Hunter-Gatherers Were Making Baskets 9,500 Years Ago, Researchers Say
Hunter-gatherer societies on the Iberian Peninsula were making sophisticated baskets with decorative geometric patterns 9,500 years ago, more than 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, researchers in Spain have reported.
The researchers also said that sandals that were found in the same cave as the baskets represent the “earliest and most diverse set of plant-based footwear documented in the prehistory of Europe.”
Francisco Martínez-Sevilla, a researcher of prehistory at the University of Alcalá and the lead author of a paper outlining the findings that was published this week in Science Advances, explained that carbon-14 dating tests had been carried out on 76 objects that were found by 19th-century miners in the Cueva de los Murciélagos, a cave in southern Spain.
The objects, including Europe’s oldest pair of sandals, a wooden stick and mace and exquisitely crafted baskets woven from reed and esparto, were previously believed to have been made by Neolithic farmers.
But the carbon-14 testing carried out by Dr. Martinez-Sevilla’s research group, which has recently excavated human remains in the cave, showed that the best-preserved baskets were, in fact, crafted by hunter-gatherer communities in the Mesolithic era, 9,500 years ago. Some show signs of sophisticated craftsmanship, with decorative, dyed geometric patterns, and were previously attributed to the Neolithic period, which came more than 2,000 years later.
But the carbon-14 testing carried out by Dr. Martinez-Sevilla’s research group, which has recently excavated human remains in the cave, showed that the best-preserved baskets were, in fact, crafted by hunter-gatherer communities in the Mesolithic era, 9,500 years ago. Some show signs of sophisticated craftsmanship, with decorative, dyed geometric patterns, and were previously attributed to the Neolithic period, which came more than 2,000 years later.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, that is not possible,’” Dr. Martinez-Sevilla said in a telephone interview, explaining how the discovery suggested that Mesolithic societies may have been more complex than previously imagined. “When we realized the magnitude of the findings, we published the paper with all the analysis in less than a year.”
In a statement about the findings, Dr. Martínez-Sevilla added, “The quality and technological complexity of the basketry makes us question the simplistic assumptions we have about human communities prior to the arrival of agriculture in southern Europe.”
Katina Lillios, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study, said the research “expands our understanding of the technologies of foraging peoples at the time.”
“Being able to trace changes over time in the form and techniques of plant-based technologies is also quite important, especially given how rarely plant-based artifacts are preserved,” Professor Lillios said in an email.
The study said the items found in the cave had been preserved over thousands of years because of the lack of humidity in the area combined with the wind that circulated inside, which kept the cave cool and dry, preventing the spread of bacteria.
“The preservation at the site of Cueva de los Murciélagos is truly remarkable,” Professor Lillios said, “and it is great to see that archaeologists have been able to date a larger sample of the plant-based artifacts found there.”
The research on the artifacts from the Cueva de los Murciélagos, which means cave of the bats, revealed human hair embedded within the fibers of the Mesolithic baskets. “Hair has never been found from this period,” Dr. Martinez- Sevilla said.
Dr. Martínez-Sevilla’s group now hopes to carry out carbon-14 testing on the human remains excavated in the cave, some of which may also be from the Mesolithic era.
Ruth Maícas Ramos, who is a curator at the National Museum of Archaeology in Madrid, which houses much of the collection, and who is an author of the paper published this week, pointed out that when a pioneering 19th-century archaeologist, Manuel de Gongora, published his findings about the miners’ discovery in 1868, “no one believed at the time they were so ancient” because they were so well-preserved and made with materials and weaving techniques still in use.
In fact, Ms. Maícas Ramos added, “the sandals are not dissimilar to modern-day espadrilles.”
But They’re Not Prada
Think of it as a kind of prehistoric Prada: Archaeologists have discovered what they say is the world’s oldest known leather shoe.
Perfectly preserved under layers of sheep dung (who needs cedar closets?), the shoe, made of cowhide and tanned with oil from a plant or vegetable, is about 5,500 years old, older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, scientists say. Leather laces crisscross through numerous leather eyelets, and it was worn on the right foot; there is no word on the left shoe.
While the shoe more closely resembles an L. L.Bean-type soft-soled walking shoe than anything by Jimmy Choo, “these were probably quite expensive shoes, made of leather, very high quality,” said one of the lead scientists, Gregory Areshian, of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
It could have fit a small man or a teenager, but was most likely worn by a woman with roughly size 7 feet. (According to the Web site www.celebrityshoesize.com, that would be slightly roomy for Sarah Jessica Parker, whose Manolo Blahniks are size 6 ½, and a tad tight for Sarah Palin, who, during the 2008 campaign, wore red Double Dare pumps by Naughty Monkey, size 7 ½.)
The shoe was discovered by scientists excavating in a huge cave in Armenia, part of a treasure trove of artifacts they found that experts say provide unprecedented information about an important and sparsely documented era: the Chalcolithic period or Copper Age, when humans are believed to have invented the wheel, domesticated horses and produced other innovations.
