40,000 years ago, in the Ice Age, the Iberian Peninsula was very different from what it is today. The first Homo sapiens spread across a land until then occupied by Neanderthals, a vast steppe infested with hyenas, woolly rhinos and mammoths hit by a period of extreme cold. But although these Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had to face extreme weather conditions, they had an incipient technology (the Aurignacian) that allowed them to make accessories such as clothing, shoes or tents to protect themselves from the cold.
Today, a study published in the journal Science Advances, gives an account of one of these tools: a bone fragment of about ten centimeters found in the Terrasses de la Riera del Canyars site, in Gavà (Barcelona), which, according to the researchers, it could have been used as a punching board for leather and clothing.
The Canyars site is a den of carnivores, especially hyenas, with abundant remains of fauna and some evidence of human presence such as lithic industry and some burned bones, but among them, the archaeologists found one with marks different from those made when meat or skin is processed.
"Finding it was quite a surprise, but as soon as we saw it, we knew that we had to study it carefully because its marks are not frequent at all. They were very characteristic," Montserrat Sanz Borras, from the Department of History and Archeology at the University of Barcelona, explains to EFE. and co-author of the study.
These types of marks had been documented before in other European sites and had been interpreted as numerical annotations, ornaments, even lunar cycle calendars, but few studies had studied other possible functions.
In this study, the team of scientists led by Luc Doyon, from the University of Bordeaux, carried out a series of experiments with current materials to try to replicate the marks and find out what process could have made them.
The team reproduced the perforations -some grouped and others aligned- with chisels and burins and deduced that the punctures must have been made in different sessions to make holes in the leather and then sew the pieces together.
"We saw that the marks could have been made by a burin, a stone tool used to make bone utensils and make engravings and that, in this case, we believe they were used to perforate the skin. This bone was placed underneath and served as a support or platform and that produced the brands", explains Sanz Borras.
For the authors, this bone shows that these first modern humans handled an effective puncture technique some 15,000 years before the arrival of bone needles in Europe, and "demonstrates that this technique was well established at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic," he points out. the researcher.
In addition, this innovation shows that cultural adaptation helped these first men to adapt to a changing environment and extreme environmental conditions typical of a Heinrich event, "a specific phenomenon of maximum cold in which the peninsula and what is now Barcelona, became an arid and enormous steppe", he highlights.
"This piece shows us that Homo sapiens were dressed and had clothes or accessories that allowed them to protect themselves from this intense cold."
