Did Ancient Humans Use Echolocation?

Archaeologists test how our ancestors may have used this (nearly) lost skill to navigate caves and other dark spaces.

BY BLAIR MASTBAUM
NOVEMBER 1, 2022



Fire could not illuminate all the dark corners of cave systems that our ancestors explored. Did they rely on echolocation to find their way? PHUVICH CHAVITRUTAIGUL / GETTY IMAGES


A HEDGEHOG AND HER HOGLETS scurry across the packed-dirt parking lot where University of Huddersfield sound archaeologist Rupert Till and his team have gathered around their van. They chat casually as they check their gear: headlamps operational, mobile phones charged, helmets properly buckled. It’s a crisp fall day in the Ariège Pyrenees of southwestern France, an area renowned for its high concentration of caves containing paintings and engravings from the Neolithic and earlier periods. But Till and his colleagues aren’t here for the art.

The team hikes up the narrow trail to the large mouth of Bédeilhac Cave, which was used as a military hangar by the occupying Germans during World War II. In the years since, the cave has seen everything from impromptu raves to groups of amateur treasure hunters searching for undiscovered artifacts. But today, Till is searching for something that sometimes seems even more difficult to find in our electrified age: total darkness.

Till has come to this cave to perform an acoustic archaeology experiment on the human ability to use echolocation. “Bats use echolocation, or biological sonar, to locate and identify objects,” says Till, adding that the chirping sound bats make, outside the range of human hearing, would be about as loud as a smoke detector if our ears could pick it up. Till wanted to test echolocation with something humans could hear.

“My idea was to try this with the voice,” he says. Researchers believe that ancient humans sang ritually in caves, but Till thinks the singing may have had another use: to aid in exploring the caves both for safety and to expand the area available for them to use. “I’m curious if humans might still have some remnants of this skill intact, somehow untapped and waiting to be re-used,” says Till. “Can untrained volunteers find their way around pitch-black cave galleries with nothing but their voices?”

More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/human-echolocation