Scientists pinpoint when humans started to use tools made from whale bone
The bones, shaped into narrow projectiles for hunting, were found during excavations in the Bay of Biscay, near Spain and France, over a century ago. While researchers suspected the tools were ancient, their fragmented condition made accurate dating difficult.
Recent technological advancements have now enabled scientists to determine the age of the oldest tools. Analysis revealed that the bones originated from various whale species, including blue whales, fin whales, and sperm whales.
'Humans and whales have clearly been encountering one another for a long time,' said Vicki Szabo with Western Carolina University, who studies the history of whaling and was not involved with the latest research.
Scientists think that ancient humans were crafting whale bone instruments in places including the Arctic and South Pacific. There's been solid evidence of whale bone tools dating back to about 5,000 years ago, but the new research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications pushes the timeline back.
Ancient humans weren't necessarily hunting whales, said study author Jean-Marc Petillon with the French National Centre for Scientific Research. More likely, they were scavenging the bodies of beached whales and fashioning their dense, heavy bones into tools to hunt reindeer or bison.
The tools indicate that ancient people in the area took advantage of resources near the sea for survival. They likely also collected seashells and fished. Finding such evidence has been difficult as rising sea levels disrupt coastlines across the globe, scientists said.
'It's one more contribution to the importance of coastal environments for human groups, even in this long past," said Petillon.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
How four women defied the Nazis – from within a concentration camp
The 80 th anniversary of the Second World War continues to produce its avalanche of books, many of them increasingly angle-hungry to avoid repeating so much of what we know already. American historian Lynne Olson's angle in The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück is not merely the woman's view, as must be expected about a Nazi concentration camp designed specifically for them, but one that loses no opportunity to give French men a kicking. Her thesis, which we should be far from ready to accept, is that the story of the French resistance has long been presented as a basically masculine enterprise in which the women broadly had a support role. It is not true that the resistance (in all its forms: Olson is quite right to state that it was hardly a unified organisation) operated like that. But nor is it true that that is how history has presented it, as many of the secondary sources (on which this book is perhaps too heavily reliant) have for decades made clear. If people want to believe that women have been written out of the script then that is up to them, and it would suggest they have not read much of the existing literature. Still, every new book on the heavily-exploited subject of Hitler 's war needs a unique selling point, and that appears to be Olson's. To her credit, she has read a lot of other people's work on the subject, though it does not prevent her from making the odd slip. When I last went there Niort was a town in the west of France, not one in the north-east; and her statement that 'more than a million Allied soldiers rounded up during May and June 1940 [on the Western Front, around the Fall of France] were scheduled to be shipped to Germany to do slave labor' [sic] is just bizarre. As she points out later in the book, Germany was selective about in which camps it observed the Geneva Convention; but captured Allied soldiers at that time did not normally face the fate of ending up in a situation where the Convention was not observed. The endnotes offer no indication of where her slave labour idea came from. Indeed, many of the French who were captured were sent back to France as civilians after the armistice signed by Pétain, even if they ended up as forced labourers after the crumbling Nazi war economy started conscripting French people as workers once Vichy was occupied in 1942. The author focuses on various women who were genuinely heroic and, for their resistance activities, ended up in Ravensbrück. The camp was opened shortly after the start of hostilities to house female political prisoners and others who had offended the master race in some way. The camp was north of Berlin and in what, immediately after the war, would become the Soviet zone of occupation. It was not, until very near the end of the war, an extermination camp: it became one when Hitler, in his increasing psychopathy and madness, decided that none of the prisoners of the Reich should survive. However, conditions in the overcrowded camp, with its regime of forced labour, were almost non-existent and foul food and random sadism ensured that many women did die. A crematorium was provided for convenience as a result. The heroines of Olson's book – Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the General, Germaine Tillion, an eminent anthropologist, Jacqueline d'Alincourt, a young French aristocrat, and Anise Girard, who while still a teenager was recruited into an anti-Nazi intelligence network – all survived. They have provided testimonies to numerous historians of the camp on which Olson has drawn, having all died long before she wrote her book. The last survivor was Girard, who at 93 was present at the interment of Tillion and de Gaulle in the Panthéon in Paris: for all the talk about the female contribution to the resistance being overlooked, these two women were done the honour their heroism merited. The fact that they survived was rather as though they were winners of some sort of diabolic lottery. Tillion's mother, Émilie, was also rounded up and, having survived until the final acts of psychopathic madness in the last phase of the war, went to the gas chamber. This was largely because of her age (she was in her late 