In the Stone Age, people regularly made sharp weapons and tools from animal bones. They also resorted to whale bones 20,000 years ago and thus at least a millennium earlier than previously assumed, as new finds from Spain and France show. In addition, the people of the Magdalénien period not only used bones of sperm whales, but also from at least four other types of whale, which were at the time in the Atlantic. The relics also provide information on Stone Age sea ecology.
In view of their size, whales have been an important source of raw materials for humans in the past. Their meat served as food, its oil as a fuel and its bones as material for tools – often tips and shafts of hunting weapons – how to document tradition and finds. Scientists assume that in particular populations in coastal regions were often heavily dependent on the whaling and sometimes only survived thanks to the marine mammals. But when exactly did people start to hunt whales and use their bones? These questions can be answered with the help of archaeological finds. However, it is difficult to recover these artifacts in coastal areas, since the sea level has increased significantly since the Stone Age. Therefore, only those materials that prehistoric hunters and collectors once continued to carry inland remain accessible.
Walbones occupy flowering time of whale processing
A team led by Krista McGrath from the Autonomous University of Barcelona has now examined relics that have been found on the Spanish and French coast in the Gulf of Biskaya in the past ten years. Among them were 83 tools from bones that were excavated in various places in the Biskaya Bay, as well as 90 unprocessed bones from the Santa-Catalina cave in the province of the same name in Bizkaia in Basque Country Spanish. The sites indicate that the relics come from the Magdalénien culture and thus from the European Stone Age. Using mass spectrometry, radiocarbond dating and isotope analyzes, the researchers determined the exact age and origin of the bones as well as the former food of the animals.
The result: most relics are actually whale bones. Contrary to expectations, only around 20 percent come from bones or antlers of large land animals such as mammoth, rhino, reindeer and horse. Some bones also belong to a dolphin and a seal. Regardless of their origin, the relics were processed in a similar way and into similar hunting weapons, as the team stated. “However, there is no evidence that the European hunters and collectors in the Pleistocene have the necessary technologies to hunt this whale, such as seafaring or multi -laxed tips that could have been used as hardness heads,” write the researchers. They therefore suspect that people in the Stone Age only use the bones of stranded whales and did not actively go on whaling.
“The oldest of the whale bones are around 19,000 to 20,000 years old,” reports senior author Jean-Marc Pétillon from the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. “These bones represent some of the earliest known evidence that people used whale remains as tools.” According to them, the processing of whale bones in the Cantabrian mountains began at least a millennium earlier than previously thought, McGrath and her colleagues conclude. Most of the whale bones were between 17,500 and 16,000 years old. This period was apparently the heyday of the Magdalénian whale bone processing. However, no younger tools from whale bones have yet been found in this region. It is unclear whether the people later simply stopped using whale bones, or they were just no longer transported from the coast inland, where they could still be found today.
More whale species than previously known
However, the bone tools examined show that prehistoric people used more diverse whale species than previously known. Because before that, only the use of sperm whales during the Magdalénien period was clearly documented, as the team explains. “Our study shows that the bones come from at least five types of large whales,” said Péillon. Among them were smooth whales or Greenland whales – two types that cannot be distinguished with the technology used. “We also identified species such as sperm whales, Finnwhales and blue whales, all of which still occur in the Gulf of Biskaya today, as well as gray whales – a species that is mainly limited to the North Pacific and the Arctic Ocean,” adds McGrath.
Accordingly, around 20,000 years ago, even more whale species and possibly larger whale populations lived in the Atlantic. One reason for this could be that the Gulf of Biskaya during the Magdalénien period was still much colder and temporarily covered by ice and thus more resembled today’s preferred habitat of the whales, as the researchers explain. In addition to climatic changes, whaling could also have permanently decimated the occurrence of these marine mammals in the Atlantic, even if there has been no evidence so far. The chemical analyzes of the bones revealed that these whales once died of a slightly different mix of marine animals than their today. This also indicates that the habitat of the whales has changed over the millennia. The discoveries not only help to understand how and since when people in the Stone Age used whales, but also provide insights into marine ecology during the Stone Age and indications of what role whales played in it.
Source: Krista McGrath (Autonomous University of Barcelona) et al.; Nature communications, DOI: 10.1038/S41467-025-59486-8
