Sometime between 41,000 and 52,000 years ago, at a rock shelter in what is now southeastern France, a Neanderthal twisted together three bundles of conifer bark into a short length of cord. The fragment — just 6.2 millimeters long — survived tens of thousands of years pressed against the underside of a flint tool, undetected, until a paleoanthropologist put it under a microscope and rewrote what we thought we knew about our closest evolutionary cousins.
Key findings
- Neanderthal string: The cord fragment was recovered from the Abri du Maras rock shelter in the Ardèche River valley of France, a site Neanderthals occupied from roughly 90,000 to 42,000 B.C.E.
- Oldest known cordage: At 41,000–52,000 years old, this fragment is more than twice the age of the previous record-holder — fiber fragments from Israel dating to around 19,000 B.C.E.
- Ropemaking technique: The cord was made using deliberate two-direction twisting — clockwise S-twists in each bundle, then counterclockwise Z-twists to bind them together — the same fundamental method used in ropemaking today.
A find hiding in plain sight
Bruce Hardy, a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College in Ohio, almost missed it entirely. What looked like a smear of contamination on the underside of a thin flint tool turned out, under spectroscopy and microscopy, to be a structured mass of intentionally twisted plant fiber.
Hardy published the findings in Scientific Reports in 2020 C.E., alongside colleagues from French and American institutions. The Abri du Maras site had been under excavation since 2006 C.E., yielding stone tools, reindeer bones, and other traces of Neanderthal daily life through layer after layer of Middle Paleolithic sediment. Hardy had previously found individual twisted fibers at the site — suggestive but inconclusive. This fragment was different: a complete, three-ply structure whose construction could only be explained by deliberate technique.
The cord survived for one specific reason. It ended up in a microenvironment directly beneath the flint tool, which slowed the decay that would have erased it. Almost everything else from this period — hides, wooden implements, plant-fiber bags, woven fabric — is simply gone. The stone and bone record that archaeologists work with is the hardest, least representative fraction of what ancient people actually made and used.
What making Neanderthal string actually requires
The cognitive implications of this cord are less obvious than they first appear, and far more significant.
To produce a stable three-ply cord, a maker must track multiple processes simultaneously — maintaining direction and tension in each individual strand while monitoring how the combined structure is developing. The researchers argued in Scientific Reports that this requires a working understanding of pairs, sets, and sequence: a mathematical sensibility, even if never articulated as such. Cognitive scientists call the underlying capacity “context-sensitive operational memory” — the ability to move between steps in a multi-stage process without losing your place.
The choice of raw material adds another layer. The Neanderthals at Abri du Maras used bast fiber — the inner bark of a conifer. Harvesting it efficiently requires knowing when in the annual cycle the trees yield the most workable fibers, typically early spring when rising sap makes separation easier. That implies not just knowledge of specific tree species but an understanding of how they change across seasons, and the foresight to plan around those changes.
Lasting impact
Twisted fiber may be the most underestimated technology in human history. Once a group can make reliable cordage, the downstream possibilities expand in almost every direction.
Cord is the basis for clothing construction, carrying bags, fishing nets, mats, baskets, hafted tools — where a stone blade is lashed to a wooden handle — and eventually watercraft. Nets expand the range and efficiency of hunting and fishing. Bags change how much food can be transported. Hafted tools change how much force can be applied to cutting or digging. Warm, fitted clothing changes how far north a group can survive. Research on fiber technology’s role in early human dispersal has suggested that cordage may have been as significant to human expansion as any stone-tool innovation.
The Neanderthals at Abri du Maras were almost certainly not inventing string for the first time. They were practicing a skill they already knew well. Paleoanthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook University has pointed out that some very old stone tools appear designed to fit handles — which would have required lashing — suggesting fiber technology extends much further back than any surviving evidence can currently confirm.
That invisible history is a reminder that technologies built from organic materials — the baskets, nets, ropes, and wrappings that structured daily life for countless generations — leave almost no trace. The fact that Neanderthals were making sophisticated cordage in what is now France during this period reminds us that parallel technological development was happening across the inhabited world. Populations in Africa, western Asia, and Europe were all solving similar problems — how to carry, bind, hunt, and stay warm — and arriving at related solutions through independent ingenuity and, where groups overlapped, shared knowledge.
Blindspots and limits
The Abri du Maras fragment is a single data point — 6.2 millimeters of preserved cord from one site in France. It cannot tell us how widespread Neanderthal string-making was, whether the skill was taught across generations, or how long before this moment the technique had already been in use. The organic record from this period is so sparse that absence of evidence is almost never evidence of absence. What we can say is that the capacity existed — and that the Neanderthal mind that produced it was considerably more sophisticated than popular imagination has long allowed.
Read more
For more on this story, see: HowStuffWorks — World’s Oldest Sample of String Was Made by Neanderthals
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Rhinos return to Uganda’s Kidepo Valley after decades away
- Indigenous land rights agreement protects 160 million hectares at COP30
- The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory
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