Page 19 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

Pleistocene Knotting 7

and stone walls, and lived in semi-permanent base camps. They hunted and
scavenged, butchered large animals such as elephants and rhinos with their
massive stone cleavers, and carried meat to their camps. Hence the two pop-
ulations lived in very similar ways, and their tools do not identify the species
responsible-only recognisable human bones could do that.
Objects such as small quartz crystals, presumably non-utilitarian, have
been found at many sites of the Acheulian or contemporary industries, in
all three continents, and from deposits up to 900 000 years old. Fossil casts
on stone tools, too, seem to have been appreciated. At sites in the Czech
Republic and in India, pieces of haematite have been found to bear abrasion
markings indicating that they were rubbed against a rock surface. In India
some rock engravings were discovered in a cave; their stratigraphical position
proves their Acheulian age. They are the oldest rock art known in the world.
Engravings on bone, elephant ivory and stone of similar age occur in Germany,
and an Acheulian site in Israel has yielded a volcanic pebble with deep grooves
held to be artificial, which emphasise the pebble's shape as of a female figure.
These finds suggest that the people of the Acheulian engaged in non-utilitarian
'activities of various types and produced art-like objects and markings.
People dependent on making and using many tools would carry the tools
with them when they shifted their home base, because of lack of time or
resources to make new ones. A fully upright bipedal stance allows the hands
to be used for carrying. But sooner or later it must have occurred to someone
it is much easier to bind the objects together so that they can be carried at the
waist, over a shoulder or round the neck, or collected together in a container
such as a bag or basket. It could well be that one of the first uses of any sort
of cordage and knots was for these purposes [15, p. 48], [18], though there is no
evidence for such expedients until their depiction on portable art much later,
less than 25 000 years ago.
The German site Bilzingsleben yielded skeletal fragments of late Homo
erectus, together with fragments of a 65 cm-long, polished tapered point made
of the split straight tusk of an elephant [8]. Splitting of elephant bones and
tusks is often evident at this site, and obviously involved very considerable
effort, in driving wedges into such objects with hammer stones. The ivory
point, at about 350 000 years the oldest such object known to us, is too
large to be used as a dagger, and too short to serve as a lance. Much longer
ivory lances were fashioned just 20 000 years ago in Russia. The question
then is, what was the Bilzingsleben point used for? These hunters focused
on the largest animal species in their environment for their food. Possibly
they used lances to allow the charging animals to impale themselves, just as
modern humans did in Africa, in which case they had a need for hard points
to penetrate the thick skins of their quarries. If the ivory point had been used
in this fashion (and it was found broken), it would have had to be lashed to