Puzzling prehistoric artifacts served a practical purpose: ropemaking | Hacker News Reader

Puzzling prehistoric artifacts served a practical purpose: ropemaking

science.org

40 pointsdiodorus15 comments

You can't wind rope that hasn't been dried and ret and dried again. There's too much "other stuff" in the fibers, and any rope you make will be incredibly weak.

Everything about this paragraph is confusing:

"The researchers managed to fashion 5 meters of rope in about 10 minutes with their replica batons. For fiber, they used everything from flax and hemp to cattail reeds—all plants that would have grown near the Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle caves 30,000 years ago. The ropes proved capable of supporting the weight of one of the team’s larger members. Reeds made the strongest rope fiber."

Reeds make very poor quality rope without a lot of processing, and even then the fibers are very weak. In contrast, flax and hemp fibers are exceptionally strong. 5 meters of rope in 10 minutes would be a very crude rope indeed, unless they had a winding rig and all of the fibers ready to go. Cattail makes good rope, but like reed it requires quite a bit of processing because it's so fleshy.

I agree - the authors of this paper don't seem to know anything about how rope is made.

Having said that... the tool does look like it could be used for processing and weaving fibres together.

As for "making a rope in 10 minutes"... why would anyone do that? A good rope is a multi-purpose tool that can last a very long time. You'd invest days in it, not minutes.

> In the past, many archaeologists interpreted these batons as a noisemaker or ritual object, a sort of ice age magic wand or scepter. “Ritualism was something they used to ascribe everything to,” says Wei Chu, an archaeologist at Leiden University.

This is encouraging. Surely many of the artifacts we've found had some functional purpose. Ritualism as a default seems like a cop out in many cases. If we don't know, "we don't know" suffices

If I understand correctly, they wound the rope braids as they pulled the plants through the tools. Why would they need to do all three at the same time, i.e. could the one hole tool artifacts possibly be just versions where they do one strand at a time then wind the rope/cord after doing three strands?

Perhaps the tool was twisted as the plants were pulled through? Twisting the three strands together. Just a guess...

Not a rope-making expert, but I attended a workshop once. With three holes you can twist the strands together and get a three-strand rope in one step. That's how the (early-modern) process I observed worked. I think doing it the way you suggest (which certainly makes sense - I'm not saying that's not a reasonable hypothesis for the one-hole devices) would still require a multiple-hole device later in the process.

To further clarify, the research paper does not contain the word "braid" which the lay-article uses erroneously. You're describing the fabrication of a multi-strand cable. Braided raw fibers makes for really bad rope. (I too have some passing familiarity with ancient ropemaking; I did a similar workshop and I've applied the knowledge in a pinch)

What if the one-hole tools were meant to be mounted on some kind of rack or jig?

These dodecahedrons with bumps could also be used for rope making of not for the absense of mechanical wear.

It would be fun if those dodecadedron objects turned out to be old yo-yos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-yo

It's been demonstrated that you can make gloves with them.

I've seen some knitting applications for glove fingers, also.

But there is a surprising counter claim that the dodecahedrons predate the invention of knitting:

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2022/08/04/fiber-arts-myster...

> Knitting is a pretty recent invention, time-wise. The earliest knit objects we have are from Egypt around 1000 CE.

This is an important point, and I don't mean to diminishing it. But there was quite obviously a huge analog calculator cottage industry, too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I'm sad they weren't icosahedrons; it would have been evidence for D&D in Roman times.

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