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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren voc Obam here with another classic episode

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Speaker 1: from our previous host, Christian Sagar. There was a time

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Speaker 1: when Neanderthal was used as an insult, with the implication

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Speaker 1: that this extinct species or perhaps subspecies of hominids, was

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Speaker 1: unintelligent and unsophisticated. But the more research that goes into

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Speaker 1: how Neanderthal's lived, the more we learn that they were

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Speaker 1: quite clever. For example, they made and used glue millennia

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Speaker 1: before we humans figured it out. Hey brain Stuff is

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Speaker 1: Christian Sagar here. There are some things people just can't

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Speaker 1: live without, so we invented them way before we ever

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Speaker 1: invented writing, coats, knives, roofs. Fire. Turns out, another thing

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Speaker 1: are prehistoric precursors needed that we still need today is

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Speaker 1: the ability to stick one thing to another thing and

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Speaker 1: then you know, have them stay that way, which is

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Speaker 1: why Neanderthals had glue. They might have been cavemen, but

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Speaker 1: they weren't savages. Now Homo neanderthal insists used their glue,

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Speaker 1: a viscous tar distilled from birch bark, to fix weapons

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Speaker 1: on the heads of a tool onto a halft or

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Speaker 1: maybe a handle, and Neanderthals were actually the leaders in

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Speaker 1: glue technology, beating US Homo sapiens to the punch by

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Speaker 1: more than a hundred thousand years. They began brewing tar

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Speaker 1: two hundred thousand years ago, whereas the earliest evidence of

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Speaker 1: modern humans using tree resin as adhesive appears less than

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Speaker 1: one hundred thousand years ago. Research published in twenty eleven

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Speaker 1: shows that Neanderthals had the ability to create and control fire.

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Speaker 1: So does the fact Neanderthals could manipulate fire to produce

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Speaker 1: tar prove they weren't as dimwitted as we like to assume.

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Speaker 1: Scientists have been curious about the process Neanderthal is used

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Speaker 1: to make their glue. A new study published in the

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Speaker 1: journal Nature Scientific Reports suggests three different ways Neanderthal tar

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Speaker 1: could have been manufactured. After all, it had to be produced.

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Speaker 1: This stuff wasn't just secreted from trees growing in the forest.

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Speaker 1: But how difficult was making tar? Tar making is definitely

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Speaker 1: a process no matter which way you go about it.

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Speaker 1: The research team figured that out through a fancy bit

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Speaker 1: of experimental archaeology. They devised three different potential methods of

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Speaker 1: extracting sticky stuff from birch bark, the ash mound method,

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Speaker 1: where tightly rolled layers of birch bark are covered in

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Speaker 1: ash and embers, the pit roll cigar roll method, where

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Speaker 1: one end of a birch roll is lit and placed

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Speaker 1: burning side down into a small collection pit, and the

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Speaker 1: raised structure method, where a birch bark container was placed

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Speaker 1: in a pit beneath an organic mesh which holds loosely

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Speaker 1: rolled bark that is then covered with earth and fire.

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Speaker 1: After recreating the three tar production methods, the scientists assessed

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Speaker 1: each according to three criteria the yield, temperature, and complexity.

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Speaker 1: The team found that though the simplest fastest method, the

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Speaker 1: ash mound method, yielded just a peace sized amount of tar,

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Speaker 1: the most complicated, time consuming method, that's the raised structure method,

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Speaker 1: produced fifteen to twenty times more and was also the

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Speaker 1: most efficient. They also observed that regulating the temperature of

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Speaker 1: the fire didn't make much of a difference to the product.

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Speaker 1: Even though they have no evidence that the Neanderthal way

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Speaker 1: of making tar was similar to any of their experimental methods,

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Speaker 1: making the connection between the birch bark, the fire, and

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Speaker 1: the tar would have required that Neanderthals possess a proclivity

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Speaker 1: for abstract thought, so whether they were making easy, inefficient

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Speaker 1: tar instead of something like the high yield method requiring

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Speaker 1: a folded cup and a little grill made of sticks,

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Speaker 1: Neanderthals had something going for them. They were seriously using

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Speaker 1: their brains, and who knows, it's possible they started with

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Speaker 1: a method similar to one and then moved on to

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Speaker 1: another overtime. Today's episode was written by Jesscelyn Shields and

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Speaker 1: produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on

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Speaker 1: this and lots of other sticky topics, is it how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of my

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Speaker 1: heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the

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