Handles For Stone Age Tools!!

Tools with handles even more ancient
New finds move back the origins of Stone Age tools that were attached
to handles with adhesive material
By Bruce Bower
Web edition : 1:21 pm
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In a gripping instance of Stone Age survival, Neandertals used a
tarlike substance to fasten sharpened stones to handles as early as
70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.


Stone points and sharpened flakes unearthed in Syria since 2000
contain the residue of bitumen — a natural, adhesive substance — on
spots where the implements would have been secured to handles of some
type, according to a team led by archaeologist Eric Boëda of
University of Paris X, Nanterre. The process of attaching a tool to a
handle is known as hafting. The Neandertals likely found the bitumen
in nearby tar sands, the team reports.


Stone tools of the type found at the Syrian site are typically
attributed to Neandertals. These evolutionary cousins of modern humans
frequently used bitumen and other tars as an adhesive for hafting and
perhaps sometimes as a sleeve to protect a tool user’s hand, the
researchers propose in the December Antiquity.


The new age of 70,000 years ago places the practice earlier than a
previous finding in 1996 by Boëda’s team of 40,000-year-old stone
artifacts unearthed at the same location, Umm el Tlel. Those artifacts
also contained remnants of bitumen (SN: 4/13/96, p. 235).


“The surprising thing, to me, is that we do not find more such
evidence for hafting by Neandertals,” remarks archaeologist John Shea
of Stony Brook University in New York. Hafting may have been too time-
consuming for Neandertals in some resource-poor locales, Shea
hypothesizes, because their large bodies dictated that they forage
constantly for food. Neandertals living at Umm el Tlel 70,000 years
ago apparently had time for hafting, using bitumen to construct
hunting spears, in his view.


Neandertals and modern humans inherited the intellectual abilities
needed for hafting from a common ancestor that lived more than 200,000
years ago, Shea speculates.


Following an analysis of microscopic wear on 90,000-year-old stone
artifacts from an early Homo sapiens site in Israel, Shea reported in
2007 that some stone points had probably been attached to hand-cast
spears with an unidentified adhesive. Also in 2007, archaeologist
Marlize Lombard of Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa,
reported that modern humans living in southern Africa around 60,000
years ago hafted stone points using an adhesive made from a mix of
resin and ground pigment.


In 2006, Italian researchers found two sharpened stones, dating to
more than 100,000 years ago, that Neandertals had apparently attached
to handles using birch-bark tar. The tar-stained stones lay among the
bones of an animal that belonged to a now-extinct elephant species.


In the new study, Boëda’s team identified black stains on 200 out of
more than 1,000 stone implements excavated from several related
sediment layers at Umm el Tlel. Seven pieces of burned flint found in
those newly excavated layers were dated to 70,000 years ago using a
method that measured the radiation dose that had accumulated since the
artifacts had been heated.


Black residue on stone tools clung to areas that had been grasped by
hand or attached to handles, the researchers note. Geochemical
analyses revealed a close correspondence between bits of residue
extracted from three artifacts and bitumen collected from tar sands
located 40 kilometers from the Syrian site.


A closer investigation showed that the ancient residue and modern
bitumen shared nearly identical chemical compositions.


The researchers then made an adhesive out of bitumen mixed with quartz
and gypsum and applied it in various amounts to 10 experimentally
produced stone implements. After drying, the mixture displayed
microscopic features much like those of residue on the Umm el Tlel
artifacts, the scientists say.


http://www.archaeologynews.org/story.asp?ID=361964&Title=Tools%20with...


and


Volume: 82 Number: 318 Page: 853–861


Middle Palaeolithic bitumen use at Umm el Tlel around 70,000 BP


Eric Boëda1, Stéphanie Bonilauri1, Jacques Connan2, Dan Jarvie3,
Norbert Mercier4, Mark Tobey5, Hélène Valladas6, Heba al Sakhel7 and
Sultan Muhesen8


1Département d'Ethnologie et de Préhistoire, CNRS, UMR 7041, ArScAn,
équipe AnTET, Maison de l'Archéologie et de l'Ethnologie, Université
de Paris X- Nanterre, 21 allée de l'Université, 92023 Nanterre, France
(Email: eric.bo...@wanadoo.fr; stephanie.bonila...@wanadoo.fr)
2Laboratoire de Biogéochimie Moléculaire, CNRS, UMR 7177, Université
Louis Pasteur, 25 rue Becquerel, 67200-Strasbourg, France (Email:
connan.jacq...@orange.fr) 3Worldwide Geochemistry, LLC, P.O. Box 789,
Humble, Texas 77347, USA (Email: danjar...@wwgeochem.com) 4Institut de
Recherche sur les Archéomatériaux, CNRS, UMR 5060, Centre de Recherche
en Physique Appliquée à l'Archéologie (CRP2A), Maison de
l'Archéologie, Université de Bordeaux, 33607-Pessac Cedex, France
(Email: Norbert.Merc...@u-bordeaux3.fr) 5Encana Oil & Gas, USA Inc.,
370 17th St., Suite 1700, Denver, CO 80303, USA (Email: Mark.Tobey@
encana.com) 6Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement,
LSCE/IPS, UMR CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Centre des faibles Radioactivités,
Laboratoire mixte CNRS-CEA, avenue de la Terrasse, 91198-Gif-sur-
Yvette Cedex, France (Email: helene.valla...@lsce.ipsl.fr) 7Musée
National de Damas, Ministère de la Culture, Direction générale des
Antiquités et des Musées, Shoukry al-Qouwatly St., Damas, Syrie
(Email: h.alsak...@ifporient.org) 8Département d'Archéologie,
Université de Damas, Damas, Syrie (Email: sultanmuhese...@hotmail.com)


The authors identify natural bitumen on stone implements dating to
70,000 BP. It is proposed that this represents residue from hafting,
taking the practice back a further 30,000 years from the date
previously noted and published in Nature. The bitumen was tracked to a
source 40km away, using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and
carbon isotopes.


Keywords: Near East, Djebel Bichri, Mousterian, bitumen, micro-traces,
hafting, microscopic techniques, geochemical analysis, stable isotope,
absolute dating, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry


© 2008 Antiquity Publications

Handles For Stone Age Tools!!