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Stone Age humans in Europe made, swapped, and carried whale bone weapons along long-distance networks from Spain through to France, say researchers who have tracked down dozens of such tools. The exchanges around the Bay of Biscay may have contributed to one of the world’s first coastal economies, they argue.
“This innovation was good enough to rapidly spread across this territory,” says Alexandre Lefebvre, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and lead author of a new study documenting the find.
Around 15,000 years ago, Western Europe was home to the Magdalenians, a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture that made hunting tools, cave art, and maybe even music. Previous research had shown whale bone weapons were used just north of the Pyrenees mountains, in France. Yet, surprisingly, almost no evidence had been found for the same technology in prehistoric sites along the northern coast of Spain, where whale bones might reasonably have come fr
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