Neanderthals glued their tools together | Hacker News Reader

Neanderthals glued their tools together

arstechnica.com

84 pointsUltramanoid29 comments

This is delightful writing:

Previous studies have involved archaeologists practicing their butchery skills with stone tools, and those suggested that Paleolithic hunters would have had no need to haft their tools to get the job done. It now appears likely that the Neanderthals did not read that particular study.

And since the word "haft" may be unfamiliar (as it was to me):

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/haft

>This is delightful writing:

Indeed.

JFYI, a great structural engineer I knew used to have a saying that can be roughly translated as

"Thank goodness materials do not read construction theory books: walls and bridges, despite the ignorance of the engineers that calculated them, and of the people that built them, keep obstinately standing up, totally oblivious of their errors".

In EE circles similar (well, kind of opposite) things are said along the lines that "unfortunately, electrons don't read schematics".

Pine resin is pretty amazing stuff. I once made pine pitch glue out of pine sap chunks I collected, and it's amazingly strong for something that's not available at Home Depot. ;) You could easily mistake it for epoxy. From what I remember, I basically melted the sap and mixed in some ground dried grass and a little bit of ash. I honestly forget what exactly it was that I was gluing, though. At one point I was making an atlatl, so maybe it was for that.

As an aside, pine sap is also an amazing fuel in its liquid state. Once it gets going, it burns like gasoline. They're natrue's waterproof fire starters, and as there were neanderthals who used fire, I imagine they might have used pine sap to help start them.

Wow... from 'atlatl' to the fire sticks... it's like we were in Scouts together. Thanks for the memories.

And allegedly you can make the world best baked potato with it, by boiling them in pine pitch, although obviously you can't eat the skin afterwards.

Correction, Pine Rosin,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFoB5OEtRA

The Japanese during WWII, critically short of petroleum (consequence of US submarine patrols) experimented with producing aviation fuel from pine root turpentine.

The practice would have required immense numbers of trees (the number 1,000, per flight, comes to mind), and denuded forests.

It's not clear if the method was used militarily, though there's some documentation that turpentine fuels were used by civilians at the time (http://www.smokeriders.com/History/Honda_History/body_honda_....

Source: Daniel Yergin, The Prize.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...

>“We continue to find evidence that the Neanderthals were not inferior primitives but were quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attributed to modern humans,” said co-author Paolo Villa, adjunct curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

For that I blame the curators themselves. Whenever you go to a museum, the exhibits extrapolate far more than is reasonable from the thing they're actually displaying. And then they blend it in! Entire skeletons to glue together a few bones, leaving you unable to tell what's real - something pulled out of the ground where it's been resting for millions of years - and what's a historian's best guess. Thanks to that we still have exhibits of dinosaurs with bare skin.

Show me the real fossil, it's far more interesting.

It's a double edge sword. Without speculation and extrapolation, things get dull quick.

OTOH, communicating degrees of uncertainty is not something that we typically do well.

I'd prefer to see something like Matrera Castle. For architecture I find it a bit much, probably because it needs to be structurally sound, but for a skeleton or an antique it could bring more attention to the real parts and still offer a suggestion of what it might look like.

That would definitely be good for skeletons, but it doesn't solve the problem. Is is just this specimen that lacks ribs or is it the whole species? Do tend ribs vary much between species within the genus?

It's a hard problem to solve, and people can get distrustful when they hear "facts" have been superceded, that the theory they read in a museum is no longer popular.

It's not just the curators. Most modern peoples clearly assume we are currently at the height of human civilization and development and everything in the past was less well developed.

I love watching TV shows where they try to recreate past techniques with what we know of their available tech and we fail.

One TV show tried to melt rock to figure out how vitrified castles were made. They couldn't get enough rock to melt to recreate the effect.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4326

There are countless examples of ancient tech we don't really understand and can't readily recreate with the resources -- including knowledge and technology -- we believe they had available at the time. Yet we continue to presume we represent the height of human development, it's been a more or less steady climb up and the future will obviously see further advancements, never mind the overwhelming evidence of lost knowledge around the world and "dark ages" following a loss of development.

Can anyone recommend a modern book to learn more about early humans?

I read "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari which contains a chapter on it, but was left wanting more.

The first 2 may help of my yesterday's comment <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20333451>

The guy I spoke to who recommended the chimp book also recommended 'Yiwara: Foragers of the Australian Desert' <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21412584-yiwara>. The first part is an observation of their life, the second part is a terribly sad description of their very ancient culture being destroyed simply by the presence of western culture. It was less interesting, but mostly it was just too sad to read. I skipped that.

Reason he recommended the chimpo book and Yiwara is I asked him about the then-new finding of a very old artefact on which he had some fascinating stuff to say. I asked him how he knew these things, he said 'personal experience, mostly'.

'The innocent Anthropologist' was suggested by someone else. Very revealing, very funny though.

The aztec book I also pushed... well, it's a damn good read too!

I would recommend this book by evolutionary anthropologist Svante Pääbo.

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

https://www.amazon.com/Neanderthal-Man-Search-Lost-Genomes/d...

After the Ice by Steven Mithen: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264288.After_the_Ice

It's a doorstop of a book, but very interesting, tracing the threads of hunter-gatherers transitioning to civilisations all over the world, 20,000 - 5,000 BCE.

I had people point at laugh at me in a hotel bar once because of the size of that book (I could tell from their hand gestures it was the book and not me they were laughing at!) - a good read though.

Harari is an academic, and includes a copious bibliography in his Notes section, which would be a good start.

What I find most fascinating is there's no evidence neanderthals were not biologically just as intelligent as homo sapiens. That we achieved civilization and they died out before doing so was little better than luck.

Reportedly one of Asimov's favourite stories related to this: The Ugly Little Boy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy)

Most civilizations were made by hybrid Homo sapiens/Neanderthals.

I thought this was already known. I remember watching a show a few years back on Neanderthals that mentioned they used a form of glue. For context, if anyone else might recall this show, a researcher attempted to recreate the "spearhead" they found and determined it was more sophisticated than previously thought. They also had shared results of DNA sequencing which found a 98%+ similarity to homo sapiens. Unfortunately, I don't remember where I saw it, or what it was called.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295598

I have a feeling that anybody who has to do things on their own, very very quickly become good at sensing all tricks, techniques that can give them ~leverage.

... to say the least.

Understanding enough about the thing to start making something with it makes it an order of magnitude easier to learn about in depth.

Unless they have been patented by someone else already.

That's what happened to the Neanderthals. We got all the good patents locked up first.

Neanderthals had a larger brain than sapiens. And more of a brain complexity gene DUF1220 than any other primate.

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