The Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany yielded a mammoth‑tusk baton, known as a lochstab, dated to more than 35,000 years ago. The artifact is a roughly eight‑inch rod pierced with four holes, each lined with spiral grooves. When researchers threaded cattail fibers through these grooves and twisted them, the grooves helped align the strands and they produced 16 feet of thick, strong rope in just ten minutes. This experiment shows that the lochstab was a tool for making rope, correcting an earlier interpretation of it as a purely symbolic object.

Replica of Stone Age perforated mammoth tusk with cattail fibers being threaded through its grooves to make rope
Archaeologists demonstrate rope production using a replica lochstab and cattail fibers, showing how spiral grooves align strands.www.smithsonianmag.com

This image corresponds to the experiment described in the first paragraph where researchers tested the Hohle Fels baton as a rope-making tool, producing thick rope in minutes.

Beyond rope making, the same evidence pushes back the timeline for fiber use. The oldest surviving human‑made fiber is a six‑millimeter‑long three‑ply string made by Neanderthals about 50,000 years ago at the Abri du Maras rock shelter in France, while wear patterns on stone tools from France and the Netherlands suggest hafting—attaching stone points to handles with cord—may date back as far as 250,000 years ago. By securing a sharpened stone to a wooden shaft, hafting transformed simple rocks into axes, arrows, and spears, vastly expanding what prehistoric humans could hunt and build.

Illustration showing hafted stone tools: barbed arrowhead, Acheulean axe, stone dagger, and spear with cords attaching points to wooden shafts
Hafted stone tools from prehistoric times, illustrating how cord was used to attach stone points to handles for axes, arrows, and spears.www.smithsonianmag.com

This image relates to the article's discussion of hafting evidence from wear patterns on stone tools, suggesting cord use as far back as 250,000 years ago to create hafted weapons and tools.

Producing such fiber was labor‑intensive and shaped seasonal rounds. Ethnographic work with the Wola of Papua New Guinea shows that generating enough string for a single bag requires 65 to 80 hours of twisting plus foraging for raw materials, and Neanderthal cord preparation involved soaking inner bark for about two weeks before it could be broken into usable fibers. These demands meant that fiber production structured the yearly mobility of hunter‑gatherer groups, while the perishable nature of cordage, leather, and wood means that most of this technology leaves little trace, leaving stone tools to dominate the archaeological record.