2023-12-05 13:32:00
Researchers from Liège have made a major archaeological discovery: Cro-Magnon Man was already hunting 30,000 years ago in Hainaut. It was thanks to weapon flints that archaeologists were able to determine that they were hunting 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.
30,000 years ago, in the middle of the ice age, when they were not gathering, men hunted reindeer and wild horses in the Mons region. They used a propellant.
The archaeological excavations date back to the end of the 1960s. The flint points found were mounted on an arrow bow, on a spear. At the time, scientists didn’t know it.
To determine this, Liège researchers reconstructed the points with flints taken from the same place. “Right next to the site, there is a raw material reserve, an outcrop of very good quality flint. They probably settled there for flint“, explains Justin Coppe, researcher at Traceolab and archaeologist at ULiège.
Reproductions of arrowheads were then tested on ballistic dummies, reproducing the animals being hunted. “When a stone point is fired at an animal while a prehistoric man is hunting, it will almost always break. But, it will break in a way specific to the weapon. It’s a bit like when the scientific police go to study the traces on rifle bullets. We do a bit of the same thing, but on stone points“, compares the researcher.
Then begins a long process of microscopic comparison between the reconstructed flints and the Paleolithic points. “We hope that our experimental points will break in the same way as prehistoric points. The principle of the discipline we have here, traceology, is that an action, whether it is done in the past or in the present, if it is done under the same conditions, it will leave the same traces.“, justifies Justin Coppe.
The oldest traces of spearfishing date back 20,000 years, in the north of France. Work from the University of Liège actually proves that the technique was in fact used 10,000 years earlier. Mons is therefore, on the planet, the oldest known site where men used this technique.
archeology Mons Flint prehistory
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