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New Day Cafe: The Oldest Known Whalebone Tools [1]
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Date: 2025-06-02
Scientists have recently dated the oldest known tools made from whalebone by humankind. Technological advances in dating have now led those scientists to conclude that the bones are 20,000 years old. These bones have been excavated for about a century from the Bay of Biscay, but it’s only now that dating techniques have made it possible to give more accurate dating.
Scientists have pinpointed the oldest known evidence of humans making tools from whale bone. The bones, fashioned into narrow projectiles for hunting reindeer or bison, had been uncovered in excavations dating back over a century in the Bay of Biscay near Spain and France. [image or embed]
From Smithsonian Magazine: www.smithsonianmag.com/...
“Stone Age hunter-gatherers may have been particularly interested in sperm whale skeletons, because the creatures are the only toothed species of the group, featuring long, straight jaw bones—perfect for crafting hunting tools, the researchers write in the paper.
Several of the whale species identified in the study still live in the Bay of Biscay, even though the modern climate is warmer and sea levels are higher today. That was an intriguing realization for the researchers.
‘What was more surprising to me—as an archaeologist more accustomed to terrestrial faunas—was that these whale species remained the same despite the great environmental difference between the Late Pleistocene and today,’ Pétillon tells Popular Science’s Laura Baisas. ‘In the same period, continental faunas are very different: the ungulates hunted include reindeer, saiga antelopes, bison, etc., all disappeared from Western Europe today.’
The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the tools. The oldest implement dated to around 19,600 to 20,200 years ago, while several others dated to between 16,000 and 17,500 years ago.”
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