Middle Paleolithic stone core from the Heidenschmiede. By re-assembling these stone artifacts, the research team revealed the many different techniques used in stone tool manufacturing. Credit: Universitaet Tübingen
Posted on 09/09/2021 9:38:04 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Neanderthals living in the Swabian Jura more than 45,000 years ago used sophisticated techniques with many different production strategies to make stone tools. The Heidenschmiede site has yielded many stone tools and by-products of the toolmaking process.
The researchers refitted the pieces made from stone cores and were thereby able to show the techniques – requiring planning and forethought – used in the process...
The Heidenschmiede, a rock shelter near Heidenheim in southern Germany, was discovered and excavated in 1928 by amateur archaeologist Hermann Mohn, who recognized it as an important site for stone and bone worked by early humans...
The bone and stone tools date from the Middle Paleolithic, and are at least 50,000 to 42,000 years old, he says, "In this period, modern humans of our current species Homo sapiens were yet to come to the region. It was late Neanderthals living at the Heidenschmiede."..
"Based on the reconstructions, we were able to prove that the Neanderthals at the Heidenschmiede used a branched manufacturing system in which various techniques known to the makers were applied to one core piece of stone," Schürch explains, adding that such sophisticated manufacturing processes have only rarely been attested from the Middle Paleolithic...
The research team has shown that the early humans who worked the stones from the Heidenschmiede had an excellent working memory overall. The new study results supported other investigations, according to which the Neanderthals possessed great mental flexibility and adaptability, coupled with manual dexterity. At the same time, the varied and elaborate manufacturing processes made visible also provide an explanation as to why a great variability of the assemblages are found in stone artifacts from the Middle Paleolithic.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
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>> Neanderthals possessed great mental flexibility and adaptability, coupled with manual dexterity.
God forbid the modern world is preserved within the ashes.
The world could start a million times and we would would repeat the same trail a million times.
I have always believed that the human brain is pre-programed and "living" taps this brain resource as needed...a process I call "pondering"...or the search for a solution.
“Ugh-Garshbag borrow my flaker, never bring back.
They never stopped developing...today they make machine tools.
Of course, all of this was just what people needed to survive, hunt and trade with the big cities on the coast and at river mouths - now under hundreds of feet of water and more hundreds of feet of sediment.
The Chinese ones make cheap machine tools.....................
Sure, but I was referring to that particular area of Germany, which is home to a number of high-end machine tool companies.
Kinda like, they started 45,000 years ago and never stopped.
And the Chinese Neanderthals stole the deigns and copied them...................
Deeper in some places, more shallow in others.
lol
That’s how the xylophone got invented.
And it probably has, if not a million times, then a whole bunch of times.
That’s is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of the Iron Butterfly drummer.............
I think he graduated with Keith Richards.
lol
:^) From using a found stick to dig grubs out of a log, to moving individual atoms with a scanning-tunneling electron microscope, in just a few hundred thousand years.
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