Late Stone Age people got a grip thanks to honeybees. Northern Europeans attached a barbed bone point to a handle of some kind with a beeswax adhesive around 13,000 years ago, scientists say. The result: a fishing spear.
     Using beeswax glue to make tools was common in Africa as early as 40,000 years ago, but this spear is the first evidence of its use in cold parts of Europe at a time toward the end of the Stone Age when the glaciers were receding, say archaeologist Michael Baales of LWL-Archaeologie für Westfalen in Olpe, Germany, and his colleagues.
     Where the beeswax came from remains a question. Farmers in Southwest Asia and Europe acquired beeswax and probably honey as early as 9,000 years ago. Honeybees may have pushed north into Europe from warmer, Mediterranean locales several thousand years earlier than previously thought, the researchers propose. Or Northern European hunter-gatherers may instead have obtained beeswax through trade networks extending to Mediterranean areas, Baales' team says. Stone Age Eurasians formed group alliances over large areas.
     New chemical and microscopic analyses of the bone point, discovered in western Germany in the 1930s, identified beeswax mixed with crushed charcoal. Charcoal kept the beeswax from becoming brittle, the investigators suspect.

Edited from ScienceNews (6 October 2017)