Despite many recent discoveries that show Neanderthals were technologically and socially sophisticated, there's still a popular idea that these heavy-browed, pale-skinned early humans were mentally inferior to modern Homo sapiens. Now we have even more corroboration that they were pretty sharp. A fascinating new study reveals that Neanderthals were distilling tar for tool-making 200 thousand years ago—long before evidence of tar-making among Homo sapiens. And an experimental anthropologist has some good hypotheses for how they did it, too.
One of humanity's earliest technological breakthroughs was learning to distill tar from tree bark. It was key to making compound tools with two or more parts; adhesives could keep a stone blade nicely fitted into a wooden handle for use as a hoe, an axe, or even a spear. Scientists have discovered ancient beads of tar in Italy, Germany, and several other European sites dating back as much as 200 thousand years, which is about 150 thousand years before modern Homo sapiens arrived in Western Europe. That means the people who distilled that tar had to be Neanderthals.
[...] [Paul] Kozowyk and his fellow researchers [...] set about trying to make tar using only the tools Neanderthals had available. These included fire, ash, birch bark, sharp stones, and mesh woven from sticks. Kozowyk and his team tested three ways to make tar from birch bark, and they measured tar output, temperature, and complexity of the task.
[...] Neanderthals might have figured out how to make tar by accident when a stray piece of birch bark began to ooze tar near the fire. Then it would have been a relatively simple matter for the ancient people to figure out that tar was sticky and ultimately to deduce that it could be used to secure their tools better.
Experimental methods for the Palaeolithic dry distillation of birch bark: implications for the origin and development of Neandertal adhesive technology (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-08106-7) (DX)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 05 2017, @02:06PM
I think it's mostly the fog of history that makes it appear like nothing much changed over hundreds of years.
If you move down into the life of a peasant in the middle ages - sure, the feudal system was what there was for hundreds of years, but in a given lifetime you might have two or three changes in leadership, maybe a minor war or two between neighboring castles, more than enough to cause you to have to move house, maybe leave in the middle of the night, important people in your life dying unexpectedly from disease or a robbery on the trail to get some water... Not as stable as the "nothing much happened for 400 years" history book makes it out to be.
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