Posted on 01/06/2002 7:24:03 AM PST by blam
Neanderthals clever enough to make 'superglue'
Researchers say Neanderthals had considerable technical and intellectual skills and were as ingenious as modern humans.
German scientists say they have found Neanderthals mixed a kind of superglue to make tools.
It had to be made at a precise temperature and means the race had considerable technical and manual skills in comparison to their dullard image.
Neanderthals are thought to have first appeared around 230,000 to 300,000 years ago.
Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said the discovery is potentially very important: "It would further show that the behaviour gap between us and Neanderthals is narrower than we thought. Some may say there isn't a gap."
Independent reports that the research centres on a new analysis of two 80,000-year-old samples of blackish-brown pitch discovered in a lignite mining pit in the Harz mountains in Germany.
One of the pitch pieces bears the print of a finger and there are also imprints of a flint stone tool and wood, suggesting the pitch had served as a sort of glue to secure a wooden shaft to a flint stone blade.
The research, carried out at the Doerner-Institut in Munich, found the pitch was a birch pitch, which can be only be produced at temperatures of 300-400C.
The team, led by Professor Dietrich Mania of Freidrich-Schiller University in Jena, said: "This implies the Neanderthals did not come across these pitches by accident but must have produced them with intent."
"The pitch finds demonstrate that the Neanderthals must have possessed a high degree of technical and manual abilities, comparable to those of modern Homo sapiens.''
Story filed: 12:45 Sunday 6th January 2002
I think this is not a suprise to certain freeperettes ;-)
That's one theory anyway.
I have known people who did not have wisdom teeth: their teeth fit perfectly in their jaws, no need for extractions. I have also known people who not only had to have all four wisdom teeth removed, but who also had an extra set of four wisdom teeth behind those which had to be removed, and in one case, a third upper pair of half-formed wisdom teeth which the dentists did not touch because they were too close to the sinuses.
Tracing DNA material down the female line does not necessarily prove anything definitively, contrary to what scientific spin doctors tell you. The bulk of the population of Europe, for instance, can be traced directly back to a small number of female ancestors, according to some testing done recently, but that does not mean that only those limited number of female ancestors were the only female ancestors of today's population, since indirect female inheritance is not studied; other females with Neanderthal inheritance may have existed, who did not leave direct ancestors of their own, but who might have introduced Neanderthal genes into the non-Neanderthal population. In other words, it is not necessary to speculate exclusively about Neanderthal men impregnating non-Neanderthal woman, when the reverse could also have happened just as often; even if these Neanderthal women do not have direct female ancestors in today's population, they could have passed along, indirectly, some of their genetic inheritence to non-Neanderthal women who did, eventually, pass along these genes to today's populations.
Also, we still don't know a lot about DNA, and there is a good chance a lot gets passed along which cannot be traced with our current technology and current limited understanding of DNA.
Well, that's my take; others much more knowledgeable about DNA can debate this point.
The important point for me here is there is more indication that the neanderthals were not stupid; the idea they did not have a spoken language, for instance, will have to be dropped: you need a language to pass along the kind of knowledge to make these glues (not to mention the other evidence for organization requiring language which is already well known). The association of stupidity and primitiveness with neanderthals is a result of an unfortunate misunderstanding of the original fossils, which were misshapen.
Lol. I need teeth like that. Do the people in this family have big heads? Are they big and/or tall?
The men were silent, as befits someone trying to sneak up on large game animals and bash them with rocks. The women, though, mainly sat around the cook fire cooking and gossiping endlessly about the men.
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I had a friend who once managed to Superglue one of her fingers to her teeth! She says she thinks twice about using it ever again :-).
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