200,000-Year-Old Recipe For Glue

Scientists Discover 200,000-Year-Old Recipe For Glue

We finally know how ancient Neanderthals held their tools together.

Getty Mauricio Anton
 
By Avery Thompson

Glue is a pretty wonderful thing, and given the wide variety of different adhesives it can be easy to think of glue as a modern invention. But glue is as old as the Stone Age, and a group of scientists has finally discovered the recipe our Neanderthal ancestors used to stick things together 200,000 years ago.

Neanderthal glue was completely different from its modern incarnation, and was mostly made of tar. But tar isn't something you can just find lying around: You have to make it, and most methods of tar production require tools and materials that weren't available to Neanderthals living 200,000 years ago.



To make tar, the Neanderthals would have used a dry distillation process, where putting some birch or oak bark into a fire would produce gases that condense into tar. But here's the mystery: this process typically requires some sort of container to catch the fumes and hold the tar, and Neanderthals were doing this thousands of years before ceramics and clay pots were invented.

So how did they make it? A group of researchers from Leiden University set out to find the answer, by attempting to discover the Neanderthals' process using the tools and materials available to them. The team tested three different methods they developed to see if they could produce a sizable amount of tar, ranging from simple to complex.

As it turns out, even the simplest method the team came up with was enough. The team took strips of birch bark and buried them under hot ashes from a fire, which produced enough tar to make a small tool. The more complex methods were capable of producing more tar, but they weren't required to produce the amounts of tar found in archaeological expeditions.

This doesn't mean that the team found the particular method the Neanderthals used—if anything, it proves there are multiple ways to make tar, and the Neanderthals could have used any one of them—but it does show that Neanderthals and other early humans were smart, clever people capable of finding creative solutions to their problems.







Paul Kozowyk