An Excerpt from Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization – The History Reader : The History Reader

Tim Queeney’s Rope is a unique and compelling adventure through the history of rope and its impact on civilization, in the vein of single-subject bestsellers like Salt and Cod. In it, Queeney has woven together a fascinating blend of history and technology, taking readers from the building of ancient Egypt’s pyramids to Magellan’s world-circling ships to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Read on for an excerpt of Chapter 1.

MORE THAN 5,100 YEARS AGO, a man clad in a woven grass cloak and animal skins, carrying all his possessions in a simple backpack, hurried up a mountain in the Alps. The reason for his haste was obvious when he stopped briefly and looked downslope. A group of men pursued him, and they were climbing fast. His chest tightened and he started upward again. Above him lay a glacial tongue of ice leading higher into a cleft in the mountains. And slowly moving across that ice field was a snow squall— a swirl of flakes that could be his salvation. If he could get into that whiteout, his pursuers would lose track of him and perhaps give up the chase. He could hear from their shouts that they were closing the gap but not near enough to lay their hands on him. If he kept hustling, he could beat them to the storm.

One of the men giving chase must have seen this, too, realizing that the man they pursued might soon disappear from sight. The fleeing man was likely at the limit of a bow’s range, but the pursuer knew it was their last chance. He grabbed an arrow from his woven quiver of missiles. He stopped, nocked the arrow onto the tightly twisted string of his bow, and quickly took aim. Then he loosed the arrow, sending it flying in a shallow arc.

Meanwhile, the fleeing man felt snowflakes landing on his face. His fear ebbed; he had made his escape. Just as the snow embraced him, however, he felt a penetrating jab in his upper back. The arrow had found its mark. The pain was terrible, but he was strong and he kept up his pace for a few steps. Soon, however, the strength drained from his legs and his vision weakened. He stumbled to his knees before falling over onto the ice, the heavy snow covering his body as he rattled his last breath.

This imagined chase and killing high in the Alps is based on a discovery of human remains made in 1991 that shows us how the technology of twisted fibers, the essence of rope, was allowing humanity to reshape the world around us even thousands of years ago.

Evanescent Evidence

Finding evidence of the earliest ropes used by humans is a challenge. The reason is maddeningly simple: early rope was organic. The plant or animal fibers used to make it just didn’t last. Over time, they decomposed and disappeared as if they never existed. The time in deep history when some human formed the first length of cordage will forever be a mystery, known only to that inventive Neanderthal with a mind for braiding and the manual dexterity to twist fibers together.

The knowledge to do this— to make string, cordage, and rope— had a profound effect on humans’ ability to manipulate the world. With rope we can organize reality by tying like things together in bundles to then carry them more easily; can keep something safely in one place by tying it to a tree; and can affect objects at a distance by tying a long rope to, say, a spear, so we can pull the spear back after throwing it at a dangerous animal. We can also think of the length of a rope as a metaphor for linear thinking, for timelines, perhaps even the first idea of a clock: we start at one end of a stretched length of rope, and it takes time to get to the other end. In her book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, archaeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber called the idea of twisted fiber humanity’s secret weapon. “We don’t know how early to date this great discovery—of making string as long and as strong as needed by twisting short filaments together. But whenever it happened, it opened the door to an enormous array of new ways to save labor and improve the odds of survival. . . . From these notions come snares and fishlines, tethers and leashes, carrying nets, handles, and packages. . . . So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth. . . . We could call it the String Revolution.”

The role that rope played in lifting civilization was central. Master ropemaker for the U.S. Navy David Himmelfarb put it like this: “Man’s civilization and social progress has been linked directly to the ropemaker. . . . Rope, then, can justifiably be considered the first appliance developed by man’s ingenuity.”

Certainly Neanderthals had some name for their invention that we’ll never know. In English, we call it “rope.” But where does the word “rope” come from? In modern English, the word hails from Middle English: rōp. That came from the Old English word rāp. Delving further back we get to the English parent language German and the Proto-West Germanic raip. Before that is something called Proto-Germanic, in which the word is raipaz or raipa (rope, cord, band, or ringlet). Even Proto-Germanic, as creaky as that name sounds to non-historians of languages, is not the oldest language through which we can trace the line of rope. It extends further back to Proto-Indo-European (abbreviated PIE).

