About 11,000 years ago, Stone Age hunters made sharp weapons out of human bone, a new study finds.
These hunter-gatherers lived in Doggerland, a now-underwater area in the North Sea that connected Europe with Great Britain. At the end of the last Ice Age, when the sea level was lower, it was inhabited by herds of animals and humans. Although these people have long since disappeared, artifacts from their culture, including leg weapons, often wash up in the Netherlands.
An analysis of 10 of these bone weapons revealed that eight had been carved red deer (Cervus elaphus) bone and antler, and two were made of human bone. “We expected to find a few deer, but humans? It wasn’t even in my wildest dreams that there would be humans in between,” lead researcher Joannes Dekker, an archeology master’s student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.
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It’s a mystery why these weapons, known as barbed points, are carved from human bones. The research team couldn’t think of a practical reason – human bones were probably hard to find (unlike deer remains), and human bone isn’t a particularly good material for making sharp weapons – deer antlers are much better, Dekker said.
On the contrary, “there were probably cultural rules about which species to use for barb production,” he said. “We think it was a conscious choice … [that had to do] with the connotations and associations people had with it [deceased] people as symbols. “
Bone deep
There are nearly 1,000 known bone weapons from Doggerland, named after the nearby Dogger Bank, a shallow area popular in the Middle Ages among Dutch fishing boats called doggers. Some of these barbed points are small, about 2.5 inches (9 centimeters) long, but others are longer, the researchers said. The barbed points could have been thrown like javelins, shot like arrows from a bow, or thrust with spears, Dekker said. Whatever the method, impact scars and cracks on their ends show that they had impacts at high speed with targets, Previous research found it.
These artifacts have washed up in the Netherlands for years, but the number of finds has accelerated in recent decades as the Dutch began dredging the seafloor to strengthen their coastlines, Dekker added.
Radiocarbon dating revealed that these leg weapons dated between 11,000 and 8,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age, Dekker and his colleagues discovered. By analyzing uniquely collagen proteins in each bone, the team determined the species for each weapon. Finally, by variations or isotopes of carbon and nitrogen In each of the bones, the team found that, unsurprisingly, the deer had a herbivorous diet, while the two humans ate animals that lived on land and in fresh water.
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Dekker noted that his study was small, and only larger analyzes can reveal how common human bone weapons were in Mesolithic Doggerland. It’s also unclear which anatomical bone they come from, but one of the long leg or arm bones would likely have worked the best given the size of the arms, he said.
One thing is clear: These bones were carved out shortly after the person’s death, because fresh human bones are much easier to cut than dry, brittle ones, Dekker said.
While “the use of human bone for bone tools is so rare,” it is not without precedent, Dekker said. Warriors of New Guineaused daggers made of human femur bones, for example, but only of very important people.
The new study is published in the February 2021 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Originally published on Live Science.