In the ancient past, Europe was a very different place: once upon a time, Britain was still tied to the European continent.
Only millennia later, when this connection had long been disrupted, modern humans began to rediscover ancient artifacts from Stone Age villages that once inhabited land now hidden beneath the waves.
One of these lost kingdoms, called Doggerland, was located between Britain and the Netherlands, and its existence today is revealed in countless cultural objects that are rented on the shores of Dutch beaches.
Among these artifacts, for many years it was believed that numerous bone spikes carved into bones were a form of weapon used by the Mesolithic famine collectors who inhabited Doggerland or its environs 11,000 years ago.
“We’re sure they’re projectile points,” said archaeologist Joannes Dekker of Leiden University in the Netherlands. New scientist, noting that the spike points, which probably adorned arrows or perhaps spears, indicate signs of active use as weapons or tools, not as ceremonial elements.
“They have been readjusted. They show wear and tear.”
But this is not all. In a new study led by Dekker, researchers analyzed 10 of the spike points collected on the Dutch North Sea coast, using mass spectrometry and a technique called massive collagen fingerprinting (also known as ZooMS). .
Although it has never been known what type of bone was used for the weapons, the researchers were still surprised when the results arrived, showing that the human bone was used for two of the points of then, with the rest chiefly cut from the bones of antiquity. red deer (Cervus elaphus).
Researchers argue that the prominent use of deer bones may simply reflect the availability of the species to ancient hunter-gatherers.
However, other species, including aurochs (Bos primigenius), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and wild boar (sus), should also have been easy to orient, and their bones or horns should have been equally suitable from a biomechanical perspective, if not more so.
“This was not an economic decision,” Dekker explained Smithsonian Magazine. “There must have been some other reason, a cultural reason, why it was important to use these species.”
Especially for human bones, which is even more disconcerting.
“Ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers, which use an immediate food search style, show that the amount of animal resources exploited is of various orders of magnitude greater than the biomass of the hunters themselves,” the authors write in their article .
“In other words, human bones usually make up only a tiny fraction of the total amount of bones available to hunter-gatherers … Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that opportunistic selection for human bone is highly unlikely “.
What can then explain the intentional use of human bones by ancient Doggerland hunters?
There is no way to know for sure, but researchers hypothesize that the use of deer bones may have reflected some form of culture-specific meaning or symbolism attributed to the species.
Similarly, human bone points could have served ritualistic purposes, representing a kind of mortuary practice: one in which “human remains are transformed into weapons.”
Doggerland tides may have risen, but the hunt lasts forever beyond.
The findings are reported in Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports.