern Siberia without sophisticated clothing,” Gilligan said. “Without needles, humans could not cross the land bridge between Siberia and North America, a dry corridor that became exposed due to low sea levels as the climate grew colder at the end of the last ice age,” he added.

Gilligan said the needles discovered at the Wyoming site are smaller and more delicate, but similar to the world’s oldest needles, used in Siberia 40,000 years ago and in northern China between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago.

“Compared to loose garments like capes and cloaks, tailored garments offer better wind protection… Needles would also be useful for sewing the inner layers into sets of multilayer garments, which provide additional thermal insulation — the beginning of underwear,” he said.

The research adds to a growing body of studies suggesting that hunting strategies among hunter-gatherers “were not always about getting food.”

“Some of the major technological innovations and trends in human prehistory may have been related to clothing rather than food,” Gilligan said. “And the invention of needles is perhaps just one example.”

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This content was originally published in Prehistoric tools reveal how humans survived the Ice Age on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil