Tiny flax fibres aged 34,000 years old – the earliest examples of their type ever seen – have been discovered by archaeologists in a cave in the Caucasus mountains of the Republic of Georgia. They’re so tiny they’re not visible to the naked eye – the team responsible for the find, from Harvard University, only spotted the minute artefacts while examining clay samples from the cave under a microscope.
The flax was probably used to make linen or thread, and was collected raw from the wild, rather than being farmed. It could have been put to all sorts of uses – from making warm clothes by sewing animal hides together, or fastening packs to aid mobility in the harsh prehistoric climate. Some of the fibres are twisted, which suggests that they may have once been part of a rope or string. Others were dyed.
Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Harvard University
Ofer Bar-Yosef is a highly-experienced and respected Israeli archaeologist, who specialises in the Paleolithic period. He is most closely associated with excavations at prehistoric Levantine sites including Kebara Cave in Israel, the early Neolithic village of Netiv HaGdud in the West Bank and other Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites in China and the Republic of Georgia.
He studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the 1960s, and later became a Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the same institution. He moved to America in 1988, and was appointed a Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Harvard University, and Curator of Palaeolithic Archaeology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Among his most recent discoveries were microscopic flax fibres, found while examining clay samples from a cave in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia (which he has visited every year since 1996). At 34,000 years old they are the earliest artefacts of their kind ever discovered.
The book of human history will need a slight redraft, if a remarkable claim by a prominent Georgian anthropologist and archaeologist – on the basis of human remains recently excavated at a site not far from the Georgian capital Tbilisi – is true.
Dmanisi is a small town and archaeological site in Mashavera river valley of Georgia, 93 kilometres south-west of the Georgian capital Tbilisi. It is best known for the discovery, between 1991 and 2007, of various bones and skulls which - aged 1.8 million years - are believed to be the oldest human remains ever found outside of Africa, and evidence of a evolutionary precursor to Homo erectus. They have seen Dmanisi and Georgia labelled the "cradle of European civilization" by David Lordkipanidze, the anthropologist and archaeologist leading the research there.
Various other ancient and medieval artefacts have also been found at the site over the years, as well as some ruins and structures dating from throughout Dmanisi's long history. These include animal bones identified by the Georgian paleontologist A. Vekua in 1983 as being teeth from the extinct rhino Dicerorhinus etruscus etruscus.
.jpg "One of the skulls dug up at Dmanisi. Is it evidence of a missing chapter in human history? Picture from Wikimedia Commons.")
