7 ms·

Neanderthals glued their tools together

84 points by Ultramanoid 7y ago

Stratoscope 7y ago
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 7y ago
  >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 7y ago
    In EE circles similar (well, kind of opposite) things are said along the lines that "unfortunately, electrons don't read schematics".
lentil_soup 7y ago
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.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  The first 2 may help of my yesterday's comment <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20333451> 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> 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!
- mirandatann 7y ago
  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/dp/1511320117 https://www.amazon.com/Neanderthal-Man-Search-Lost-Genomes/d...
- mkl 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Harari is an academic, and includes a copious bibliography in his Notes section, which would be a good start.
bookofjoe 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295598
agumonkey 7y ago
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.
- usgroup 7y ago
  ... 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.
- aerique 7y ago
  Unless they have been patented by someone else already.
  - danielmg 7y ago
    That's what happened to the Neanderthals. We got all the good patents locked up first.
tafurnace 7y ago
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.
kurtisc 7y ago
>“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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  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 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.
ravenstine 7y ago
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.
- wjp3 7y ago
  Wow... from 'atlatl' to the fire sticks... it's like we were in Scouts together. Thanks for the memories.
- keithnoizu 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Correction, Pine Rosin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFoB5OEtRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFoB5OEtRA
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  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_history.html 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-money-power-with-a-new-epilogue/oclc/811407310 https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...
Causality1 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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)
- haihaibye 7y ago
  Most civilizations were made by hybrid Homo sapiens/Neanderthals.
peter303 7y ago
Neanderthals had a larger brain than sapiens. And more of a brain complexity gene DUF1220 than any other primate.

84 points by Ultramanoid 7y ago

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 7y ago
>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 7y ago
  In EE circles similar (well, kind of opposite) things are said along the lines that "unfortunately, electrons don't read schematics".

lentil_soup 7y ago

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.

tempguy9999 7y ago
The first 2 may help of my yesterday's comment <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20333451> 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> 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!
mirandatann 7y ago
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/dp/1511320117 https://www.amazon.com/Neanderthal-Man-Search-Lost-Genomes/d...
mkl 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Harari is an academic, and includes a copious bibliography in his Notes section, which would be a good start.

bookofjoe 7y ago

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

agumonkey 7y ago

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.

usgroup 7y ago
... 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.
aerique 7y ago
Unless they have been patented by someone else already.
- danielmg 7y ago
  That's what happened to the Neanderthals. We got all the good patents locked up first.

tafurnace 7y ago

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.

kurtisc 7y ago

>“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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
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 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.

ravenstine 7y ago

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.

wjp3 7y ago
Wow... from 'atlatl' to the fire sticks... it's like we were in Scouts together. Thanks for the memories.
keithnoizu 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Correction, Pine Rosin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFoB5OEtRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFoB5OEtRA
dredmorbius 7y ago
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_history.html 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-money-power-with-a-new-epilogue/oclc/811407310 https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...

Causality1 7y ago

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 7y ago
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)
haihaibye 7y ago
Most civilizations were made by hybrid Homo sapiens/Neanderthals.

peter303 7y ago

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