50,000-year-old, tar-smeared tool shows Neanderthal smarts

[Timeshifter]

'Old-school scholars considered Neanderthals brutish and simple, but recent research shows they made jewelry, had a precision grip, and may have even painted cave art. Now, a tar-caked tool found on a Dutch beach supports the idea that Neanderthals could accomplish complex, multistep tasks that took planning ahead over several days.'

In 2016, an amateur collector named Willy van Wingerden found a flint flake partly covered in thick black tar on the Zandmotor, an artificial beach in the Netherlands. The beach, made from sand dredged from the bottom of the North Sea, is a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts. That’s because the sand used to be part of a wide expanse of dry, cold steppe, connecting the United Kingdom and the Netherlands during the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower than they are today.

Wow, thats some survival for a flake of flint and tar...


Archaeologists reconstructed how Neanderthals manufactured sticky tar from birch bark 50,000 years ago. Neanderthals may have used the tar to attach stone points to wooden spears, as shown.
© PAUL KOZOWYK

'At first glance, the tool doesn’t look like much—a small, sharp-edged flint flake with a gob of tar on the end. Once it hardened, the tar provided enough of a handhold for someone to use the flake’s sharp edge as a scraper or blade. “It looks quite simple, but it’s quite a complex tool,” says lead author Marcel Niekus, an independent archaeologist in the Netherlands who analyzed the find. “It took a lot of steps to make and haft the piece.”

Brutish and simple though...


This tar-handled tool was made by a Neanderthal 50,000 years ago.
© RMO

'When Niekus and his colleagues used radiocarbon dating to analyze the tar on the flake, they found it was 50,000 years old'

Ah, the old radiocarbon dating...

Had a thought, ignore the 50,000 years, lets say 500 years, more realistic?

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[feralimal]

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Username: Feralimal
Date: 2019-10-24 21:19:18
Reaction Score: 2

Had a thought, ignore the 50,000 years, lets say 500 years, more realistic?

Or 3.

You said it was found in 2016...

 

[EUAFU]

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Username: EUAFU
Date: 2019-10-25 00:40:39
Reaction Score: 1

Head of Archeology Department
- Make some discovery or our resources for next year will be cut.
Professional Archaeologist
- Don't worry, boss. I had a simple but efficient idea. Where do we keep those pieces of rock?

 

[Archive]

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Username: SonofaBush
Date: 2019-10-31 17:30:52
Reaction Score: 1

As I've stated elsewhere, I subscribe to Leif Ekblad's Neanderthal Theory of "Autism" / Neurodiversity The Neanderthal theory of autism, Asperger and ADHD. Before H.s.s. hybridized to form Cro-Magnon, they very rarely if ever invented anything. This is just one of many examples of Neanderthals that lacked trade continually reinventing the wheel. Leif assumes around 40,000 or so years ago this took place, but this is based on a statistical analysis which assumes neurotypical behavior (that is existence of H.s.s.) to be 150,000 years old. Change that assumption to 15,000 or 1.5 million and you'd get 4,000 or 400,000 years. If Uniformitarianism is wrong and catastrophism right, who knows when the species developed, hybridized, and (in the case of H.s.n) became extinct.

I have much more faith in this being an actual real find, although dating is probably more problematic than mainstream archeology and geology would have you believe, especially when it seems the truth about just about everything is obfuscated.