5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools
ncl.ac.ukI think archaeology requires a multidisciplinary approach that has only recently begun to emerge. For too long, especially in past centuries, archaeologists focused on history and languages while neglecting engineering, chemistry and the practical techniques that enabled survival and innovation. That's why the general public views our ancestors as 'primitive,' when in reality they possessed techniques many of which we've lost or still don't fully understand.
Indian carpenters always had a drill with large spindle around which a long rope is wound. A person pulls the rope back and forth spinning the drill. Another person holds the drill in position using a flat wood piece at the top with small hole to hold the drill axle.
Same technique is also used for spinning a wooden churner to get butterfat out of curd. A standing woman would pull the rope back and forth for a few minutes on the long churner stick that is churning the curd in a clay pot placed on the floor.
> always
Can you be more specific here? In an article about civilization 5300 years ago, where India has had a human population for at least 65,000 years, saying "always" is fairly vague
Sorry I was referring to mechanical techniques of spinning a drill in general, that I'm familiar with, in addition to the bow method described. I was not referring to any time scale.
For the curious, Clickspring has recreated something a lot like this and uses it on his Antikythera Mechanism videos on YT.
Thankyou. I was going to point this out. Chris (ClickSpring) is the first to say that his methods are not proven, they're just highly believable given the technology of the time. I did some archaeology at uni and I know we're not meant to say this, but sometimes things are just so obvious even when there is no physical evidence of it.
Archaeological proofs have the unfortunate property of having each deductive step being fairly obvious and limited, but proving those steps can be literally impossible.
Bow drills were still commonly used in India in 25 years ago.
Because electricity was unreliable and machinery was expensive.
I keep one of those Amish hand-crank drills in my vehicle toolbox. I have one in the closet too.
I have a thing for old tools, but not much can substitute a drill when one is needed. And the ones I refer to are surprisingly effective, and built to last. Borders on art for me.
Ohh no, i thought the science is settled on slaves and chisels.
I wonder if the bow drill principle for boring holes evolved from fire-starting techniques, where the same reciprocal motion was already understood and mastered in that years.
Just speculation, but it suggests how practical problem-solving builds on existing techniques rather than appearing fully formed.
Given that humans must have "always" known that carving a hole in something is easier if you use your wrist to reciprocally rotate the tool, I'd be inclined to suspect that both hole-making and firestarting with a bow drill were invented more or less contemporaneously.
Yes, but didn’t our wrists evolve because of all the fire-starting?
It's what a lot of engineers have been saying for decades: Looking at the surfaces of the artefacts, it's obvious more advanced tooling, than what was claimed by archaeologists, must have been used. Oh irony, the bits were already lying about in the museum's archive for a century.
I am really curious about the scoop marks across the globe. The hole drilling story is only interesting because of the precision and feed-per-revolution which is probably why archaeologists does not understand how advanced those people creating this holes must have been.
Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive, drilled holes should have been sufficient evidence of drills, people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats, rope-worn bones should be considered evidence of rope and so forth.
people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats
Historical sea levels were wildly different at different times, so not necessarily. For instance, the British isles were settled at a point when it was a part of the mainland: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland.png
Certainly. Land bridges are also a thing. As is swimming, in some cases.
Balance would be nice, yes, but I think the conservative approach is closer to correct, especially given the natural human bias toward believing sensational theories.
What is more sensational:
a, you can drill a hole and cut a 100 ton stone block with a chisel
b, you create a hole with a drill, you use some for of stone cutting technology that supports cutting 100 ton stone blocks?
The problem is that you get a vastly distorted picture because of different survivorship rates of artifacts. In the Stone Age people used mostly wood tools but stone tools didn’t rot away.
Maybe not closer to correct, but definitely less likely to admit errors. But sometimes the negative space around a particular thing becomes overwhelming. To me this is like circumstantial evidence—in general it’s weaker than physical evidence, but in high enough numbers it can serve.