This is where things get a bit hazy as no direct record of PIE actually exists. Historical linguists pored over ancient texts and reconstructed PIE based on what they found. It is considered the common ancestor of the Indo-European language family, which is a big group of more than 440 languages— roughly 46 percent of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language. In PIE, the word for rope is roypnos, which is derived from reyp— to peel off, tear, border, edge, or strip. Now we’ve reached the essential meaning of the word, which relates to how early humans made rope.

As an indispensable tool for most of human existence, the idea of rope has worked its way deep into the language. Its cultural significance is revealed by a parade of expressions: “roped me in,” “rope it off,” “tied in knots,” “rope-a-dope,” “roped and branded,” “give him/her enough rope,” “at the end of my rope,” “throw me a rope,” “give me some slack,” “on the ropes,” “go piss up a rope,” “learn the ropes,” “a rope of sand.” This incomplete list of everyday sayings just shows how deeply into our consciousness rope has entwined itself.

Pivotal Tools

As important as rope is, however, there is good evidence that it wasn’t the absolute first of humanity’s world-changing tools. We’ll never know, but the sequence probably goes something like this: fire, stone tools, and then the twisted strands of the first ropes.

In many cultural traditions, the fire giver of myth is openly branded as a thief. The gods don’t bestow fire on lowly humanity freely as a gift; special beings must “steal” the fire for mankind’s use. In Native American Cherokee myth, after possum and buzzard fail in their attempts to bring fire to humanity, grandmother spider gives it a try. Small and overlooked, she brings a clay pot with her and snatches up fire from the sun, hides it in the pot, and follows her web back from the other side of the world to where the people live.

In the Greek version, the fire stealer is the Titan Prometheus. Zeus, the king of the gods, learns of Prometheus’s theft and in punishment, has him chained to a rock where every day his liver is eaten by a hungry eagle, and every night it grows back.

The thief Prometheus brings fire and with it comes technology, transforming humans into creative builders of their world. The idea of Prometheus as transformer continues well past Greek storytellers. Mary Shelley cites the Titan for her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. And in a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the chief architect of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, is dubbed American Prometheus, the bearer of nuclear fire.

For early humans, the sun provided heat and light and acted as a celestial clock with its rising and setting, dividing day from night. When humans devised how to make fire, it seemed a theft of heavenly power. With this knowledge, humans had a portable source of warmth and a way to set their own clock by extending daylight into the nighttime hours. And with the ability to cook the protein-rich meat hard won from hunting, fire helped humans prosper.

What came next? The earth provided a ready material for making simple, sharp, and durable tools. Enter the Stone Age.

The Stone Age encompasses the use of a wide variety of stone tools and methods across 3.4 million years. Naturally, this long extent is a bit messy and cries out for detailed classification, so archaeologists have drawn up some boundaries. The Stone Age is generally divided into three major periods: the Paleolithic, or old Stone Age; the Mesolithic, or middle period; and the Neolithic, or new period, when agriculture blossomed. The Stone Age ended when metals like copper came into widespread use.

Stone tools were developed because early humans were keen observers of their environment and noticed that some types of rock could be fashioned into sharp-edged implements. Using a sandstone or limestone striking tool called a hammerstone, humans learned to fashion stone-cutting tools from crystalline sedimentary rocks like flint and chert. The great characteristic of flint is its ability to fracture into shapes with razor-sharp edges—as sharp as any metal blade.

The first of these scallop-edged pieces of flint that was used as a tool was something called a hand axe. With their hardness and developed edges, hand axes were likely used for slicing and for scraping, but their exact function is still not clear. In his book Work, anthropologist James Suzman notes the ubiquity of these tools: “No one has worked out what they were used for. . . . Adding to the hand-ax’s mystery is the fact that Homo erectus and its descendants hammered them out consistently for a period of 1.5 million years, making them arguably the most enduring tool design in human history.”

