Human-whale interactions have deep historical roots extending back thousands of years, although their prehistoric origins remain largely understudied. Due to their massive size, whales have long served as substantial sources of meat, blubber, baleen, bone, and teeth for prehistoric coastal populations. Yet, reconstructing the deep history of whale exploitation is challenged by the conspicuous absence of these marine giants in the archaeological record, a pattern particularly pronounced in Paleolithic contexts. Most of the evidence for the presence of cetaceans in the European Paleolithic has been discovered over the last two decades in Magdalenian collections (between around 21 and 13 ka cal. BP), particularly in the Iberian Peninsula. Among direct evidence, 95 objects (mainly weapons and tools) were visually identified in several stages as being made from the longest and straightest parts of whale skeletons (probably ribs and jaws) at 31 Magdalenian sites, mainly located along the Pyreneo-Cantabrian region. Of these 95, 71 were subsequently confirmed by ZooMS (Zooarcheology by Mass Spectrometry), revealing the exploitation of at least six different cetacean species at this time – i.e. in decreasing order: sperm whale, fin whale, gray whale, bowhead/right whale (indistinguishable with ZooMS), blue whale, porpoise –, most of them previously unknown in the Bay of Biscay. Suspected of having appeared in the Cantabrian region around 20 ka cal BP (during the Cantabrian Lower Magdalenian), this industry reached its peak during (the recent phase of) the Middle Magdalenian culture, between 18 and 16 ka cal BP. It was at this time that the objects’ circulation networks were at their most extensive, including continental transport along the Pyrenees chain, as well as occasional inputs further north.
However, there are still a number of grey areas surrounding this phenomenon, such as (1) on the composition of the range of known and exploited species. As these whale-bone objects, which have travelled inland, are almost exclusively highly processed, it was not possible to sample them all with ZooMS to determine species, especially as the least invasive sampling method known at the time (rubbing with an eraser) proved inoperative on this material. (2) The lack of investigation from other chronological contexts (i.e. ante and post-Magdalenian) deprives us of verifying whether this is an exclusively Magdalenian activity or whether it may have had a longer trajectory and greater chronological depth. (3) The absence of systematic geographical survey deprives us to know whether the use of whale bone as a raw material was a strictly Atlantic activity limited to the society of the south-eastern part of the Bay of Biscay, or whether it was more widely shared by other European Upper Paleolithic (UP) foragers. Therefore, we do not know whether the use of cetacean bone, by promoting communication networks, also affected other European territories, and if so, when and in what way.
