Yashuv and Grosman, PLOS ONE, 2024 under CC-BY 4.0 When faced with an assortment of 12,000-year-old perforated pebbles from an archaeological site in northern Israel, researchers wondered if the ...

(a) Manual thigh-spinning [64]; (b) Spindle-and-whorl “supported spinning” [68]; (c) “drop spinning” [66]; (d) the experimental spindles and whorls, the 3D scans of the pebbles and their negative ...

So argue Israeli archaeologists in a paper that approaches the question by examining more than a hundred 12,000-year-old perforated pebbles that were found in a village in northern Israel called ...