But what does the negative space indicate? It says something is missing - which few will dispute - but there are many possible answers in a sort of superposition. Speculation about this answer or that one isn't reliable. It resolves to one answer (or a few) when you have actual evidence.
Sure, you can’t always make a definitive statement, but you can at least determine classes of things. Same way we can determine a murder occurred without recovering a weapon or sometimes even without finding a body. Maybe we can’t be very specific about the how, but IME it is also OK to draw comparisons to modern tools so long as those comparisons are helpful.
That's an interesting thought. I wonder if you can quantify this belief? That Weibull (presumably) distribution would be an interesting and useful thing to know.
Quantify the belief that humans are biased toward sensationalism? No, I have no idea how to do that. Actually you could make an argument that it's a bit circular, that "sensationalism" is defined as the kind of ideas that humans are biased towards and which are therefore more able to cause a "sensation".
But if you don't see how people yearn to believe in big dramatic things like conspiracies, aliens, bigfoot, or even simple narratives about single people changing the course of history, and how they only accept the complicated and/or boring reality with conscious effort, then, well, you seem to be living in a better universe than I am.
Unfortunately, you also sometimes throw out explanations like "they did X in substantially the same way as their descents were doing X up until the late 1800s" or "they used it for Y, just at it was used at other sites throughout the world."
At least in the case of things like migrations, we're starting to get overwhelming genetic evidence.
It's possible to put holes through things without a drill. People can get onto islands without boats. How do you define rope, and what else might cause similar wear? Are you certain you can distinguish them?
Archaeology has come a long way over the last couple of centuries. It used to be little better than grave robbing and crackpot (often racist) theories. Archaeologists made all sorts of assumptions that turned out to be ridiculously (and sometimes tragically) wrong. Excavations once involved dynamite and bulldozers. Things have changed. Techniques for re-analyzing and extracting new information from old finds are allowing archaeologists to make discoveries without digging at all. Even a careful, modern dig is a destructive act that can only be conducted once.
It's not frustrating. It's progress.
If you find a man made hole with a perfectly vertical shaft and high aspect ratio (tall and narrow), it was drilled. Individuals can float or be washed ashore on an island, populations can't. If you find entire civilizations on distant islands, they got there by some sort of boat or advanced raft. Rope generally implies twisted or braided fibers, so maybe it's difficult to tell if this was artificially twisted or a natural one like a vine. But if it looked like a rope, and was used like a rope then it was a rope.
This is true, but archaeology has been settled for a while now on what constitutes sufficient evidence. Believe it or not, it's actually a pretty new science.
> archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example".
Could you provide some evidence of your own? Archaeology has always been tied to evidence, as any scholarship is.
they dont even accept claims with properly documented and preserved samples. your methodology doesnt matter if it disagrees with the common accepted 'truth'.
archeology is a cesspool.
not to mention tons of hings being twisted into weird shit only to try and push colonial agendas!
This has been less true for the last 50 years. Archaeology as a field is very aware of this cultural bias, and the old school are mostly dead. Think of it like the doctors of 150 years ago prescribing "cucaine for ill humors". It's a pendulum, but it's settling.
These days it's seen as a dynamic decision tree. If such and such people had so and so technology, then the logical ways to achieve that are x, y and z methods. Let's look for evidence for those things and weigh up the probability of each. Importantly, let's not allow cultural bias to cloud that analysis by consulting with the closest living relatives of said people.
The problems are, amongst others, maintaining that lack of cultural bias, recognising that you have to allow for unknown paths to technology, and being aware that every deductive step exponentially expands the decision tree whilst simultaneously clouding the certainty.
This is why modern archaeology is actually highly averse to saying things are "true", but it's also very strong on saying other things are almost certainly "false".
Most things in this tree of dwindling probability are "false" , and it takes serious evidence, linking a bunch of deductive steps, to flip the consensus to "true".
Do you have any examples of this?
> we'll believe anything
Can you explain what you're referring to? Obviously "ancient aliens" does not count as archaeology, despite your insistence otherwise.