Eventually, the process of shaping flint with a hammerstone— a skill called flintknapping— evolved into something new. At some point, clever humans discovered a technique of knapping called the “prepared core technique.” Instead of taking a hunk of flint, knapping its edges to sharpen them, and being satisfied with the resulting thick hand axe, they devised a more useful tool. Using the prepared core technique, a skilled Stone Age worker readies the edges of a hunk of flint and then strikes the prepared core in a way that fractures off a thin, deadly piece of flint more like a knife blade than the clumsy hand axe. Archaeologists call these pieces flakes. Flint flakes were a Stone Age revolution and ushered in a new era of tools and weapons.

While a hand axe was heavy and unwieldy, these flakes of flint were light and supremely useful in a new role. Attached to the end of a stick, they became spears for thrusting and javelins for throwing. With this technological leap forward, humans could attack game animals with a deadly stone edge, increasing the chances of success.

Enter Rope

It’s all very good to make a sharp, light spearpoint and to have a shaft of wood prepared to accept the deadly warhead, but how do we attach it in a way that can withstand the rigors of repeated use?

One way that spearpoints were set on their shafts was with a sticky bed of pine tar or some variety of tree pitch. A good start, but that wasn’t nearly strong enough.

Long before duct tape was available in every big box store endcap, the Boy Scouts gave out merit badges for attaching things to other things using rope in a technique called lashing. In the case of our flake spearpoint, it was set in a bed of sticky pine, and then cordage, rope’s smaller incarnation, was wound around the base of the flake several times and then tied. The lashing merit badge in a nutshell. Now the spear was a deadly weapon, to both animals and, sadly, to other humans. It was rope that made the spear a thing—without rope, humanity would be stuck with throwing rocks at its prey.

An even greater leap forward in terms of hunting efficiency— and the safety of the hunter— was the combination of cordage with a springy stick. The ends of the stick could be bent toward each other with a stout piece of cordage and the result was a bow. Pulling back the bowstring stores potential energy in the stick. When the string is released, the potential energy is released as kinetic energy as the stick springs back to its previous shape and sends the arrow flying. Taking the concept of the spear with its wooden shaft tipped by a sharp flint flake and downsizing it gave early humans the arrow. The bow and arrow provided Stone Age hunters a “standoff” weapon. It was no longer necessary to get close enough to thrust in a spear— and risk getting gored by the 31-inch horns of an angry aurochs. A group of hunters could take down one of these 2,000-pound wild cattle with a hail of arrows while staying clear of the animal’s deadly horns.

We started this chapter with the imagined death of a man in the Alps five millennia ago. That incident dramatizes the importance of the bow and flint-tipped arrow and its ability to kill not just animals but humans as well. In September 1991, two German tourists came across the strange sight of a body emerging from melting glacial ice in the Ötztal Alps, near Similaun Mountain on the border of Austria and Italy. The mummified remains, first called the Iceman and later dubbed Ötzi, were determined to be from 3100 BCE.

Among his possessions was a quiver with two finished arrows and twelve unfinished arrows. The finished arrows not only had flint arrowheads, but they also had fletching— the fins, often made with bird feathers, along the back end of an arrow shaft. Fletching helps the arrow fly straight by providing a small amount of air resistance at the trailing end of the arrow, similar to how a weather vane has a flat tail to keep it pointed into the wind. Fletched arrows show how sophisticated human thinking had become in making a proper bow and arrow.

The primacy of the arrow, and of the rope bowstring that helped propel it, was demonstrated in 2001 when a researcher found an object embedded in Ötzi’s shoulder: a flint arrowhead. With this discovery it looked like Ötzi’s death was more than a bad fall or succumbing to illness. Someone shot Ötzi in the back. The Iceman was murdered. In addition to his bow, quiver, and a flint dagger, Ötzi also carried a copper-headed axe. This tool firmly places him not in the Stone Age but the Copper Age. Which raises the question: When was the first rope made? If we have evidence that Stone Age people were using spears tipped with flint lashed to a wooden shaft, then surely rope was invented long before the Copper Age.

