
Neanderthals glued their tools together - Ultramanoid
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/neanderthals-glued-their-tools-together/
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Stratoscope
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](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/haft)

~~~
jaclaz
>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".

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

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ravenstine
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.

~~~
keithnoizu
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.

~~~
keithnoizu
Correction, Pine Rosin,

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFoB5OEtRA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFoB5OEtRA)

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kurtisc
>“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.

~~~
dalbasal
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.

~~~
kurtisc
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.

~~~
dalbasal
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.

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lentil_soup
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.

~~~
mkl
_After the Ice_ by Steven Mithen:
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264288.After_the_Ice](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.

~~~
arethuza
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.

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Causality1
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.

~~~
vijayr02
Reportedly one of Asimov's favourite stories related to this: The Ugly Little
Boy
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy))

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tafurnace
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.

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bookofjoe
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295598)

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agumonkey
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.

~~~
aerique
Unless they have been patented by someone else already.

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

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peter303
Neanderthals had a larger brain than sapiens. And more of a brain complexity
gene DUF1220 than any other primate.