60s), and despite efforts by the other women to hide her and disguise the physical manifestations of ageing through makeup and through having her wear a scarf to conceal her greying hair at roll-call. An inmate working in the camp's records department – the Nazis were very meticulous at keeping records of their victims – forged her age on her file, but it was all to no avail. Her daughter and her three friends were spared the cull for various reasons. In most cases it was their relative youth, and that they could, despite malnutrition and disease, still perform the various acts of slave labour their captors imposed on them – not to mention the routine beatings. Camaraderie not just among the French women, but among all the inmates of whatever nationality, was intensified by the hatred of their oppressors. Small acts of kindness assumed gigantic proportions in such a scene of horror. The camp ended up containing around four times as many women as it was intended to house: inevitably many died of disease, saving the Nazis the trouble of slaughtering them. After a long period in a hellish solitary confinement, de Gaulle was first moved to a less spartan part of the camp and then, after the liberation of France, released. Himmler, as the head of the SS, had seen her as a potential hostage because of her relationship to her uncle, but eventually saw the benefit of exchanging her in a prisoner swap to boost his own credentials with the people he realised were going to win the war, and save his own neck. His suicide rendered that pointless, and Hitler profoundly disagreed with his idea of a negotiated peace. As the camp authorities proceeded to murder as many as they could, lives were eventually saved by the Swede Count Bernadotte who, anxious to improve neutral Sweden's post-war reputation in the light of its having been considered rather too friendly to the Nazis, negotiated the rescue of the camp's remaining inmates and their repatriation to their own countries. A number went straight back to France; some had a period of recuperation in Sweden first. The camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, escaped and was found in 1949 working as a waiter in Munich. Although Olson is highly critical of the use of the British common law system, saying it was inadequate for the seven trials of Ravensbrück war criminals, Suhren got what was coming to him, and was shot by a French firing squad in 1950. Olson spends too long on the after-story of the inmates, the book becoming tedious in its later stages with a rather dull episode about an American woman's making of a documentary on the camp. Readers will be glad to hear of the fulfilling family lives that the women lived after their nightmare, and that many of those who tormented them received justice; but much else in the last part of the book is irrelevant. Also, the book is a struggle to read. It is written in American and the publisher has not thought it worth the investment of translating it into English. Olson's style is at times cloying and always adjective-rich, which makes the reader feel he or she is trapped in an interminable, over-written article in a women's magazine. The story of Ravensbrück, and of the role of French women in resisting Nazi occupation, is important: but it has already been told, and much better than this. ★★★☆☆
The Sun
a day ago
- The Sun
EuroMillions results and numbers: National Lottery draw tonight, July 11
THE draw for tonight's National Lottery EuroMillions (July 11, 2025) has taken place, with life-changing cash prizes at stake. Check the results to see if you have just won a fortune and bagged enough to start that jet-set lifestyle you always dreamed of. Every EuroMillions ticket also bags you an automatic entry into the UK Millionaire Maker, which guarantees at least one player will pocket £1million in every draw. You can find out if you're a winner by checking your ticket against tonight's numbers below. Tonight's National Lottery EuroMillions winning numbers are: 08, 23, 24, 45, 49 and the Lucky Stars are: 02, 10. The UK Millionaire Maker Selection winners are: TXGS29255. Tonight's National Lottery Thunderball winning numbers are: 05, 17, 21, 24, 29 and the Thunderball is 08. TOP 5 BIGGEST LOTTERY WINS IN THE WORLD £1.308 billion (Powerball) on January 13 2016 in the US, for which three winning tickets were sold, remains history's biggest lottery prize £1.267 billion (Mega Million) a winner from South Carolina took their time to come forward to claim their prize in March 2019 not long before the April deadline £633.76 million (Powerball draw) from a winner from Wisconsin £625.76 million (Powerball) Mavis L. Wanczyk of Chicopee, Massachusetts claimed the jackpot in August 2017 £575.53 million (Powerball) A lucky pair of winners scooped the jackpot in Iowa and New York in October 2018 The first EuroMillions draw took place on February 7, 2004, by three organisations: France's Française des Jeux, Loterías y Apuestas del Estado in Spain and the Camelot in the UK. One of the UK's biggest prizes was up for grabs on December, 4, 2020 with a whopping £175million EuroMillions jackpot, which would make a winner richer than Adele. Another previous UK winner who's whole life was altered with their jackpot was a player who wanted to remain anonymous on October 8, 2019. They walked off with a cool £170,221,000. Colin and Chris Weir, from Largs in Scotland, netted a huge £161,653,000 in the July 12, 2011. Adrian and Gillian Bayford, from Haverhill, Suffolk, picked up £148,656,000 after they played the draw on August, 10, 2012, while Jane Park became Britain's youngest lottery winner when she scooped up £1 million in 2013. The odds of winning any EuroMillions prize are 1 in 13. Could tonight's jackpot of £74million see you handing in your notice and swapping the daily commute for slurping champagne on a super yacht or lying back on a private beach in the Bahamas? 2
Medical News Today
2 days ago
- Medical News Today
Heart disease, weight gain linked to higher breast cancer risk after menopause
Researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer recently examined the link between excess weight and breast cancer risk in postmenopausal scientists focused specifically on women who developed cardiovascular disease to see how developing this affected breast findings showed an especially increased risk of breast cancer for every 5 kilograms per square meter increase in body mass index (BMI) in women who developed cardiovascular to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 74% of people living in the United States have body mass index (BMI) levels that indicate either overweight or excess weight can cause many health issues, such as type 2 diabetes and an increased risk of heart disease. Being overweight can even lead to a higher risk of developing breast cancer. A new study led by researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Lyon, France set out to discover whether women who are overweight or have obesity who go on to develop heart disease or type 2 diabetes have an increased breast cancer risk. While type 2 diabetes did not increase breast cancer risk, the study revealed that women who developed cardiovascular disease (CVD) had a 31% higher risk of breast study appears in the American Cancer Society's journal Cancer. Linking obesity, CVD, and breast cancer While breast cancer can affect women of all ages, it affects postmenopausal women at higher rates. After women go through menopause and the ovaries no longer produce estrogen, the hormone is produced in adipose cells (body fat), which includes cells in the much estrogen can increase the chance of abnormal cell growth, which may lead to breast learn more about breast cancer and heart disease in postmenopausal women, the authors used data from around 170,000 participants from two European prospective cohort studies. They only included women who did not have a history of CVD, type 2 diabetes, or breast cancer. The researchers reviewed various health metrics, including BMI, which is not always the best measure of health, since it does not take into account sex, age, fat location, or muscle as a more established measure, BMI was the focus for the authors in the new study in terms of developing CVD, type 2 diabetes, and breast cancer. At the beginning of the data collection, the average age of the participants from both data sets was around age 60, and obesity levels in one data set was 17% and the other was 21%. Both cohorts had a median follow-up of around 11 years. Some of the data the researchers reviewed from that time included whether the participants developed CVD, type 2 diabetes, or breast cancer. Developing CVD more than doubles breast cancer riskThe researchers found that having either an overweight or obese BMI level and developing CVD can increase the risk of developing breast the follow-up period, nearly 7,000 women developed breast cancer. The scientists learned that each 5 kilograms per square meter (kg/m2) increase in BMI was linked to a 31% increase in breast cancer risk for women with is significantly higher compared to the increased risk in women without CVD, which was a 13% higher risk. Developing type 2 diabetes did not increase the risk of developing breast leader of the research team, Heinz Freisling, PhD, spoke with Medical News Today to explain the connection between CVD and breast cancer risk. Freisling explained how excess body weight can lead to chronic inflammation, high insulin levels, and abnormal cholesterol, all of which can damage blood vessels and contribute to heart researcher also discussed how adipose tissue secretes hormones, such as leptin, that can impact blood pressure and heart rate. 'Leptin also stimulates cell division, in particular in breast tissue, and suppresses immune responses,' said Freisling. 'These mechanisms are also risk factors for breast cancer, with the exception of blood lipid levels.' 'In short, excess adiposity can cause biological changes in the body that can lead to both cardiovascular disease and breast cancer, including inflammation, insulin resistance, and dysregulated hormone levels,' he tips on lowering heart disease, breast cancer riskChristopher Berg, MD, a noninterventional cardiologist specializing in cardio-oncology at MemorialCare Heart and Vascular Institute at Orange Coast Medical Center, spoke with MNT about the study.'This study shows that the risk of breast cancer associated with elevated BMI is increased in women who develop cardiovascular disease,' Berg, who was not involved in the research, told us.'These findings highlight the potential of preventing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease not only to reduce heart-related outcomes but also as a strategy to reduce breast cancer risk,' he made some preventive recommendations postmenopausal women who want to lower their breast cancer risk can take. 'The study reinforces the importance of managing cardiovascular risk factors and maintaining a healthy weight to lower breast cancer risk,' explained recommended the following strategies:engaging in regular physical activity—aiming for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per weekavoiding excessive alcohol consumptionquitting smokingmaking heart-healthy dietary choices, such as following the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) or Mediterranean Pathak, MD, a board-certified hematologist and medical oncologist and medical director of Integrative Oncology at MemorialCare Cancer Institute, likewise not involved in the study, also shared some preventive strategies with recommended incorporating strength training to 'shift metabolism towards retaining the more metabolically active muscle tissue.' Additionally, Pathak also made suggestions for a healthy diet that can help with cancer prevention. 'Inclusion of more whole foods, including fruits, vegetables, and grains that are low in saturated fats, is healthful for the microbiome with micronutrients and fiber to sustain both a healthy immune system for cancer prevention and maintain healthy lipid levels involved in the genesis of atherosclerosis.'– Bhavana Pathak, MD
