May
29
/ 2025
About 20,000 years ago, when Europe was frozen in the final chill of the Ice Age, mysterious giants periodically washed up on the Atlantic shores of modern northern Spain and southwestern France. They were not gods or monsters but whales—giant, oil-filled corpses drawn onto the beaches by the tides and slain by accident, not human hand. But it was Homo sapiens, men, who fashioned these beachcombed titans into instruments of survival. A recent research by Jean-Marc Pétillon (CNRS) and Krista McGrath ( ICTA-UAB), published in Nature Communications, reports the first known evidence of humans manufacturing tools from whale bones. During the time range of 14,000 to 20,000 years ago, Bay of Biscay Paleolithic hunter-gatherers collected cetaceans' remains to produce intricately
