[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

DID NEANDERTHALS USE CHEMICALS TO LIGHT FIRES? Yes, probably. Some researchers still believe that Neanderthals couldn't make fires from scratch and only used those taken from naturally occurring lightning-strike fires. Having experienced four winters in Germany, it's always been hard for me to imagine Neanderthals surviving for more than 250,000 years in Ice Age Europe relying solely on opportunistic fires. Although the Neanderthal body type was cold adapted, Aiello and Wheeler (2003) determined that our cousins could only tolerate about 4°F colder temperatures than modern man. Their research indicated that Neanderthals needed both clothes and fire to survive Ice Age winters. Other recent studies support the idea that Neanderthals not only made fires from scratch, they even used manganese dioxide powder as an accelerant. The Pech-de-l'Azé cave in SW France has yielded blocks of manganese dioxide with lots of scratch marks. Scientists used to think Neanderthals used the mineral for body decoration. But many other minerals are more suitable for that purpose and more readily available, and Neanderthals mostly collected the dioxide. Heyes et al. (2016) determined that the manganese dioxide lowered combustion temperatures for wood from above 650 °F to 480 °F, making fire starting much easier. So we can likely add chemistry to the growing Neanderthal repertoire

I've often thought that it was ridiculous that science thinks that man couldn't do "stuff" (build the pyramids, stonehenge, make fire, etc...) back in the day.


© Testing the efficiency of Neandertal bone tools replicas © Malvina Baumann, 2020

© Testing the efficiency of Neandertal bone tools replicas © Malvina Baumann, 2020

While the jury is still out as to why the Neanderthal, an ancient ancestor of modern humans, became extinct about 40,000 years ago, it has long been assumed that it was because they possessed a low level of intelligence. Pioneering research is challenging this idea, uncovering evidence to suggest that our ancient cousins were in fact much more like us than we thought.

Try to imagine the modern human, Homo Sapiens, as just one of three species of humans coexisting on the planet Earth. That’s a difficult picture to paint by any stretch of the imagination. Yet this was the reality 60,000 years ago, when the first anatomically modern humans left Africa. It was a time when Europe and the Middle East were already populated by the Neanderthals, while the Denisovans spread across large parts of Asia.

Ever since the discovery of the Neanderthal 1, the first specimen to be recognised as an early human fossil in 1856, researchers have been trying to figure out what brought about the extinction of earlier species of humans. For a long time, paleoanthropologists viewed Neanderthals as being very distinct from our own species, and inherently incapable of sharing the “modern” characteristics that came to define our own evolution.

A substantial and rapidly growing body of research is putting this “dumb brute” conception of the Neanderthal firmly to bed: there is evidence to show that they were a sea-faring people, skilled cooperative hunters, and possibly even capable of medical treatment and healthcare. These discoveries are adding to the complexity of understanding why Neanderthals died out and the modern human survived; if the differences between the two species were much smaller than previously assumed, what gave the modern human the competitive advantage over our ancient cousin?