Shaped stone ball from Qesem Cave, (photo credit: PAVEL SHRAGO)
Ancient communities populating Israel between 400,000 and 300,000 years
ago already understood that high-quality utensils were crucial for
successful dishes.
New
research by a team led by Tel Aviv University scholars has pointed out
that the groups of hunter-gatherers living in the area of the Qesem
Cave, located in the Samaria Hills, were able to identify shaped stone
balls as the best tool to extract bone marrow, one of the most important
sources of nutrients in their diet.
Shaped stone balls started to be produced around 2 million years ago and have been unearthed by paleontologists in several sites across Africa and Asia but their function has so far remained a mystery.
As
explained by Dr. Ella Assaf, a post-doc at Tel Aviv University and
co-author of the paper on the topic that was published last week in the
scientific journal PLOS ONE, the new project might help shed light on
the issue.
“It all began
during excavations at the cave, where I have been working since 2009,”
she told The Jerusalem Post. “Every now and then, in specific areas of
the cave, we came across these strange tools.”
The
Qesem Cave, as the researcher pointed out, is a very special site. It
was inhabited between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago; after this period,
it was sealed and not accessed until the year 2000 when it was uncovered
by chance. For this reason, it offers a range of really well-preserved
artifacts and traces of Paleolithic life distributed in 11 meters of
archaeological layers.
Assaf
explained that they found 29 shaped stone balls, mostly in areas where a
lot of bones were also unearthed and whose use can be dated back to
300,000 years ago and earlier.
“We began to ask ourselves if there was a connection,” she said.
The team started to work with the DANTE—Diet and Ancient Technology
Laboratory at Sapienza University of Rome, whose Associated Professor
Emanuela Cristiani co-authored the study.
“They
started to study the stones. We were very lucky since they were able to
identify residues of bone marrow, despite the fact that it is very rare
to find traces of organic material after such a long time,” Assaf
highlighted, adding that the residues were detected on several stones.
The
researchers did not stop there. In order to further validate their
hypothesis that the objects where indeed used to crush bones and extract
bone marrow, they created a replica of the stones and used them in a
similar way.
“We found out
that they were extremely efficient compared to other instruments they
could have employed: they extracted the marrow in a very clean way,
without leaving parts of bones in it and they could be used multiple
times. Moreover, the signs that were left on the modern replicas of the
stones were very similar to the signs on the ancient ones,” the scholar
explained.
If it is not clear
yet how many individuals made up the communities that live in Qesem
across time, the cave was definitely a popular site, since groups kept
on coming back to it.
As
explained by Assaf, the period around 400,000 years ago represented an
era of very significant changes: different species of humans populated
the planet, the use of fire began to spread and likewise many
technological changes occurred.
The
cave clearly presents signs of these changes. The bones of many
animals, small and big – including fallow deer, wild horses, tortoises
and birds – were found, some of them burned, likely to facilitate to
extract the marrow. A variety of utensils including knives were also
found.
The material used to
manufacture the utensil also represents a mystery surrounding the shaped
stone balls found in Qesem: while most of the other artifacts found in
the cave are made of flint, the vast majority of the balls where made in
carbonate rocks.
This
element, together with the fact that the stones are surrounded by a
patina that preceded their use in the cave, suggests that they were not
produced by the inhabitants of Qesem, but rather collected by them
somewhere else and brought home because they were considered valuable.
“The
patina accumulated on the stones is different from the one on other
items in the cave. We also did not find the waste involved in the
process of making them,” Assaf pointed out, adding that in order to
understand better where the carbonate rocks that the shaped stone balls
are made of come from will require further research which will
necessarily damage some of the artifacts. “It is going to be our next
step.”
If the current study does not cover the reason why the artifacts were created
in the first place, in Israel or elsewhere, the TAU scholar believes
that further research will also help to solve the mystery surrounding
ball-shaped rocks from all over Africa and Asia at large.
“Our
hypothesis is that they were all produced for the purpose of extracting
bone marrow, but we still cannot confirm it yet. I hope that after
studying other samples from different sites we will be able to,” she
concluded.
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