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We
once assumed that Neanderthals were just dumb cavemen because they
looked so different from modern humans. But as scientists uncover more
and more information about them, we learn that while they were
primitive, they were no dummies. They were using tar to glue objects
together 200,000 years ago, which enabled them to design and manufacture
tools. That was way before the invention of ceramics, much less the
forging of metal pots. So how did they manage to cook the necessary
ingredients to make tar? A group of researchers from Leiden University
tried to recreate the possible scenario for the Neanderthal's discovery
of tar, using the materials (birch bark, pine) and methods (fire)
thought to be available to them at the time. By repeating the process
and varying the conditions, they were able to reproduce the kind of tar
Neanderthals used.
“What this paper reinforces is that
all of the humans that were around 50,000 to 150,000 years ago roughly,
were culturally similar and equally capable of these levels of
imagination, invention and technology,” explained Washington University
anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, who wasn’t involved in the study, in an
interview with Gizmodo. “Anthropologists have been confusing anatomy and
behavior, making the inference that archaic anatomy equals archaic
behavior, and ‘modern’ behavior [is equivalent to] modern human anatomy.
What is emerging from the human fossil and Paleolithic archeological
records across the Eurasia and Africa is that, at any one slice in time
during this period, they were all doing—and capable of doing—basically
the same things, whatever they looked like.”
By the way, even the way Neanderthals looked has undergone
a lot of revision since we first discovered their skeletons. Read more about
the Neanderthal glue experiments at Gizmodo.
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