We have been creating whale bones to tools for a long time. Before even learning to hunt them

For centuries, whale hunting was a weight sector in the coastal areas of the Gulf of Bizkaia. Everything took advantage of this animal, or almost everything: the meat served as food and fat served as oil to enliven the flames of the lamps before electricity and oil. His bones have also been A valuable resource Throughout history.

Now we know that also during prehistory.

Prehistoric tools. A group of researchers, including scientists from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, He has discovered Tools made of whale bone. The analysis of De Ha throws an estimated age of between 19,000 and 20,000 years.

The 83 tools were found In various deposits Distributed by the coast of the Gulf of Bizkaia, including the Cantabrian coast and points in southern France. To these tools you have to add another 90 unrelated bones found in the Cave of Santa Catalina, Located in the Biscay town of Lekeitio.

The bone remains would have belonged to specimens of at least five different species, including species such as the sperm whale, the common whale and the blue whale that can still be found in the waters of the Gulf and the gray whale, already disappeared from that environment with a more restricted habitat to areas of the northern Pacific and the Arctic Oceans, explains the team

Investigating what and when. For the identification of the species and dating the tools, the equipment resorted to the mass spectrometry techniques and radiocarbon dating. Thus they managed to find the origin of the tools in the five species mentioned above. It was also like the team determined that it was, In words of the Jean-Marc Pétillon group “some of the oldest known evidences of human use of whale remains as tools.”

“Zooms is a very powerful technique to investigate the past diversity of marine mammals, especially when there are missing diagnostic morphometric elements in bone remains and objects, something common in artifacts made of bones,” explained in a press release Krista McGrath, co -author of the study.

Chemical analysis. The study also involved a chemical analysis of the sample. Thanks to this, the team was able to find out data on the eating habits of the whales, which “differed slightly from those of their modern counterparts.” This implies possible changes in the behavior of cetaceans, or in the marine ecosystem itself.

The details of the study were published In an article In the magazine Nature Communications.

20,000 years hunting whales? The conclusion that the human being has 20 millennia hunting whales is tempting, but the team responsible for the study considers it “extremely unlikely.” The most likely hypothesis is that the Pleistocene hunters would have taken advantage of the arrival of stranded whales to the coast to obtain their bones and manufacture from them

“It is extremely unlikely that these species would have been accessible to the hunters collecting European pelistocene in another way that were not through passive acquisition methods, such as the opportunistic acquisition of stranded whales or the arrival on the coast of corpses,” says the article. “There is no evidence (…) that the collection hunters of the European Pleistocene had the necessary technologies to hunt these species, such as navigation (…).”

Change of sea level. Study coastal life in glacial ages since the present coastline is relatively Far from the coastline typical of the last glaciation, although the extension of the lands flooded after the end of the last glacial era differs between area and area. Within the Gulf of Bizkaia, for example, we can appreciate a greater area flooded on the French coast and therefore a greater decline of the coastal line in contrast to the Cantabrian coast.

In any case, the coastal recession implies the loss of valuable coastal deposits now flooded by the Atlantic waters. Deposits that could hide countless data that could help us to know better these life modes of the millennium coastal peoples behind in time.

In Xataka | The history of the last whale hunted in Spain, on October 21, 1985

Image | ICTA-UAB/Alexandre Lefebvre