The First Twists

The surprising answer to the question of when the first rope was made came from a French cave in 2019. The Abri du Maras cave site is on the Ardèche River, a tributary of the Rhône in southeastern France. It was once a cave, but the entrance roof collapsed at some point in the past, long after it was used as habitation by early humans. There is ample evidence from recovered artifacts that Neanderthal people used the site.

In 2016, Dr. Marie-Hélène Moncel, a senior researcher at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris, and a team of four researchers were conducting excavations at the site. In many archaeological excavations involving Stone Age tools, the recovered pieces are washed and cleaned, as this aids in examining the flint and determining both how it was made and how it was used. For the dig Dr. Moncel was leading, however, the pieces of flint were kept as untouched as possible. The team immediately sealed all the specimens in plastic bags so nothing associated with them would be lost. When the dig was finished, the bagged specimens were brought to Moncel’s lab in Paris.

For the examination of the specimens, Moncel was joined by Dr. Bruce Hardy, an anthropologist from Kenyon College who often worked with Moncel. For several years, specimens from the Abri du Maras site had been yielding tantalizing clues.

“Back as far as 2013, I had started seeing individual pieces of twisted fibers on some of these tools,” Dr. Hardy said when we talked. “I suggested at the time that maybe they [Neanderthals] were making string, but I didn’t have enough to really say that for sure because there was no structure to it.”

On the bottom of one 60-millimeter-long piece of flint, however, Hardy noticed something promising. “I kept seeing more twisted fibers on tools from the site. And then finally when we hit this piece, there was a whole bunch of twisted fibers there.”

The cordage remnant from the flake was examined with a standard optical microscope. The early results were so promising that a more powerful tool was swung into action. An optical microscope uses visible light to magnify and image a specimen. This limits the detail that can be picked up to the wavelength of visible light, a range between 380 to 750 nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter). The researchers wanted to see more, so they imaged the specimen with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). A SEM can record detail down to one nanometer, providing finer resolution. Hardy also used an automated optical microscope that provides a 3D image. The added resolution was needed because the specimen was so small. The new tools proved their worth, however, because they revealed that the specimen was indeed a small shard of a cordage. True cordage or rope has two distinctive features: an S twist and a Z twist.

“When we started comparing all those images together, we began to figure out there was a structure there and there were three sets of fibers that were twisted together,” explained Hardy. “And then those sets were twisted back around each other. That’s the S and the Z twist. The small individual fibers are S twisted into three bundles and then they roll back to form the Z twist.”

For Hardy, it was a singular moment. “I certainly remember seeing this, this thing, because you actually see it with your naked eye. I put it under the scope, and I focused in on it. And then all of a sudden I see all these fibers twisted around each other. And I’m like, ‘Oh, we might have it,’” Hardy said with a laugh. “ ‘We might actually have it here.’ So, I definitely knew something was happening that day.”

The SEM images show that the Abri du Maras specimen has the elements of cordage. The specimen was determined to be fifty thousand years old, making it the oldest example of rope yet known.

Dr. Hardy and his colleagues took their analysis of the rope even further. They postulated in a paper published in Nature magazine that the ability to make rope represented impressive abstract thinking by Neanderthal people. “The production of cordage is complex and requires detailed knowledge of plants, seasonality, planning, retting, etc. Indeed, the production of cordage requires an understanding of mathematical concepts and general numeracy in the creation of sets of elements and pairs of numbers to create a structure. Indeed, numerosity has been suggested as ‘one possible feral cognitive basis for abstraction and modern symbolic thinking’. . . . As the structure becomes more complex (multiple cords twisted to form a rope, ropes interlaced to form knots), it demonstrates an ‘infinite use of finite means’ and requires a cognitive complexity similar to that required by human language.”

So ropemaking, in addition to the practical uses to which cordage could be put by these early people, also could have represented a human ability to think in abstract numbers—a trait that most people likely consider to be the province of Homo sapiens in the last few thousand years or so. According to Dr. Hardy and his colleagues, the Abri du Maras find suggests abstract thinking was commonplace for Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago. Cave people were a lot more on the ball than we previously imagined.