The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus) but if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".
(Just saw the snark about ancient aliens; no idea where that came from. If you're going to try to imply that that's my position you'll need to produce some artifacts to back it up.)
Piltdown was rejected 70 years ago, so hardly a current example. Kamitakamori was someone taking legitimately old artifacts and putting them in other places. You can detect that (as people did), but it's much less obvious than you're suggesting.
There are also numerous examples where physical artifacts haven't been immediately accepted. The white sands footprints. Monte Verde II. Others like Monte Verde I, Buttermilk Creek, and Cooper's ferry still aren't accepted despite physical evidence.
Consensus generally has high standards for anything that pushes boundaries. It's very easy to construct an "obvious" explanation that's totally wrong. We call these "just-so" stories. A narrative that's supported by physical evidence is a lot more verifiable.
> Piltdown was rejected 70 years ago, so hardly a current example
Well of course it wasn't a current example -- to quote their original comment:
> Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive ... [emphasis added]
In other words, they feel that historical examples of fanciful theories being mainstream has resulted in an over correction to modern archeology requiring unreasonably strict proof standards.
(There is a certain irony in a user called "AlotOfReading" not reading a fairly short comment carefully...)
And for the record, my grump here is about soft / organic tools and artifacts and coastal / high weathering sites being discounted while everyone falls all over themselves for rocks and bones, even if fake. No aliens, just weavers, sailors, and the like.
> The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus)
Two examples from over a century is not evidence of unreliability.
> if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".
Evidence is a requirement in all scholarship; the rest is speculation - which can be useful as a direction for searching for evidence, but is not sufficient to be accepted in any field. What field accepts claims without evidence?
They didn't say things should be accepted without evidence. That's a laughably bad-faith reading. They proposed a different standard of evidence that they think is less infeasibly high while still not accepting nonsense. I don't totally agree but it's a reasonable direction to argue.
As for the examples, when they start with "swings over the years" they're clearly taking a long-term perspective, and not trying to claim that modern archaeology will "believe anything" (especially not when their more prominent claim is that modern archaeology believes too little).
It sounds very un-archaeologist to not investigate the gap between artifact and tooling (like that’s their job?).
For me the ‘archaeology not accepting things’ has been fueled by Graham Hancock etc. Archaeology is a lot like science, it sits on a body of research, if there’s evidence of advanced tooling and it’s properly investigated and written up, verified, no archaeologist would deny it.
It's this kind of gate keeping in archaeology that has kept Graham Hancock out of the industry for years, and we are now just finding out his theories are true.
My theory is that the industry is so small, they are afraid it will put them out of a career.
No judgement, but what theories of Hancock have been proven to be true?
This is true in many, many, many, many places. It takes a significantly higher bar of evidence to put forward specific tooling than an engineer's intuition to make the mark in archaeology.
Conspiracy theorists have long pointed out the obviously drilled holes in stonework that was >5000 years old. Of course they want to attribute it to lost advanced technology, but the more believable answer is that ancient Egyptians had really refined mundane tools like a bow drill.
I still want to know how the scoop marks were made in the ancient quarries. What tool could do that?
So they were right when questioning the chisel story?
Btw. the scoop marks are still a mystery. I would not classify people who are challenging the current narratives conspiracy theorists, they are skeptics really.
Given need, access to anything that might serve as string, pieces of wood, and too much time to think about the problem, most singular humans will come up with that within the year, if not within days.
That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.
Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting rocks together. Sharp rocks happens to be the only tool you need to make a basic bow drill.
I think it is several steps up and beyond from hitting rocks together.
You need to create string. You need to cut the wood for the bow. The bow and the string need to be the right sizes too. You need something that is sharp enough to work as the drill bit but also small AND approximately round enough to work in the bow. That also needs to be made of a material that is harder than the one you are drilling - here in this story there was some sort metallurgy involved to create the alloy, so that likely involves working with ores etc (mining, identifying, processing etc etc).
