Ancient baskets and shoes found in a Spanish cave provide evidence of the weaving skills possessed by people living in Europe thousands of years ago. The Cueva de los Murciélagos, or Cave of the Bats, is a cave system in south-west Spain that was discovered in the 19th century. Excavations of the cave have uncovered mummified corpses and various objects, including baskets, sandals, and a wooden hammer.
Researchers from the University of Alcalá in Spain, led by Francisco Martínez Sevilla, have analyzed 76 of these artifacts. Due to the low humidity inside the cave, these plant-based objects are considered to be among the best-preserved from prehistoric Europe.
About 65 of the items were made from a fiber called esparto grass, which includes baskets of different shapes and sandals made by crushing and twisting the esparto. The remaining artifacts are made of wood and include tools like a hammer and digging sticks.
The team performed carbon dating on 14 of the objects and found that they belonged to two different time periods: 7950 to 7360 BC or 4370 to 3740 BC. The older objects were created during the Mesolithic age by hunter-gatherers, while the later ones were likely used by Neolithic farmers. The oldest sandal, dated at around 6000 years old, is the oldest shoe ever found in Europe.
These findings challenge previous assumptions about the complexity of Mesolithic populations. Maria Herrero-Otal, a team member from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says, “We imagine the Mesolithic populations as simpler, but it seems that they were much more complex than we thought.”
