https://phys.org/news/2018-07-thread-bronze-age-britain.html

According to lead author Dr. Margarita Gleba, researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, "Splicing technology is fundamentally different from draft spinning. The identification of splicing in these Early Bronze Age and later textiles marks a major turning point in scholarship. The switch from splicing—the original plant bast fibre technology—to draft spinning took place much later than previously assumed."

Splicing has previously been identified in pre-Dynastic Egyptian and Neolithic Swiss textiles, but the new study shows that this particular type of thread making technology may have been ubiquitous across the Old World during prehistory.