There are a lot of steps. You can't just find a random "vine" to wrap snuggly and securely around a random thing you find to use as a drill bit that is like 1cm in diameter - you'll need something of consistent size and highly flexible for the string, similar for the drill bit needs to be the right size and so on.
The next step up from banging rocks together is probably using sharp stone chips as scrapers or crude knives. Even napped stone axes are quite difficult to create and require skill, even if the raw components are literally laying around.
I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
> You need to create string.
That region typically used flax for string. That's another thing that can be done with virtually no tools.
Even if you skip the retting and merely hand-strip the fibers you still get something usable enough for some use.
These people didn't sit inside looking at screens all day. If your region had a plant that can be trivially turned into usable string you'd know - especially since they had contact/trade with neighboring Asia and there's evidence of flax processing in Georgia another 30k years earlier.
> I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
It took us maybe a few days of experimenting to finally figure out as boys. We used some modern string, random sticks, and an assortment of materials to try to start a fire with. It's harder than it seems, but not much so if you're determined. If some bored 8 year olds can do it, then so can anyone of any era.
I don't think the linage of anyone for whom that was truly so unattainable would have survived to this day.
> That region typically used flax for string.
Replying to myself because I looked into this a bit. Looks like date palm fiber might have been more common for rope (likely much easier to make if you needed a lot).
For this use-case probably nowhere near as good though.
I've made bowdrills for fire starting with hand twisted hickory cordage. Soaking the bark makes it easy to separate the inner bark, which you then tear into long strips and twist into rope with a "reverse wrap"--basically twist until it curls back on itself then give the "bundle" a half twist back to lock it in. I'm sure many species of tree would work similarly.
That is to say there's nothing special about rope, you can make it with nothing but your bare hands.
Alloying copper with silver and lead is sophisticated. How could they have got to this without structured research, experimentation, controlled manufacturing. It’s a lot closer to our drill bits now than a sharpened bone.
It is likely that only silver was the intended alloying element.
Except for native silver, which is very rare and usually mixed with gold, most silver is extracted from sulfides where it is mixed with lead (because silver ions and lead ions have the same size), so simple smelting will produce a mixture of silver and lead.
There are techniques of purifying the silver from the lead (i.e. "cupellation"), which were well known in later antiquity, but, at the time of early tools like this, probably the purification was not yet efficient.
The knowledge of the fact that pure metals are soft but mixing them makes hard metals is extremely ancient. Before learning this, metals could be used only for jewelry (except for very rare natural alloys, like the meteorites made of Fe-Ni-Co-Ge, which were the source of the oldest iron-based tools found in Egypt and elsewhere, thousands of years before the discovery of how to extract iron from its minerals).
Before discovering tin and the bronze made from copper and tin, which happened relatively recently, around the time when written history also began, for many thousands of years various weaker copper alloys were used, but which nonetheless were much harder than pure copper.
The metallurgy of 3 metals, lead, copper and gold, is very old, around ten thousand years or more. So more time has passed from the time when the techniques of smelting metals and making objects of them were first discovered until the discovery of other metals, e.g. silver and tin, and the diversification of metal-working techniques, than since that moment until the present.
There was a lot of time for refining the techniques used by smiths.
But to make a drill bit of highly alloyed copper you need a bit more tools and knowledge
Do a web search for "Wootz steel", "Damascus blades" and "Iron pillars India". The ancient world certainly had expertise in advanced metallurgy. Wootz steel was actually nanotech.
But that doesn't mean the average person will produce all that stuff from a standing start within 12 months just because they would like to drill a hole.
Nah, they just bought their drilling tool from whatever was their local version of Walmart in that ancient era.
Except it wasn't. It relied on contaminated ore, which nobody understood really why it worked. Unlike bronze that was well understood.
> Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.
True. Good thing no one is trying to do that.
Basic research is never silly.
Hominin history is millions of years old. 5300 years is merely a drop in the ocean of human history.