© NASA
Archaeologists working in two Italian caves
have discovered some of the earliest known examples of ancient humans using an adhesive on their stone tools-an important technological advance called "hafting."The new study, which included CU Boulder's Paola Villa, shows that Neanderthals living in Europe from about 55 to 40 thousand years ago traveled away from their caves to collect resin from pine trees. They then used that sticky substance to glue stone tools to handles made out of wood or bone.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that
suggests that these cousins of Homo sapiens were more clever than some have made them out to be. "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 Villa, corresponding author of the new study and an adjoint curator at the
CU Museum of Natural History.
That insight, she added, came from a chance discovery from Grotta del Fossellone and Grotta di Sant'Agostino, a pair of caves near the beaches of what is now Italy's west coast.
© Degano et al. 2019, PLOS ONEFlints bearing traces of pine resin. The letter "R" indicates the presence of visible resin, and the arrows point to spots where researchers sampled material for chemical analysis.
Those caves were home to Neanderthals who lived in Europe during the Middle Paleolithic period, thousands of years before
Homo sapiens set foot on the continent. Archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,000 stone tools from the two sites, including pieces of flint that measured not much more than an inch or two from end to end.
In a recent study of the materials, Villa and her colleagues noticed a strange residue on just a handful of the flints-bits of what appeared to be organic material.
"Sometimes that material is just inorganic sediment, and sometimes it's the traces of the adhesive used to keep the tool in its socket" Villa said.
Comment: There are various ways one could can attempt to ameliorate the problems of these tick borne diseases. Although the threats ticks pose appears to only be increasing:
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