Even at my age, if I rummage through pockets of various bits of outdoor clothing there’s a good chance I’ll find a handy length of string that I have scavenged at some time. It’s a just-in-case thing, which I learned from my father and grandad. One can hardly imagine a hunter-gatherer not having string or lengths of sinew for that very reason. Cordage has many other uses than merely securing something: bags, mats, nets, snares, fabric, baskets, huts made of sticks and fronds, and even watercraft. Yet archaeological evidence for twine is exceedingly rare. The oldest known string – made of bark fibres – was found wrapped around a stone tool at a 52 to 41 ka Neanderthal site in the Rhône valley 120 km north-west of Marseille. Rope is somewhat more difficult to make as it requires twisting together several lengths of simpler cordage. Once that skill is cracked a rope maker is on the verge of engineering!
In 2015 archaeologists unearthed several pieces of worked mammoth ivory from the Hohle Fels Cave in SW Germany. They were dated to between 40 to 35 ka and associated with Aurignacian stone tools made by modern humans. Fifteen pieces could be fitted together to yield a 20 cm long ‘baton’. First believed to be some kind of ritual object, the fact that 4 circular holes had been bored through the ‘baton’ suggested it must have had some practical use, perhaps for straightening wooden shafts. Then it became clear that each hole was surrounded by spirals of carefully carved, V-shaped notches. Nicholas Conard and Veerle Rots of the University of Tubingen realised that the object may have been used for making rope using a technique known from the Egyptian pharaonic period into medieval times (Conard, N.J. & Rots, V. 2024. Rope making in the Aurignacian of Central Europe more than 35,000 years ago. Science Advances, v. 10, article adh5217; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh5217).
After a little practice, four people were able to make sturdy rope using a replica of the tool. Three twisted together fibrous materials, such as the stems and leaves of bulrushes (Typha), and pushed the rough cordage through the intact holes. A fourth person pulled the cordage through and counter-twisted the three strands into rope about 1.5 cm thick – thicker rope would also have required a tool with more holes and more operators. The spiral grooves maintained the initial clockwise rotation of each strand of cordage, so that when all three were twisted together in an anticlockwise sense the counter rotation held the rope together firmly. Remarkably, the small team were able to produce 5 m of rope in 10 minutes. Other common kinds of fibrous plant material, such as linden and willow were used successfully. Incidentally, the tool squeezed edible starch from the foliage of bulrushes. But it seems that this particular rope-making took only performed well for coarse materials. Making rope from finer firbres, such as animal sinew, nettle, flax and hemp would probably have required another design with smaller holes.
A movie of the manufacturing process can be downloaded.
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