BARCELONA, SPAIN—According to a statement released by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), a study of tools recovered from Coro Trasito, a Neolithic site in the central Pyrenees Mountains, suggests that toolmakers selected the bones of specific species to craft certain implements. Researchers from the UAB, the ChemArch project, the High Mountain Archaeology Research Group, the General Council of Aragón, and the University of Copenhagen used archaeozoology to analyze the bones’ morphological characteristics and paleoproteomics to identify the species-specific proteins in the 20 bone artifacts. They also studied the use-wear marks on the items in order to explore how they might have been employed. The study suggests that sheep and goat bones were used to make bone tips for preparing vegetables, while the bones of cervids, or deer, were used to make tips for projectiles, said Maria Saña of the UAB. “Obtaining long bones from deer, probably through hunting, requires more effort than using long bones from domesticated animals,” added Jakob Hansen of the UAB. “This selection could be due, in part, to the properties of the bone, but also to the beliefs and values associated with this animal species,” he concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in PLOS ONE. To read about 9,000-year-old rock art in eastern Spain, go to “Neolithic Honey Hunters.”
