Recycling is not a recent practice. Even the men of the Paleolithic practiced it
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
The practice of recycling it is not an invention Contemporary, but it has very ancient roots dating back to Paleolithic. We don't try to take credit for ourselves that we don't have. Our ancestors were already fervent ecologists, perhaps out of necessity, but they already used to recycle some objects of daily use.
This was discovered by a study conducted byUniversitat Rovira i Virgili and by the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), according to which humans dating back to the Upper Paleolithic age recycled their stone artifacts to adapt them to other uses.
The study is based on burnt artifacts found at the site of Molí del Salt in Tarragona, in Spain, in the heart of Catalonia. The recycling of stone tools during prehistoric times is a novelty, difficult to identify due to the difficulties in verifying such practices in archaeological finds.
Manuel Vaquero, author of the study, explained to ScienceDaily that to identify recycling as such, it is necessary to differentiate the two phases of the manipulation sequence of an object: the moment before it is altered and the moment after. The two are separated by an interval in which the artifact has undergone some form of alteration. "This is the first time that a systematic study of this type has been performed."
Archaeologists have found a high percentage of remains charred in Molí del Salt dating back to 13 thousand years ago, at the end of the Upper Paleolithic. The expert assures that the choice of these burnt artifacts can provide unequivocal evidence of their recycling after being exposed to fire.
And the results proved the researchers right and allowed them to discover that recycling of tools was normal at the time. However, this practice is not equally documented for all of artifacts. According to what is known today, the use of recycled tools was more common for household activities and was associated with immediate needs. On the other hand, the tools used for hunting were hardly recycled.
“This indicates that a large part of these instruments they were not conceived from the beginning as double artifacts but as a single instrument built first and then readapted for a second function later, when the artifact itself was recycled "he explains vaquero.
The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Francesca Mancuso
