In the ancient past, Europe was a very different place – once, Britain was still connected to the European continent.
It was not until millennia later, when this connection had long since been severed, that modern humans began to rediscover ancient artifacts of the Stone Age peoples who once lived in countries now hidden under waves.
One of these lost lands – called Doggerland – is located between Great Britain and the Netherlands, and its existence today is revealed in countless cultural objects that are washed along the shores of Dutch beaches.
Among these artifacts, numerous bone-carved barbed points have long been believed to be a form of weapon used by Mesolithic hunger gatherers living in or around Doggerland 11,000 years ago.
“We’re sure there are projectile points,” said archaeologist Joannes Dekker of Leiden University in the Netherlands. The new scientist, pointing out that the barbed dots, which probably adorned arrows or perhaps spears, indicate signs of active use as weapons or tools, not as ceremonial objects.
“It simply came to our notice then. They show wear and tear. “
But that’s not all. In a new study led by Dekker, researchers analyzed 10 of the barbed wire collected off the Dutch coast of the North Sea, using mass spectrometry and a technique called collagen peptide fingerprinting (aka ZooMS).
Although it was never known what type of bone was used for the weapons, the researchers were further surprised when the results came, showing that the human bone was used for two of the barbed points, the rest being mainly carved from the bones of old red deer (Cervus elaphus).
Researchers claim that the prominent use of deer bones may simply reflect the availability of the species for ancient hunter-gatherers.
However, other species, including aurochs (Bos primigenius), deer (Capreolus capreolus) and wild boar (up) should also have been easy to obtain, and their bones or horns would have been just as suitable from a biomechanical perspective, if not more so.
“It was not an economic decision,” Dekker explained Smithsonian Magazine. “There must have been another reason, a cultural reason, why it was important to use these species.”
Especially for human bones, which is even more puzzling.
“Ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers, which use an immediate feeding style, show that the amount of animal resources exploited is a few orders of magnitude larger than the biomass of hunter-gatherers,” the authors write in their paper.
“In other words, human bones typically make up only a tiny fraction of the total amount of bone available to hunter-gatherers … Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that opportunistic selection for human bone is extremely unlikely.”
What, then, can explain the intentional use of human bones by ancient Doggerland hunters?
We cannot know for sure, but researchers hypothesize that the use of deer bones may have reflected a culture-specific form of significance or symbolism attributed to the species.
Likewise, human bone points could have served ritual purposes, representing a kind of mortuary practice – one in which “human remains are transformed into weapons.”
Doggerland waves may rise, but the hunt lasts forever in the afterlife.
The findings are reported in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.