Image courtesy of Martin Novák
What did ancient
hunters carry in their pouch? Nothing extraordinary, but the date seemed to be
all wrong.
A set of 29 stone tools, including blades and points for
hunting, butchering and cutting wood, were found neatly arranged as if carried
in a leather pouch that decayed
A set of stone tools found in the Czech Republic appears to
be the personal toolkit of a hunter-gatherer who lived about 30,000 years ago.
The 29 artefacts, which include blades and points meant for hunting, skinning,
basic butchering and cutting wood, offer a rare glimpse into the daily lives of
ancient hunters, says Dominik Chlachula at
the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.
In 2009, a village road collapsed in the Pavlovské vrchy
mountains in the south-east of the country, opening up abandoned cellars that
archaeologists began studying. In 2021, they found a deeper level of the site,
called Milovice IV, containing charcoal dated to between 29,550 and 30,250
years ago. There, researchers found horse and reindeer bones, and – more
recently – a bundle of stone tools, still positioned as if they had been
wrapped in a leather pouch that had long since decayed.
Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2025 30,000-year-old toolkit shows what ancient hunter carried in a pouch | New Scientist 16 September
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