Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain
Speaker 1: stuff is Christian Sager here. There are some things people
Speaker 1: just can't live without, so we invented them way before
Speaker 1: we ever invented writing, coats, knives, roofs. Fire. Turns out,
Speaker 1: another thing our prehistoric precursors needed that we still need
Speaker 1: today is the ability to stick one thing to another
Speaker 1: thing and then you know, have them stay that way,
Speaker 1: which is why Neanderthals had glue. They might have been cavemen,
Speaker 1: but they weren't savages. Now Homo neanderthal insists used their glue,
Speaker 1: a viscous tar distilled from birch bark, to fix weapons
Speaker 1: on the heads of a tool onto a halft or
Speaker 1: maybe a handle, and Neanderthals were actually the leaders in
Speaker 1: glue technology, beating US Homo sapiens to the punch by
Speaker 1: more than a hundred thousand years. They began brewing tar
Speaker 1: two thousand years ago, whereas the earliest evidence of modern
Speaker 1: humans using tree resin as adhesive appears less than one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years ago. Research published in twenty eleven shows
Speaker 1: that Neanderthals had the ability to create and control fire.
Speaker 1: So does the fact Neanderthals could manipulate fire to produce tar,
Speaker 1: prove they weren't as dimwitted as we like to assume.
Speaker 1: Scientists have been curious about the process Neanderthals used to
Speaker 1: make their glue. A new study published in the journal
Speaker 1: Nature Scientific Reports suggests three different ways Neanderthal tar could
Speaker 1: have been manufactured. After all, it had to be produced.
Speaker 1: This stuff wasn't just secreted from trees growing in the forest,
Speaker 1: but how difficult was making tar? Tar making is definitely
Speaker 1: a process no matter which way you go about it.
Speaker 1: The research team figured that out through a fancy bit
Speaker 1: of experimental archaeology. They dive eased three different potential methods
Speaker 1: of extracting sticky stuff from birch bark. The ash mound method,
Speaker 1: where tightly rolled layers of birch bark are covered in
Speaker 1: ash and embers, the pit roll cigar roll method, where
Speaker 1: one end of a birch roll is lit and placed
Speaker 1: burning side down into a small collection pit, and the
Speaker 1: raised structure method, where a birch bark container was placed
Speaker 1: in a pit beneath an organic mesh which holds loosely
Speaker 1: rolled bark that is then covered with earth and fire.
Speaker 1: After recreating the three tar production methods. The scientists assess
Speaker 1: each according to three criteria the yield, temperature, and complexity.
Speaker 1: The team found that though the simplest fastest method, the
Speaker 1: ash mound method, yielded just a peace sized amount of tar,
Speaker 1: the most complicated, time consuming method, that's the raised structure method,
Speaker 1: produced fifteen to twenty times more and was so the
Speaker 1: most efficient. They also observed that regulating the temperature of
Speaker 1: the fire didn't make much of a difference to the product,
Speaker 1: even though they have no evidence that the Neanderthal way
Speaker 1: of making tar was similar to any of their experimental methods,
Speaker 1: making the connection between the birch bark, the fire, and
Speaker 1: the tar would have required that Neanderthals possessed a proclivity
Speaker 1: for abstract thought, So whether they were making easy, inefficient
Speaker 1: tar instead of something like the high yield method requiring
Speaker 1: a folded cup and a little grill made of sticks,
Speaker 1: Neanderthals had something going for them. They were seriously using
Speaker 1: their brains, and who knows, it's possible they started with
Speaker 1: a method similar to one and then moved on to
Speaker 1: another overtime. Today's episode was written by jess Lyn Shields,
Speaker 1: produced by Tristan McNeil, and for more on this and
Speaker 1: other top fis, please visit us at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com, MH.