This is delightful writing:<p><i>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.</i><p>And since the word "haft" may be unfamiliar (as it was to me):<p><a href="https://www.dictionary.com/browse/haft" rel="nofollow">https://www.dictionary.com/browse/haft</a>
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.<p>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.
>“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.<p>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.<p>Show me the real fossil, it's far more interesting.
Can anyone recommend a modern book to learn more about early humans?<p>I read "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari which contains a chapter on it, but was left wanting more.
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.
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.
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.