Posted on 06/10/2023 3:34:59 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Researchers at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and colleagues in Germany have taken a closer look at the birch tar used to affix Neanderthal tools and found a much more complex technique for creating the adhesive than previously considered... the team compared different methods of creating birch tar to the chemical residues found on ancient Neanderthal tools....
The birch tar used by Neanderthals predates any known adaptation by modern humans by 100,000 years. The sticky material was used as an adhesive backing to connect stone to bone and wood in tools and weapons, with the added benefit of being water-resistant and resistant to organic decomposition.
How Neanderthals made birch tar has been speculated to be either a manufactured process or a found substance scraped from rocks after a fire. Through a comparative chemical analysis of two birch tar pieces from Germany and a large reference birch tar collection made with Stone Age techniques, the researchers found that Neanderthals did not simply find birch tar after a fire, nor did they use the simplest manufacturing method.
Instead, researchers have discovered that the Neanderthals who made the German birch tar used the most efficient method with a stepwise oxygen-restricted distillation process of underground heating to extract the synthetic adhesive.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Königsaue birch tar and experimental production techniques. a KBP1, Königsaue 1 (left); KBP2, Königsaue 2 (right). b Drawing of the condensation method; c cobble-groove condensation method; d the bark roll buried technique; e the pit roll technique; f raised structure. 1, birch bark; 2, birch tar. Explanations in the main text but also see supplementary information. DOI: 10.1007/s12520-023-01789-2Credit: Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2023).
Neanderthal and human fire-making methods suggest different origins, shared intelligence
by Justin Jackson , Phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-neanderthal-human-fire-making-methods-intelligence.html
I emulaymy 2% Neanderthal cousins by going to Home Depot and buying adhesives made by Elmer or Phil Swift.
Neanderthal science chemistry Ping!
I believe I’ve read somewhere they had a larger cranium capacity and likely had more raw IQ than Homo sapiens.
They just look stupid to us, today.
Nanderthal chicks were easy.
No wonder those GEICO caveman commercials were so offensive. They were smarter than most of the apes leaving high school today.
“so easy, a caveman could do it”
Average cranial capacity was larger, but they had more of everything to move around.
Original gorilla glue
“Average cranial capacity was larger”
There has to be more to it tham that, otherwise whales would be on Alpha Centauri by now.
The size of the brain is relative to the body. Assumig. Intelligence simply by overall size is foolish. Larger. Odors need larger brains to process all the information their body is sending them.
Vision for example, is a good example of this. Very little of your eye is actually providing high definition vision.. if you were to double the size of the part of your eye that provided such vision your brain would need to be noticeably larger to just be able to process that extra information.
General rule I have seen is brain size relative to body size, tends to correlate with intelligence. Brain size/body size, the higher that number, genrally the more intelligent the animal appears to be
Whales don’t have opposable thumbs.
“Average cranial capacity was larger”. There has to be more to it tham that, otherwise whales would be on Alpha Centauri by now.
—
Whales have no intention of returning home just yet.
Thumbs help!
But neanderthals didn’t have bigger bodies. They were actually slightly shorter, although stockier
They had larger brains, and at least based on the skull shape, appeared to have more visual processing and perhaps more motor cortex function. Unfortunately, they probably had less prefrontal lobe, which I think is why they basically went extinct. Those clever, cunning, and more complex strategizing homo sapiens couldn’t have these rustic brutes competing for their game and made it a point to root them out.
“…the Neanderthals who made the German birch tar used the most efficient method with a stepwise oxygen-restricted distillation process of underground heating to extract the synthetic adhesive.“
Sometimes I get the feeling that academia is trying to make the case that Neanderthals were a gentle highly intelligent race who were wiped out by us barbarian humans.
That would be opposable thumbs and such.
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