The Ice Age Tool That Reveals How Rope Was Made

Stone tools and bones dominate what we know about the Stone Age, mostly because they’re what survives. A strange perforated rod from a German cave is helping researchers see past that bias, straight into one of prehistory’s most important, and most invisible, technologies.

A Puzzling Object From a Famous Cave

Archaeologists recovered the object in 2015 from Hohle Fels, a cave in southern Germany already famous for yielding what may be the world’s oldest musical instruments and the Venus of Hohle Fels, one of humanity’s earliest known pieces of figurative art. Compared to those finds, the new discovery, a nearly eight-inch rod carved from mammoth ivory with four small holes, initially looked unremarkable. Researchers first interpreted this type of object, known as a lochstab, as a symbolic item tied to prestige or status.

Sixteen Feet of Rope in Ten Minutes

Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen whose team made the discovery, wasn’t convinced by that explanation. He noticed each hole was lined with carefully carved spiral grooves and began to suspect the object had a practical function instead. Working with Veerle Rots, an archaeologist at the University of Liège who led the experimental research, the team tried threading cattail fibers through the holes and rotating them. The spiral grooves helped align and twist the strands together, and within ten minutes, the group had produced 16 feet of thick, strong rope. Their findings, dated to more than 35,000 years ago, appeared in the journal Science Advances.

A Technology That Leaves Almost No Trace

The experiment solved one puzzle while exposing a much bigger one. The people at Hohle Fels must have produced substantial quantities of rope to meet their daily needs, but virtually none of it survived. Only the most durable part of that production system, the ivory tool itself, remains. Paleoanthropologist Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College, who wasn’t involved in this particular study, estimates that fiber-based technology accounts for more than 90 percent of what actually happened during a typical day in prehistory, activity that leaves essentially no trace for archaeologists to find. Emma Finestone, a paleoanthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, points to a related bias: because plant and animal-based materials rarely preserve, researchers end up building their picture of the past almost entirely from stone and bone.

Cordage’s Deeper Roots

Direct evidence for fiber technology is exceptionally rare, but it does exist. The oldest known example, a six-millimeter length of three-ply cord, was made by Neanderthals roughly 50,000 years ago and discovered by Hardy’s team at the Abri du Maras rock shelter in France. Indirect evidence goes back much further still: markings on 250,000-year-old stone tools from France and the Netherlands suggest they were hafted, or attached to handles using some kind of cord, even though the binding material itself never survived. Hardy suggests fiber technology likely predates even that, reaching back to a common ancestor shared by modern humans and Neanderthals more than half a million years ago.

Why This Missing 90 Percent Matters

Cordage wasn’t just a convenience. Veerle Rots calls the invention of hafting a genuinely revolutionary moment, since attaching a stone point to a wooden shaft transforms a simple sharpened rock into a functional weapon capable of far greater force. Finestone’s research on early hominins moving high-quality toolmaking stone over long distances, starting as far back as three million years ago, suggests some kind of carrying technology, quite possibly made from perishable fiber, may have made that transport feasible in the first place. Fiber-based nets and snares would have enabled passive hunting, and rock art in Spain dated to roughly 7,500 years ago even appears to show people climbing elaborate rope ladders to reach wild beehives. As Conard put it, prehistory only gets called the Stone Age because stone is mostly what survives, not because stone was the only technology that mattered.

Sources

This report draws on original reporting by Knowable Magazine and Smithsonian Magazine, and the peer-reviewed study by Rots, Conard, and colleagues published in Science Advances.