Along with the shoe, the cave, designated Areni-1, has yielded evidence of an ancient winemaking operation, and caches of what may be the oldest known intentionally dried fruits: apricots, grapes, prunes. The scientists, financed by the National Geographic Society and other institutions, also found skulls of three adolescents (“subadults,” in archaeology-speak) in ceramic vessels, suggesting ritualistic or religious practice; one skull, Dr. Areshian said, even contained desiccated brain tissue older than the shoe, about 6,000 years old.
But The Earliest Example of Human Involves Woodworking
Nearly half a million years ago, humans in Africa were assembling wood into large structures, according to a study published Wednesday that describes notched and tapered logs buried under sand in Zambia.
The discovery drastically pushes back the historical record of structural woodworking. Before, the oldest known examples of this craft were 9,000-year-old platforms on the edge of a British lake.
Ancient wood products are extremely rare because the organic material typically degrades over thousands of years, said Annemieke Milks, an archaeologist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the new study, which appeared in the journal Nature. “It almost never preserves,” she said.
The logs were discovered by an international team of scientists in 2019 near an enormous waterfall in Zambia known as the Kalambo Falls. There, the Kalambo River drops 770 feet before flowing into Lake Tanganyika.
For archaeologists, the site has a checkered history. In the 1950s, a British archaeologist, Desmond Clark, found ancient stone tools near the falls, as well as pieces of wood that he proposed had been digging sticks and spears. Other pieces looked as if they had been burned; it would have been some of the oldest evidence of people making fires.
By the early 2000s, however, much of the luster of Dr. Clark’s discovery had disappeared. For one thing, he never got a firm fix on the age of the wood. The only reliable method available at the time to determine age was radiocarbon dating, which can be used only on objects less than 50,000 years old. The wood pieces at Kalambo Falls proved to be older than that — but how much older?
Other researchers questioned whether people had actually crafted the wooden objects. Dr. Clark acknowledged that they might have been branches that had fallen into the Kalambo River and were reshaped by sand grains carried in the water flowing toward the falls.
In 2006, Lawrence Barham, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, and his colleagues returned to the Kalambo Falls. By then, researchers had developed a new way to determine the age of archaeological sites, taking advantage of how quartz grains can act like geological clocks. As naturally occurring uranium atoms break down in the ground, they release energy that gets trapped inside the quartz. Over time, the grains store more and more energy, which scientists can later measure in their labs. The more energy, the older the specimen.
On their trip to the Kalambo Falls in 2006, the scientists found more stone tools. Geoff Duller, a geophysicist at Aberystwyth University in Wales, collected sand from the riverbanks, and spent the next few years measuring its trapped energy. He determined that the oldest layers of sediment that contained stone tools were 300,000 to 500,000 years old.
That meant the tools were made well before the evolution of modern humans. The scientists suspect they might have been made by an earlier species present in Zambia, known as Homo heidelbergensis.
The researchers made another trip to the falls, in 2019, and Dr. Duller had planned to use an even more powerful dating technique based on feldspar grains rather than quartz.
But when they arrived at Dr. Clark’s old site, they discovered it had vanished. In the 13 years since their last trip, the river had shifted away. All that was left was a reed-filled marsh.
Fortunately, Dr. Barham had prepared a Plan B. Before the expedition, he used Google Earth to spot a promising strip of beach along the Kalambo River. When they got there, Dr. Barham immediately saw a stick jutting out of the sand. In the water, he found a sharpened tip that fit perfectly on one end of the stick. If he had come a year later, the fragments might have washed away. “It was just a moment of luck,” Dr. Barham said.
In the same area, the researchers found stone tools along with wood shaped into wedges and V’s — clear signs of handiwork.
Dr. Duller used the feldspar grains to determine the age of the artifacts. He found that the objects came from three distinct ages: 487,000 years ago, 390,000 years and 324,000 years. It’s possible that people lived by the river throughout that time or returned to it over thousands of generations.
At the end of the field season in 2019, the researchers made their most spectacular discovery. In the oldest layer of sand, they uncovered a four-and-a-half-foot log of a small African tree known as Zeyher’s bushwillow. Near the log’s tapered end, the researchers noticed a large notch. When they dug farther down, they realized the notched part of the log was resting on an even bigger tree trunk.
As the researchers exposed the wood, they took high-resolution photographs. The pictures revealed chop marks on the log and the trunk, suggesting that people had worked them with axes and scraping tools. “This is deliberate,” Dr. Barham said. “This is intentional.”
Dr. Milks said taking photographs of the ancient wooden objects as soon as they were discovered was crucial for understanding how they were crafted. The waterlogged sand allowed the wood to survive for hundreds of thousands of years almost unchanged. But when ancient wood is exposed to the air again, it can lose essential clues in a matter of minutes. “It can shrink, it can warp — all sorts of things can happen,” Dr. Milks said.
Dr. Barham and his colleagues collaborated with John Mukopa, a traditional Zambian woodworker, to interpret their findings. They suspect that people cut down live trees with stone axes. They then worked the wood so that the two pieces could fit together into some larger structure.
Dr. Barham speculated that the log and the trunk were part of a structure built above the marshy land along the Kalambo River. “It’s about keeping your feet dry, or keeping your food dry, or keeping your firewood dry,” he said.
“Put yourself in the mind of somebody living there almost 480,000 years ago with a big brain,” he said. “Don’t be frightened of complex suggestions.”
