Archaeologists Piece Together the "Invisible" Rope and String of the Stone Age

In 2015, archaeologists found a puzzling ivory object in the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany. The same cave had already given up what may be the oldest musical flutes in the world and one of the earliest pieces of figurative art, the Venus of Hohle Fels. The new find was a rod of nearly eight inches with four small holes. It looked less exciting, but it has taught researchers a lot about how prehistoric hunter-gatherers lived, Smithsonian magazine reports.

The rod was carved from a mammoth tusk more than 35,000 years ago. Such objects are called lochstabs, and at first this one was thought to be a symbol of prestige or power. But Nicholas Conard, whose team found it, was not sure. Each hole had carefully carved spiral grooves, and he suspected it was a tool for twisting something through the holes. He says that if you are pushing something through a hole and turning it, you are very quickly in the world of fiber. His team tried threading cattail fibers through the holes and found that the grooves helped to line up the strands. Within ten minutes they had made 16 feet of thick, strong rope.

That solved one mystery, but it also showed a bigger problem. The people at Hohle Fels must have made large amounts of rope, but none survives. All that is left is the toughest part of the process, the ivory tool. Emma Finestone, a paleoanthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, says our view of the past is biased toward things that last. Archaeologists lean on stone tools and bones, while objects made from plants and animal materials that rot are often overlooked. Bruce Hardy, a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College, says researchers are missing more than 90 percent of what happened in a prehistoric day. The challenge is how to study a technology that you cannot actually find.

The oldest known piece of human-made fiber is a six-millimeter piece of string made by Neanderthals about 50,000 years ago. Hardy and his colleagues found it at the Abri du Maras rock shelter in France. It is a rare survivor, and it shows that making cord goes far back in the human family tree.