Today, the Bay of Biscay has been swallowed by the sea, but in ancient times, it was an important path for hunter-gatherers. They would walk along the sea, looking for valuable materials; not rocks or shells, but bones. In particular, whale bones.

In a groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers has uncovered the earliest known evidence of humans working whale bones into tools. The bones — sourced from at least six different whale species — were fashioned into projectile points and other implements as far back as 20,000 years ago.

Sperm, fin, blue, grey, and right whales — the species is less important. What mattered was that they were scavenging the sea’s offerings — and transforming them into tools for survival.

The tools in question are 83 shaped objects and 90 unworked bone fragments. They were found across 26 cave and rock shelter sites along the Bay of Biscay, the rugged arc between northern Spain and southwestern France. Among them, scientists identified pieces made from the bones of several types of whales and even porpoises. The researchers used a technique called Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to identify which animals the bone tools came from. This method detects collagen proteins unique to each species — allowing scientists to peer through time and identify even heavily worked or fragmentary remains

The most ancient of these tools date between 20,000 and 19,000 years ago, during the Magdalenian culture of the Late Upper Paleolithic. That’s more than three times older than previously known whale bone artifacts.

At that time, the region’s climate was colder and sea levels were lower. The coastline was also different, and the sea teeming with life. The richness of the marine and coastal ecosystem of the Bay of Biscay at the end of the Paleolithic was striking, the authors wrote.

So how did these bones end up in human hands?

It’s extremely unlikely that these species would have been accessible to hunter-gatherers through hunting. These ancient people simply did not have the means to go whale hunting, archaeologists believe. Instead, they would have found carcasses on the beach and used their bones.

The people of the Magdalenian didn’t have seaworthy boats or barbed harpoons. But they did have fire, stone tools, and a keen awareness of the natural world. When the sea delivered a 40-ton corpse, they took advantage.

They recognized that bones were valuable materials — durable, shapeable, and available in abundance when the sea delivered its dead. Unlike stone, which could splinter, or wood, which rotted, whale bones offered a sturdy, workable alternative for crafting tools. These early humans saw opportunity in the skeletal remains of stranded giants.

Most of the whale bone tools were weapon elements — projectile points and foreshafts — used in hunting other animals, like reindeer or bison. Interestingly, a disproportionate number of these were made from sperm whale bones. It’s not entirely clear why, but one possibility is the sperm whale’s long, dense jawbones — ideal raw material.

This study is also about whales

Intriguingly, researchers can do more than just figure out which species the whales belonged to. They can analyze stable isotopes (atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons) and reconstruct aspects of ancient whale diets and marine ecosystems. Essentially, they can detect some differences between ancient and modern diets. The isotope signatures matched, to an extent, those of modern whales. Fin whales, for example, had lower nitrogen ratios, consistent with a krill-heavy diet. Sperm whales showed higher values, reflecting their squid-based predation.

But there were also some differences. The ancient whales often had elevated carbon or nitrogen values compared to modern whales, possibly hinting at cooler waters or altered food webs. Gray whales — now confined to the Pacific — also showed up in this Atlantic assemblage, suggesting they once roamed here too.

But at some point, people stopped using whale bones

For a few millennia, whale bones were evidently a prized material. But after 16,000 years ago, the record goes dark. It’s not clear what happened, but for a period of thousands of years, researchers have only recovered one artifact from Germany.

This is quite the mystery. Perhaps it was cultural — a shift in preference, or technique. Or perhaps it’s a case of archaeology’s blind spots: people continued using whale bones, but we just haven’t found them. After all, the coastlines where whale bones may have once been worked are now underwater, drowned by rising post-glacial seas.

This study may help fill in that gap. Although the researchers don’t offer conclusive evidence, they suggest that the whale bone objects likely remained in coastal areas. If these people didn’t trade (or stopped trading) with others at some point, these objects would have likely remained in coastal areas that are now submerged.

There could be even older bone tools out there, waiting be discovered.

Journal Reference: Krista McGrath et al (2025). Late Paleolithic whale bone tools reveal human and whale ecology in the Bay of Biscay. Nat Comm    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59486-8