Fragments of glassy petrified grass and microscopic traces of plant material, dating to around 200,000 years ago, are all that’s left of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer’s bed in the back of Border Cave. In the same part of the rock shelter, archaeologists found layers of ash with more recent (as in only around 43,000 years old) and better-preserved leaves of dried grass laid on top, as if people had burned their old, dirty bedding and then laid fresh, clean sheaves of grass over the ashes—the rock shelter version of changing the sheets.

The finds shed light on an aspect of early human life that we rarely get to consider. Most of the artifacts that survive from more than a few thousand years ago are made of stone and bone; even wooden tools are rare. That means we tend to think of the Paleolithic in terms of hard, sharp stone tools and the bones of butchered animals. Through that lens, life looks very harsh—perhaps even harsher than it really was. Most of the human experience is missing from the archaeological record, including creature comforts like soft, clean beds.

Beds were burning

Until now, the oldest bedding archaeologists had ever found came from another South African site called Sibudu, where people 77,000 years ago had piled up layers of grasslike wetland plants called sedge, mixed with assorted medicinal plants, and occasionally burned the old layers. Some modern people in parts of Africa also use plants as bedding in similar ways. The Border Cave find shows that people have been making comfy sleeping pallets out of grass for at least 200,000 years—nearly as long as there have been Homo sapiens in the world.

With a scanning electron microscope and infrared spectroscopy, paleoanthropologist Lyn Wadley of the University of Witwatersrand and her colleagues identified the Paleolithic bedding as broad-leafed grasses from the family Panicoideae, which still grow in the area around Border Cave today. The chemical content of the ash underneath also lines up well with the chemical content of local Panicoideae grasses.

Besides being much softer than the cave floor, these ancient beds were probably surprisingly clean. Burning dirty bedding would have helped cut down on problems with bedbugs, lice, and fleas, not to mention unpleasant smells. Wadley and her colleagues suggest that people at Border Cave may even have raked some extra ashes in from nearby hearths “to create a clean, odor-controlled base for bedding.”

And charcoal found in the bedding layers includes bits of an aromatic camphor bush; some modern African cultures use another closely related camphor bush in their plant bedding as an insect repellent. The ash may have helped, too; Wadley and her colleagues note that “several ethnographies report that ash repels crawling insects, which cannot easily move through the fine powder because it blocks their breathing and biting apparatus and eventually leaves them dehydrated.”

Working from bed

That doesn’t mean the beds were always neat and clean, though. Wadley and her colleagues also found stone flakes and other debris from toolmaking, which means people probably also used the comfy piles of grass as a soft place to sit while working on a new stone tool. For the record, flint-knapping in bed is probably an even worse idea than eating crackers in bed, but it’s a delightfully human thing to find traces of. Grains of red and orange ocher also mingled with the bedding layers, and Wadley and her colleagues say the grains had probably rubbed off from someone’s body art.

This aspect of Paleolithic life, at least, sounds pleasantly cozy. Imagine that you’ve just burned your old, stale bedding and laid down a fresh layer of grass sheaves. They’re still springy and soft, and the ash beneath is still warm. You curl up and breathe in the tingly scent of camphor, reassured that the mosquitoes will let you sleep in peace. Nearby, a hearth fire crackles and pops, and you stretch your feet toward it to warm your toes. You nudge aside a sharp flake of flint from the blade you were making earlier in the day, then drift off to sleep.

The next day, of course, you’ll forget to extract those flint flakes from your bedding, and archaeologists will find them 200,000 years later, along with the charred bits on the end of the grass where you left it too close to the fire. Good luck living that one down.

Science, 2020 DOI: 10.1126/science.abc7239  (About DOIs).

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1698983