“…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.
No, much of the time it is the other way around.
I think they were just burning some birch one day and notice a sticky substance afterward and went ‘Aha’ or ‘Eureka!’ or ‘Watson, come here!’