Neanderthals were a lot more intelligent than they looked

Neanderthals were not dumb, lumbering idiots after all. New evidence suggests that they had considerable technical and intellectual skills, as well as ingenuity, to put them on a par with modern humans.

Neanderthals were not dumb, lumbering idiots after all. New evidence suggests that they had considerable technical and intellectual skills, as well as ingenuity, to put them on a par with modern humans.

A team of archaeologists and scientists has discovered that Neanderthals, thought to have first appeared around 230,000 to 300,000 years ago, were capable of a sophisticated tool manufacturing process using prehistoric superglue that had to be made at a precise temperature.

"This finding demonstrates that the Neanderthals must have possessed a high degree of technical and manual abilities, comparable to those of modern Homo sapiens," says a report of the new research.

Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, says 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."

The new finding, by a team of German researchers, also puts a question mark over theories that Neanderthals disappeared because they were no intellectual match for humankind's ancestors.

The research centres on a new analysis of two samples of blackish-brown pitch discovered in a lignite open-mining pit in the foothills of the Harz mountains in Germany. Their geological location suggests they are more than 80,000 years old.

One of the pitch pieces bears the print of a finger and there are also imprints of a flint stone tool and wood, suggesting that the pitch had served as a sort of glue to secure a wooden shaft to a flint stone blade.

In the research, carried out at the Doerner-Institut in Munich, the scientists set out to discover the chemical composition of the pitch, its biological origins, and the amount of skill and ability needed to make it.

It had been thought that the pitch was made from melted pine resin. But although such resins could work as putty, they are not strong enough to work as glue.

When the researchers broke down the samples, they found that it was a birch pitch, which is far more difficult to make. Birch pitches can be produced only at temperatures of 300-400C (570-750F). At lower temperatures, no tar is produced, while higher temperatures destroy any tar that has formed.

"Today, comparable pitches can easily be produced with modern technical methods, like airtight laboratory flasks and temperature control facilities," says a report of the research in the European Journal of Archaeology. "However, any attempt at simulating the conditions of the Neanderthal period and at producing these birch pitches without any of these modern facilities will soon be met with many difficulties.

"This implies that the Neanderthals did not come across these pitches by accident but must have produced them with intent. Conscious action is, however, always a clear sign of considerable technical capabilities,'' says the team, led by Professor Dietrich Mania of Freidrich-Schiller University in Jena.

"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.''

Professor Stringer says views are changing about Neanderthals: "They are not the shambling half-wits they were sometimes portrayed as," he said.

"It is potentially a very important find. It implies quite high technical ability. They also buried their dead. All this does make it more of a problem to explain why we are here and not them.''