The organic fibres were found in the Dzudzuana cave, a wet clay site so waterlogged it helped to preserve them. Made of wild flax, some were found to have been dyed black, gray, turquoise, and even pink
Credit: Harvard University
SYDNEY: Archaeologists have found 30,000 year old coloured fibres in the Georgia, which hint that prehistoric hunter-gathers were making ropes, weaving baskets and fashioning garments.
"This was a chance discovery in the glass slides under the microscope and nothing we expected," said one of the authors Ofer Bar-Yosef, an anthropologist at Harvard University, in Boston, USA.
It shows us modern humans who came out of Africa were innovative in multiple ways when compared to their ancestors, he told Cosmos Online.
Earliest known fibres
"They used symbols, body decorations, made art objects, painted caves, improved stone knapping techniques, invented the use of bone, antler and ivory for well shaped objects, and discovered the use of flax to make fibres for strings and ropes."
The findings are published in the U.S. journal Science.
The fibres are the earliest known to have been used by humans and are more than 2,000 years older than the similar fibre imprints previously discovered at Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic.
The team took the soil samples over a ten-year period, along with bones and charcoal sent for radiocarbon dating in Israel and the USA. This meant the dates of the different ages were known before the specimens were even found.
The organic fibres were found in the Dzudzuana cave, a wet clay site so waterlogged it helped to preserve them. Made of wild flax, some were found to have been dyed black, gray, turquoise, and even pink
Use of dye
"This discovery increases our knowledge of the innovative mind of our direct ancestors", said Bar-Yosef. The study suggest that these ancient people used fur, skin and cloth together to make winter clothes for travel. The research also suggested that they used a wide range of natural pigments to dye the fibres different colours.
Joseph Lambert, an archaeological chemist at North-Western University in Evanston, Illinois, was in the field in Israel and unable to read the full paper, but said that if the dating of the fibres had been done accurately "these results indeed describe some of the earliest examples of the production of twisted fibres."
However, he cautioned that we can't be sure about the purpose of the textiles based on fragments of fibres.
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with AFP.
