Ancient baskets and shoes reveal skill of prehistoric weavers

Intricate baskets and shoes found in a Spanish cave show that people living in Europe thousands of years ago were skilled at weaving objects from plant fibres.

Cueva de los Murciélagos, or the Cave of the Bats, is a cave system in south-west Spain that was discovered during mining activities in the 19^th century. Excavations of the cave have since revealed several mummified corpses alongside objects including baskets, sandals and a wooden hammer.

Francisco Martínez Sevilla at the University of Alcalá in Spain and his colleagues have now analysed 76 of these artefacts. They are considered among the best-preserved plant-based objects from prehistoric Europe, thanks to the low humidity inside the cave.

Around 65 of the items were found to be made from a fibre called esparto grass. This includes a set of baskets, with either a flat or a more cylindrical shape, as well as sandals that were made by crushing and twisting the esparto.

The other artefacts are made of wood and include tools such as a hammer and digging sticks.

The team carbon-dated 14 of these objects and found that they belonged to one of two time periods: 7950 to 7360 BC or 4370 to 3740 BC. The older objects were created by hunter-gatherers during the Mesolithic age, says Martínez Sevilla, while the later ones were probably used by Neolithic farmers.

The oldest dated sandal was found to be around 6000 years old, which makes it the oldest shoe ever found in Europe, says Martínez Sevilla.

“The use of vegetal fibres in Europe is older than we expected,” says team member Maria Herrero-Otal at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. “We imagine the Mesolithic populations as simpler, but it seems that they were much more complex than we thought.”