Amazing stuff!
"To survive Europe’s bitterly cold ice age some 25,000 years ago, people did what people do best: They networked. In a paper published today in Science Advances, archaeologists report finding stone tools in central Spain that came from almost 800 kilometers away, the farthest confirmed distance a stone tool has been found from its source in this time period, known as the European Paleolithic. ..."
From the abstract:
"Social networking is an essential feature of hunter-gatherer societies. It fosters the circulation of goods and information and enables kinship ties across different scales, including long-distance contacts. While such behaviors are known since at least the Upper Palaeolithic, evidence for geographically extensive social networks remains scarce. This evidence is limited to indirect inferences based on shared cultural traits, “art” styles, and symbolic items, while lithic raw material movements are mostly local and regional, with few cases exceeding 300 kilometers.
We provide geochemical evidence for the largest confirmed distance between the source and discard location of a knapped lithic object in Palaeolithic Europe. Solutrean artifacts discarded at Peña Capón, Central Iberia, were sourced in Southwest France, 600 to 700 kilometers away.
This demonstrates social networks of unprecedented geographic scale maintained during ∼1400 years during the Last Glacial Maximum. It also suggests that stone tools were exchanged as symbolic items to solidify social contacts and sustain far-reaching networks as risk-buffering mechanisms among widely dispersed hunter-gatherers."
Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe (open access)
Fig. 1. Jasperoid chert artifacts.
Fig. 2. Location of studied geological units and outcrops.
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