We could boil down the finding by Hardy and his team this way: if we can make rope, we just might do okay in life. One of the more intriguing and inventive uses of rope was noted in volume 1 of A History of Technology: “Indeed, a cave painting in eastern Spain of Late Paleolithic or Mesolithic date depicts a person using what appear to be ropes to climb down the face of a cliff, in order to collect wild honey.”

But how did early humans actually make rope?

Turns out the first ropemakers were strippers— no, not that kind of stripper.

The easiest way to make simple rope is to find a thin vine. The vine itself can be used as a length of cordage. This approach to rope is limited, however, both by the length of the vine and by the fact that even the thinnest vines aren’t very easy to work with for making knots or for compacting into an easy-to-carry coil.

Another primitive way to make simple cordage is to strip off a length of tree bark and then twist that length between thumb and fingers of either hand. This twisting action will eventually make the strip kink in the middle between our hands. So we will have the middle kink and then two lengths coming off either side. The next step is to take one hand and pinch the kink while the other hand takes one of the two lengths and twists it one turn. The pinching hand advances to where the twist ends and then the other hand grabs the other strand and twists that, tucking it under and around the first strand. The pinching hand advances and the process is repeated over and over. Eventually, we produce a length of two-strand twisted cordage. This hand-twisting process is easy to learn and produces simple cordage useful for many simple tasks. For early humans, this was surely the first way they realized the tremendous usefulness of rope as a tool.

The actor Tom Hanks demonstrates the simple method of using strips of bark for cordage in the 2000 movie Cast Away. Hanks’s character is stranded alone on a South Pacific island after his plane crashes. He realizes that he will have to save himself, so he builds a raft on which to escape. But to make a raft, he needs a way to lash the logs of the raft together, so he strips bark from saplings and hand twists them together to make cordage. It’s a great example of what early humans no doubt did when they needed a way to put things together. (By the way, the non-ropemaking scenes of Cast Away are pretty good, too.)

YouTube has many videos by outdoors people and survivalists that show viewers how to make simple rope. I contacted a YouTube personality named Rob Nelson, whose channel is called StoneAgeMan. Nelson has a good video on how to make simple cordage in the woods. “The essence of what I’m doing is to try to get people to remember that we evolved in the Stone Age as hunter-gatherers,” Nelson said. “I quite enjoy the idea of reminding people that much of our evolutionary history was in this age where we didn’t have modern tools.”

“My feeling is, besides having a blade, that rope is maybe the most useful tool that there is for sure. I don’t know how you could make a structure very easily without some rope. You’d have to rely on existing tree falls or that kind of thing. But yeah, rope is tremendously important.

Two Types of Twist

What makes the fifty-thousand-year-old cordage discovered by Bruce Hardy and his colleagues at Abri du Maras extra intriguing and important is that it isn’t simple two-strand cordage; it’s more sophisticated three-strand rope, in which there are three individual strands twisted around each other. To make a three-strand rope, we need to employ both an S and a Z twist, as Dr. Hardy saw in the Abri du Maras specimen. These letters are used because their central slants align with the orientation of the strands. An S twist is when the rope elements are twisted to the left, or counterclockwise. If we look at any short section of S-S-twisted rope, we’ll notice that the strands start at the upper left and descend to the lower right. A Z twist is the opposite. It represents fibers that have been twisted to the right, or clockwise. Inspect a section of Z-twist rope and we see the strands start on the upper right and descend to the left.

Now let’s start from the smallest parts of the rope and work toward the completed rope using these S and Z twists. A three-strand rope begins with thin wisps of material called fibers—of halfa grass or some other natural fibrous source. The fibers are twisted together, in the same way wool is twisted using a spinning wheel into yarn. In fact, this first element of a rope is called a “yarn.” The yarn is twisted together using either an S or Z twist. Then, a group of three yarns is twisted together into something called a strand. If the yarns have an S twist, then we want to twist them into a strand using a Z twist. Twisting them the opposite way puts the elements in tension with each other; the opposing twists work to keep the rope together. The final step for a three-strand rope is to twist the three strands together, again using the opposite twist that was used to make each strand.

