Dec 3, 2024 09:47 PM
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A 65,000-year-old hearth reveals evidence that Neanderthals produced tar for stone tools in Iberia
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180985536/
INTRO: When fire was invented, it changed the course of human evolution. It provided warmth, enabled cooking and facilitated the creation of more advanced tools. For instance, one pivotal tool, the stone-tipped spear, might have been assembled using tar and other adhesives. While early tar production remains largely a mystery, scientists have now uncovered a 65,000-year-old hearth that appears to have functioned as a small-scale “tar factory.”
In a new study published in Quaternary Science Reviews in November, scientists describe a 65,000-year-old hearth found in Gibraltar on the Iberian Peninsula. The fire pit was theoretically used to make tar—and if that conclusion is proven true, it also represents the first evidence of the use of the plant rockrose, Cistus ladanifer, for obtaining tar.
“For this reason, it can be said that it was unexpected,” says Juan Ochando, lead author of the study and a biologist at the University of Murcia in Spain, to Discover magazine’s Paul Smaglik.
Scientists already knew that Neanderthals made adhesives using other materials like ocher and naturally sticky substances to haft stone tips onto wooden shafts to create weapons. The newly described hearth in Gibraltar represents a “specialized burning structure” for tar production, the researchers write in the study.
“Stone Age adhesives are an important and still much understudied aspect of early humans,” says Patrick Schmidt, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved with the study, to Science’s Taylor Mitchell Brown.
Still, Schmidt says that although the study points to wood burning in the hearth, more evidence is needed to conclude for certain that Neanderthals used the hearth to make tar... (MORE - details)
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A 65,000-year-old hearth reveals evidence that Neanderthals produced tar for stone tools in Iberia
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180985536/
INTRO: When fire was invented, it changed the course of human evolution. It provided warmth, enabled cooking and facilitated the creation of more advanced tools. For instance, one pivotal tool, the stone-tipped spear, might have been assembled using tar and other adhesives. While early tar production remains largely a mystery, scientists have now uncovered a 65,000-year-old hearth that appears to have functioned as a small-scale “tar factory.”
In a new study published in Quaternary Science Reviews in November, scientists describe a 65,000-year-old hearth found in Gibraltar on the Iberian Peninsula. The fire pit was theoretically used to make tar—and if that conclusion is proven true, it also represents the first evidence of the use of the plant rockrose, Cistus ladanifer, for obtaining tar.
“For this reason, it can be said that it was unexpected,” says Juan Ochando, lead author of the study and a biologist at the University of Murcia in Spain, to Discover magazine’s Paul Smaglik.
Scientists already knew that Neanderthals made adhesives using other materials like ocher and naturally sticky substances to haft stone tips onto wooden shafts to create weapons. The newly described hearth in Gibraltar represents a “specialized burning structure” for tar production, the researchers write in the study.
“Stone Age adhesives are an important and still much understudied aspect of early humans,” says Patrick Schmidt, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved with the study, to Science’s Taylor Mitchell Brown.
Still, Schmidt says that although the study points to wood burning in the hearth, more evidence is needed to conclude for certain that Neanderthals used the hearth to make tar... (MORE - details)