12,000-year-old Stone Age site in Israel reveals first evidence of wheel technology
Over 100 small stone objects from Neolithic period are the earliest instance of ‘spindle whorls,’ used to spin fibers into yarn, predating previously known textile tools by 4,000 years
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Researchers have determined that a collection of 12,000-year-old tiny stone objects found at a Stone Age site in the Jordan Valley were likely used to spin fibers into yarn, a discovery that pushes back the use of the technique by thousands of years, the Hebrew University said in a Wednesday announcement.
The objects, called spindle whorls, are small, weighted circular objects made of limestone or other soft rock that feature a “circular shape perforated by a central hole” that when attached to a stick, form a “wheel-and-axle-like device to help the spindle rotate faster and longer, enabling it to efficiently gather up fibers such as wool or flax and spin them into yarn,” the university said.
“This discovery marks the earliest known evidence of this fast-spinning technology in the Levant, predating previously known textile tools by 4,000 years and highlighting an important stage in human innovation,” the researchers said.
The researchers analyzed more than 100 of the objects, which were scattered around the Nahal-Ein Gev II site, a few kilometers south of the Sea of Galilee. The site is associated with the Natufian period, a time in the late Stone Age when humans had settled in permanent villages but had not yet developed agriculture or domesticated farm animals.
Because the objects “are simple limestone pebbles that don’t stick out at first glance, it was a surprise” to determine their probable use, said researcher Talia Yashuv, speaking to The Times of Israel by phone.
Yashuv, along with Professor Leore Grosman from the Computational Archaeology Laboratory at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology, authored a paper on the subject, “12,000-year-old spindle whorls and the innovation of wheeled rotational technologies,” published on Wednesday in the peer-reviewed online journal PLOS and based on Yashuv’s MA thesis.
Video showing how the ancient spindles were analyzed, and how expert Yonit Krystal replicated their use to spin fibers. (Courtesy: Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
The “Natufian perforated stones” are in fact “the first wheels in form and function,” the researchers said, round objects “with a hole in the center connected to a rotating axle, used long before the appearance of the wheel for transportation purposes.”
The technology is considered a precursor to “wheel-based rotational innovations” such as the potter’s wheel and the cartwheel, “key advancements that revolutionized human technological history” that appeared many thousands of years later, the researchers said.
“When we started the research, we really didn’t know… we thought maybe they had to do with fishing or some other craft,” Yashuv said. The Natufians at the site had developed “a new innovative technique of fast drilling” — essentially attaching a hard, carved stone to the end of a stick, which could then be rotated quickly between the hands — and also had “a beautiful bead industry,” she said.
But the spindle whorls “were different,” Yashuv said. They weren’t beads and weren’t stone weights used in net fishing, which were made of harder material and of a totally different shape.
To confirm their hunch, the researchers scanned the whorls and then analyzed them using customized software to determine that the objects uniformly had “the morphological characteristics similar to the ones that you need if you want to use them for spinning,” Yashuv said.
All the objects were determined to have a certain “kind of symmetrical shape… [meaning] the relation between the width and the length and the location of the center of mass, which is a signature to how you use the tool,” she said.
But because the spinning whorls were dated from 12,000 years ago, some 4,000 years before other known instances of the technology, further proof was needed.
“After we suspected that they would have been spindle whorls, we went to a specialized craftswoman, Yonit Kristal,” Yashuv explained.
Kristal was able to use the replicas to spin flax into yarn, and determined that using the whorls was a more efficient method to do so than just “twisting the fibers between your thigh and your fingers,” or rubbing between flat stones, both theorized methods for creating yarn among Stone Age societies, Yashuv said.
The Nahal-Ein Gev site was a village with “architecture, houses and cemeteries… Their art expanded and they made heavy stone tools and had close relations with animals, but not domestication yet. It was a culture in transition between being nomads and hunter-gatherers and becoming an agricultural society,” she explained.
The Natufians used stone tools and didn’t have pottery, but were able to manipulate their environment and made lime plaster, a significant advance in building technology. They also developed more complex social structures and religious rituals. The string produced by the spindle whorls would probably have been used “for everything,” including clothing, weaving, beading and making fishing nets and ropes, Yashuv said.
“Traditionally, ethnographically, women are associated with textiles and crafts, and we know at Nahal-Ein Gev there was an intensification in specialization and the division of labor,” but “we can’t say for certain” who exactly in Natufian society was using the whorls, she said.
The Nahal-Ein Gev village was inhabited for about 500 years, from around 10,500 to 10,000 BCE. The spindle whorl technology then disappears from the archaeological record before popping up again about 4,000 years later at a site only 10 kilometers away, perhaps indicating a continuation of “cultural tradition” in the area, Yashuv said.
After this, spindle whorls were “found everywhere” in the Levant and were often made of ceramic materials, Yashuv said. By that time, around 6,500 BCE, the Neolithic revolution was in full swing, agriculture had long been developed and diverse animal species had been domesticated.
The Natufians at Nahal-Ein Gev were still part of the Stone Age, Yashuv said, and were “a Paleolithic culture. However, they were the last ones.”
