In a new twist on Neandertals’ Stone Age accomplishments, our close evolutionary relatives wound bark fibers into strings that could have been used to make clothes, rope, nets and other practical but perishable items, a new study suggests.
A fragment of a string made from three bark fibers was found attached to a stone tool at a French Neandertal site. That tool was embedded in sediment dating from 52,000 to 41,000 years ago, say paleoanthropologist Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and colleagues.
Researchers previously had unearthed stone tools attached to individual, twisted fibers at the site, France’s Abri du Maras rock-shelter. Those individual fibers once may have been part of cords, too. But as a piece of an actual woven string, the new discovery — described April 9 in Scientific Reports — represents the oldest direct evidence of string making.
Previously, the earliest known cords were made by humans in western Asia, who twisted wild flax fibers into twine as early as around 32,000 years ago (SN: 9/10/09).
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