A whale tooth’s journey from the ocean to a Copper Age pit

A pod of sperm whales.
| Picture Credit score: Wikimedia Commons

When archaeologists have been digging a brand new library web site at Valencina de la Concepción in southwest Spain in 2018, they uncovered an uncommon merchandise: half of a big sperm-whale tooth mendacity in a 4,000-year-old pit.

As a result of nothing prefer it had ever been reported from Copper-Age Iberia, the staff ran a bevy of exams to study the place it may have come from and the way it ended up within the pit.

Thus, based mostly on proof of marine boring and beach-root injury, the staff unravelled the tooth’s lengthy journey from a sperm whale’s mouth and to a settlement deep inland, providing en route a timeline of coastal processes 4 millennia in the past.

Their findings have been not too long ago printed in PLoS One.

The staff shot overlapping photographs with a digital camera and processed them to construct an in depth 3D mannequin that might be rotated on a display screen, permitting tiny marks to be examined with out dealing with the delicate specimen.

Then staff members used a digital microscope to disclose floor scratches, drill holes, and organic bores smaller than a millimetre broad.

The staff additionally unraveled 4 sorts of small tunnels and grooves: made by sponges, marine worms, grazing snails, and burrowing barnacles. In addition they mapped chew marks left behind by sharks.

The form of the foundation — thick with a single level and lightweight enamel — matched up to date sperm whales. The unique tooth was estimated to have been 20-25 cm lengthy, that means the whale was an grownup.

Radiocarbon relationship of the opposite animal bones and pottery within the pit revealed it was dug in about 2500-2400 BC.

On this means, the staff reported that after the whale died, the tooth stayed on the seabed lengthy sufficient for sponges, worms, snails and barnacles to bore into it and for sharks to scavenge the carcass. Later, water currents rolled it round and partially buried it in sand.

Sometime, a storm or very excessive tide lastly tossed the tooth onto a close-by shore. Whereas buried in seaside sand, plant roots etched new channels and a limestone crust fashioned on its floor.

People of the Copper Age then picked it up, in all probability as a result of it seemed unique and helpful, and pressed a number of chisels or awls into the break edge to separate items off items, in all probability to make use of in ornaments.

Ultimately, the folks positioned the trimmed tooth in a pit a few metre broad and deep together with damaged dishes, stone instruments, and animal bones. The archaeologists didn’t discover any human bones inside and thus concluded the pit to be a “structured deposition”, meant to take away valuable objects from on a regular basis use.

That is the one sperm-whale tooth present in Copper-Age Spain and solely the second within the Western Mediterranean of comparable date. Its discovery thus widened the checklist of uncommon and prized supplies — together with elephant ivory, ostrich eggshells, and rock crystals — circulating at Valencina right now.

The burial additionally confirmed that coastal objects, even from gigantic sea creatures by no means seen alive inland, held symbolic energy for communities engaged predominantly in farming.