RECYCLING IN PREHISTORIC TIMES CHANGED MAN. SOMETHING HAPPENED 13,000 YEARS AGO.
How important were tools to our prehistoric ancestors? What did they mean to them? And when objects became obsolete, did they still try to salvage them or use them in other ways? Or did they just throw them away and go looking for more.
The world 13,000 years ago was very different from the one we live in today – there was an almost unlimited amount of resources and space everywhere to expand further. Yet the habits of Paleolithic humans seem to have been remarkably close to those of today in relation to tools and other resources.
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We know very little about how the Paleolithic economy worked. A study by Catalan archaeologists examining artefacts at Molí del Salt in the Spanish province of Tarragona suggests it was more complicated than we had previously thought. It may have involved recycling.
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“In order to know if these are really recycled stone tools, we need to recognize that the artifacts have two distinct stages. One must clearly be before recycling, the other after. Our study is the first to really address this problem systematically,” archaeologist Manuel Vaquer described the scientific aim. That is why the researchers chose the burnt stone artefacts from Tarragona, which are the ones on which the new treatment can be detected relatively easily.
The results suggest that recycling was common in the Stone Age. Recycling seems to have been mainly of household items, and recycling took place quickly and probably quite randomly. When a Stone Age family needed a simple tool quickly, they recycled another tool that was no longer sufficient for its original purpose or that had become obsolete. But among hunting tools such as spearheads, for example, recycled items were not found at all. Conversely, artefacts that combined two functions were produced almost exclusively through recycling.
Changing habits changes people
All of this suggests that sustainability was a very natural theme for Stone Age people. For the population of the time, it meant easier access to sources of good quality stone, which was particularly suited to activities that provided people with a livelihood. However, the fact about recycling in the Stone Age means much more to our understanding of the people of that time, If people were able to recycle effectively, they did not have to move so often to find new resources. So as communities began to settle, they could stay in one place for longer periods of time.
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This, of course, changed other habits of prehistoric man. Not only did it give them a relationship with the place where they lived, but it may have also meant discovering their own history. According to Catalan archaeologists, people may even have recycled very old pieces of stone tools that had been at the sites of settlement many, many generations ago, left over from completely different cultures…
Source: National Geographic
Author: Editor | Published: 27.09.2012
