PARIS:
The artifacts found on archaeological sites in France and Spain along the coast of the bisses show that humans have manufactured tools from whale bones for more than 20,000 years, again illustrating the pricing of prehistoric peoples.
The tools, mainly hunting tools such as projectile points, were shaped from bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said.
Sperm bones were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, whales to the right or arc – two indistinguishable species with the analytical method used in the study – and blue whales.
With maritime capacities by humans who only developed thousands of years later, hunter-gatherers of the ice age who made these tools could not have driven out the whales for their resources in Bisque bay, a Gulf of the Atlantic Ocean.
“These whales have probably been expeditiously acquired from blocked animals or derived carcasses, rather than hunting actively,” said biomolecular archaeologist Krista McGrath at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications. Reuters
