Evidence of ancient recycling unearthed
Monday, September 24, 2012 - 12:34:53
While many people think of recycling as a modern innovation, our ancestors would be quite surprised at the amount of waste we generate each day in our consumer-oriented society.
Before mass production and industrial scale farming, most people had to subsist on a limited supply of both food and everyday items, going back thousands of years, to the dawn of our species.
However, a new study, carried out by the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, has discovered evidence of particularly ancient recycling techniques used by early humans, to prolong the usefulness of the stone tools which they had forged.
Human remains and artefacts discovered from around 13,000 years into our past are the first clear evidence that recycling was carried out, according to academics from the institute.
Expert, Manuel Vaquero, explained that in order to identify the presence of recycling techniques, it is first necessary to find the two stages of use for an object, outlining that for which it was initially intended and then finding how it was repurposed and applied in a different way.
Mr Vaquero states that hunter-gatherer communities from this time would have relied upon recycling in order to get the most value from the stone tools they made and also to improve the primitive economy by making various resources much more widely available, as a result of this reuse.
Because humans were able to recycle, it meant that they did not have to travel as widely looking for resources required for tool construction. Often, humans would happen across previously inhabited areas and simply repurpose what had been left by the last occupants, turning weapons into domestic tools.
This provides an interesting look into the way that recycling was actually something that helped to further human society thousands of years ago, just as it does today.
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