Neanderthals Used Glue

Neanderthals distilled tar more than 100,000 years before modern humans created glue; archaeologists compared three potential ways this ancient tech was used.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain
stuff is Christian Sager here. There are some things people
just can't live without, so we invented them way before
we ever invented writing, coats, knives, roofs. Fire. Turns out,
another thing our prehistoric precursors needed that we still need

(00:22):
today is the ability to stick one thing to another
thing and then you know, have them stay that way,
which is why Neanderthals had glue. They might have been cavemen,
but they weren't savages. Now Homo neanderthal insists used their glue,
a viscous tar distilled from birch bark, to fix weapons

(00:44):
on the heads of a tool onto a halft or
maybe a handle, and Neanderthals were actually the leaders in
glue technology, beating US Homo sapiens to the punch by
more than a hundred thousand years. They began brewing tar
two thousand years ago, whereas the earliest evidence of modern
humans using tree resin as adhesive appears less than one

(01:07):
hundred thousand years ago. Research published in twenty eleven shows
that Neanderthals had the ability to create and control fire.
So does the fact Neanderthals could manipulate fire to produce tar,
prove they weren't as dimwitted as we like to assume.
Scientists have been curious about the process Neanderthals used to

(01:29):
make their glue. A new study published in the journal
Nature Scientific Reports suggests three different ways Neanderthal tar could
have been manufactured. After all, it had to be produced.
This stuff wasn't just secreted from trees growing in the forest,
but how difficult was making tar? Tar making is definitely

(01:51):
a process no matter which way you go about it.
The research team figured that out through a fancy bit
of experimental archaeology. They dive eased three different potential methods
of extracting sticky stuff from birch bark. The ash mound method,
where tightly rolled layers of birch bark are covered in
ash and embers, the pit roll cigar roll method, where

(02:14):
one end of a birch roll is lit and placed
burning side down into a small collection pit, and the
raised structure method, where a birch bark container was placed
in a pit beneath an organic mesh which holds loosely
rolled bark that is then covered with earth and fire.
After recreating the three tar production methods. The scientists assess

(02:38):
each according to three criteria the yield, temperature, and complexity.
The team found that though the simplest fastest method, the
ash mound method, yielded just a peace sized amount of tar,
the most complicated, time consuming method, that's the raised structure method,
produced fifteen to twenty times more and was so the

(03:00):
most efficient. They also observed that regulating the temperature of
the fire didn't make much of a difference to the product,
even though they have no evidence that the Neanderthal way
of making tar was similar to any of their experimental methods,
making the connection between the birch bark, the fire, and
the tar would have required that Neanderthals possessed a proclivity

(03:23):
for abstract thought, So whether they were making easy, inefficient
tar instead of something like the high yield method requiring
a folded cup and a little grill made of sticks,
Neanderthals had something going for them. They were seriously using
their brains, and who knows, it's possible they started with

(03:43):
a method similar to one and then moved on to
another overtime. Today's episode was written by jess Lyn Shields,
produced by Tristan McNeil, and for more on this and
other top fis, please visit us at how stuff works
dot com, MH.