So what are the physical factors that make these twisted strands work as rope? The first is friction. The many strands of natural fiber don’t easily slide past each other because of friction (and some mechanical interlocking due to surface irregularities).

The other factor is introduced by the twist of the strands. Let’s focus on one strand of a three-strand rope. Due to the twist, the strand wraps itself around the other two strands in the form of a helix. The result of the helix is that when a pulling force is applied to the strand, the helix tightens, thus locking the rope more tightly together.

We can demonstrate this tightening with a simple experiment. We put one forearm out in front of us parallel to our chest and then lightly wrap a piece of rope around it a few times, starting near the elbow— we can leave the end closest to the elbow dangling, no need to tie it to anything. Then take the end of the rope where it comes off our arm at our wrist and pull it in the direction opposite from our elbow but along the axis of our forearm. We’ll notice that instead of sliding off, the helix shape causes the rope to tighten on our arm. We can tug hard on the rope and even though it isn’t tied off to anything, it will stay put.

Since the three strands of finished rope remain in place because they are twisted around each other and support each other, what happens when we get to the end? There are no downstream strands to hold the strands together at the ends of a rope, which means they can unravel. To secure the ends we can either tie a knot into each end so the strands don’t unravel, or we can hold the strands in place by wrapping a lighter line around the rope’s circumference. This process is called “whipping,” which we’ll discuss later on.

Making rope by hand twisting is laborious. We have to do all the twisting with hand manipulations while making sure we’re imparting the right direction of twist. The inventive minds of early humans must also have realized that fact, because even tens of thousands of years ago, it appears they were inventing tools to speed up the process.

One of the best examples of these was found in a cave just outside the town of Schelklingen, in south central Germany. The cave is called Hohle Fels (“hollow rock” in German) and is in a line of low mountains called the Swabian Jura or Swabian Alps. The cave, and several others in the immediate area, was used as a habitation for early humans. One of the first archaeological excavations in the cave was in 1870, when various animal remains were found, including cave bears, reindeer, mammoths, and horses. And alongside those bones, human-crafted tools from the Upper Paleolithic were also uncovered.

Many more excavations have since taken place, and these have unearthed further evidence of human habitation, including small sculptures of a bird and a human-lion hybrid figurine. In 2008, an excavation led by Dr. Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany found a hand-carved figurine of a busty female made from a woolly mammoth tusk that has been dubbed the Venus of Hohle Fels. It’s an example of a Venus figurine, a type of prehistoric sculpture that has been widely found across Europe and the Middle East and as far east as Siberia. The Venus of Hohle Fels figurine has been dated at thirty-five thousand years old and is said to be the oldest example of human figurative art.

In 2020, Conard led another archaeological dig in the cave and on this outing discovered a forty- thousand- year- old mammoth tusk that also had been carved by humans. In this case, however, the tusk was not a human figure, but was clearly a tool. It had four holes bored through it. And the edges of the holes had been scored with angled, radiating cuts, as if designed to guide material through the four openings.

Manual ropemaking requires that we impart the twist by turning one hand under the other and then moving up our pinching fingers to the latest twisted spot so it doesn’t unravel.

What if early humans figured out a way to get around all those hand motions?

That’s what Conard and another researcher, Dr. Veerle Rots, an archaeologist from the University of Liège in Belgium, thought when they looked at the four-hoofed mammoth tusk. If we fed lengths of grass into the four holes and then spun the whole tusk around, the four strands of grass would twist around each other and make a four-strand rope. Rots did a demonstration of this that was made into a video that showed the process in action.

If Conard and Rots are correct in their assumption, this mammoth tusk is possibly the earliest ropemaking tool. It’s the first indication we have that early humans may have started the process of systematizing rope production.

In the next chapter, we’ll jump ahead a few tens of thousands of years to when humans began to form agricultural civilizations, and rope took on a larger role as ever-larger human societies formed. As science writer Gaia Vince noted in her book on human development, Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time, “Social networks create synergy, allowing configured groups to achieve things that a disconnected collection of people could not.” Just as the first humans discovered how many small strands of fiber could come together to make rope, these larger communities learned how to bring individuals together to do big things, some of which still stand today to our modern wonder and amazement.