Meet the flint stones: Olomouc scientists track prehistoric hunters through flint samples
Prehistoric mammoth hunters who moved across the Czech lands roughly 30,000 years ago are being tracked today by Olomouc scientists. By mapping ancient deposits of worked flint, they have found that the hunters could move over distances of one hundred kilometres or more.
While easy to ignore, small stones can reveal a great deal about our ancient ancestors. The sharp edges of flint, a type of stone that can easily be ‘knapped’ into specific shapes, were highly valued in the Stone Age. As geologist Martin Moník explains, before the dawn of bronze and iron, flint had all sorts of uses:
“Flint can reach the sharpness of iron knives, which could be used for practically anything – for cutting, scratching, maybe even as tattoo tools, or as tweezers to scrape dirt from under your nails and out of your ears.”
Another use, of course, was to create weapons, such as spearheads and arrowheads for hunting, and it was often mammoth that was on the menu. Unlike biological material, stone endures down the centuries, and flint therefore gives a vital source of evidence about the lives of humans in the Stone Age. One small piece of flint can look very much like another, but an expert eye and the latest technology can find out many important details within these prehistoric weapons, according to chemist Tomáš Pluháček:
“We will use our analytical tools on these polished surfaces and with their help, we will look at changes in, for example, the colour or chemical profile of the elements found there, which are the key to determining the origin of the flints. Through this, we are tracking the hunters themselves.”
Through this method, scientists at the Faculty of Science of Palacký University in Olomouc are tracking the movement of Neolithic mammoth hunters. The samples of flint can be found in Czechia, Poland and possibly even Ukraine. Geologist Martin Moník again:
“One of the areas is located in southern Poland, in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, another in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains … It cannot be ruled out that some of the flints were brought from the present-day territory of Ukraine. We know of the Volnice flint from locations of mammoth hunters in eastern Slovakia, so it remains possible that they too were brought to Moravia – both to southern Moravia, for example to the sites under the Pavlov Hills, which are the most famous, and to Předmostí near Přerov here in Central Moravia.”
With the flint finds in question coming from such far-off locations, the scientists are able to track the prehistoric hunters over 100 to 150 kilometres, with a few exotic rocks coming from over 400 kilometres or more.
