Earliest Spindle Wheels May Have Been Discovered in 12,000-year-old Village in Israel - Archaeology - Haaretz.com

A motley assembly of perforated stones found by the Sea of Galilee were very early spindle whorls to produce yarn, researchers deduce. It would take time for the innovation to catch on

Who invented the wheel? We don't know, and most likely the concept of rotational technology emerged multiple times. But we may owe everything from pottery wheels to Porsches to the Natufians, an innovative culture that lived in the southern Levant from about 15,000 to 11,500 years ago.

Natufians were among the earliest people to abandon the cave and build homes. They had other innovations too, among which may have been the world's first spindle whorls. That is what the motley assemblage of perforated stones found in the early village at Nahal Ein-Gev from 12,000 years ago were, Dr. Talia Yashuv and Prof. Leore Grosman propose Wednesday in PLOS OnE.

Spinning fiber to make cord had been around for tens of thousands of years; apparently Neanderthals did it too, but it was a tedious manual technique. The invention of the spindle and whorl would have made it fun and fast. "This was a complete innovation insofar as we know," Yashuv tells Haaretz by phone.

What were they spinning? Not wool. Sheep had not yet been domesticated. Possibly the people in this pre-Neolithic village by the lake were having terrific fun making and/or using this invention and began drilling pebbles madly, she posits – they found over 100 of these artifacts in the village.

Yet the breakthrough apparently didn't catch on right away. After emerging in the village, spindle wheel technology would disappear for 4,000 years.

But unlike Pet Rock or the desiccated arthropod eggs hawked to children as future "sea monkeys", the fad of whorls would stage a comeback. Similarly perforated pebbles would next appear in nearby Sha'ar Hagolan, just south of the Sea of Galilee in the Jordan Valley, in the Neolithic period.

People have been drilling – which means perforating solid substances – for as much as 150,000 years, if not more. One instance of such drilling was the making of beads and pendants of shell, bone, or stone. Drilling wasn't a Natufian innovation.

However, Yashuv and Grosman believe the people by Ein Gev Stream innovated in drilling as well. The village was littered with their flint perforators, as they reported in separate work: these were the dominant stone tool found there, they say. But how did the two conclude the stones with holes were spindle whorls, and not something else?

The perforated pebbles were not uniform, ranging in weight from two to 15 grams. But they had some common features. All were (roughly) roundish, and all had a hole drilled through the middle. Also, they were ugly, Yashuv shares.

They were? "When you first look at them – we call them the ugly perforated stones. Most are not modified," she explains. When one drills a stone to make an ornament one polishes or burnishes it, or otherwise renders it aesthetically pleasing; when making beads, effort also goes into making them look identical.

Not here. The Natufians collected pebbles and perforated them as is. And as the analysis of the unsightly stoneware progressed, Yashuv and Grosman realized they did have constant parameters – out of sight.

Using scans, the team deduced that the perforations weren't simple cylindrical shapes but biconical, like two Vs with the narrowest point in the heart of the stone.

Analysis shows the Natufians drilled each pebble from two directions, with the flint drill bits meeting in the middle. One doesn't have to drill that way; it's a choice. Inside, it looked like an hourglass, Yashuv explains.

We just add that the postulated spindle whorls were made of soft limestone while the drilling would have been done using harder flint perforators, which may also have been a Natufian innovation.

Crucially, all the stones featured characteristic parameters regarding the location of the center of mass: in the middle of the stone, which is important for the spindle element to stay put and not whirl off.

The team also identified discarded partially worked stones where they suspect error in the manufacturing process – the hole is off-center. "Something went wrong and they threw it away. That was a significant aspect," Yashuv says.

In short, the Natufians could drill straight through the soft limestone pebbles but chose to "attack" them from two sides, creating an hourglass shaped channel mid-stone; they weren't fussed by the finish of the interior or into perfect symmetry. The hole just had to be biconical.

What about other interpretations? Could these have been fishing weights? Stone weights for fishing nets have been found from roughly that time, perhaps a tad later. The team considered that interpretation, but ruled it out. For one thing, soft limestone is lousy for fishing weights because it's very soft and disintegrates in water – albeit slowly; prehistoric sinkers for fishing nets found in the region were made of harder stone. For another, fishing weights don't need a biconical perforation; their holes are cylindrical. They also tend to weigh more than two to 15 grams. So, no.

They also ruled out loom weights on the grounds that looms didn't exist yet, insofar as is known, and the stones were unsuitable for the purpose anyway: "suspension stone tools/weights will best perform by having uneven shapes, with the center of mass located at their base and the perforations at the farther end," not in the middle. Again, no. Thus, the parsimonious explanation is spindle wheels, which may have been an inspiration for a lot more.

Usually, discussions of "the earliest wheel" focus on carts and chariots that appeared in the Bronze Age. However, Yashuv and Grosman argue that possibly their perforated pebbles are in fact the earliest axle and wheel technology. It doesn't seem unthinkable that the cognitive leap marrying rotational technology with drilling, even if it took 4,000 years to catch on, led to that most disruptive of technologies.

Beads are a solid with a hole and are wheel-like in form but not function, Yashuv points out. They do not involve any element of rotation technology. In parallel, and separately – we had rotational technology that didn't use wheels: drilling. Both technologies were around for tens of thousands of years; Neanderthals too drilled bones and teeth, possibly to make pendants.

"The point where these two converge – where we have a wheel shaped object used as rotational technology – this is what we are talking about," Yashuv explains.

Meanwhile, spinning fiber to make string, cord, yarn and ultimately mats and textiles had also been around; the Natufian innovation was to shift from slow manual to fast mechanical technique.

The archaeologists don't say theirs is the earliest; possibly there were similar spindle-wheel technologies using perishable materials such as bone or wood that didn't survive the eons, Yashuv says. This is the first imperishable record of converged rotational and drilling technology.

If it was so wonderful and the village was so enamored of their innovation, why didn't it spread? Why did it appear only in this one village?

Innovation can have a dynamic, Yashuv suggests. "It isn't always a linear development. It can come and go, be modified, get accepted and rejected." Until it catches on. A rope would become a cloak, a spindle whorl maybe the concept underlying the chariot wheels flashing with fearsome blades as they rolled, because about 4,000 years after Ein Gev, spindle whorls would feature in every respectable Neolithic household. The technique had become common knowledge, Yashuv says.

If you drill down to its core, the spindle whorl is an axle and a wheel, she stresses: two wheels on an axle and the pottery wheel too are developments of the base concept of the spindle whorl, Yashuv says.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, starting after the Natufians but coexisting on the cusp of the Neolithic period, dwelled the Gobekli culture. Both were pre-pottery, both built homes out of stone outside the cave, indicating sedentarism. The way of living in both places was easy, and building houses is a key sign that the nomadic era was over. And only after both were gone, would the Neolithic revolution and agriculture begin in this region.

"Looking at evolution trends of spindle whorls and how things appear and disappear, pop up and stop, you also see and can assume that technological innovations created a snowball that could not be reversed at a certain point," Yashuv sums up the mystery. "Innovations begin to accrue, to the point that one can't go back." The Natufians not only built houses, they made lime plaster, which involved a process – later it would become common knowledge. They didn't make pottery yet but fashioned what seem to have been storage vessels of lime plaster and mud for the grains they didn't grow yet. And today their technologies are in every home and parking garage.