SEVILLE, SPAIN—Fernando Muñiz of the University of Seville and an international team of researchers have identified a pit where Neanderthals may have produced plant adhesives some 60,000 years ago in Gibraltar’s Vanguard Cave, according to a SciTechDaily report. Previous research has suggested that Neanderthals could have produced birch pitch through the open-air combustion of birch bark. This method, however, would not have been very productive. The other method proposed by researchers would have required burying birch chips and then heating them, so that they could exude their resin without burning. Geochemical and fossil pollen evidence obtained from the pit in Vanguard Cave indicates that prickly rockrose was the primary source of resin. The researchers also determined that the pit had been sealed with a layer of guano mixed with sand before heating. Finally, the team members were able to reconstruct the pit, and recreate the complex process of adhesive production. “Neanderthals had to go through a series of thought processes, choosing which plants to select and figuring out how to extract resin without burning them,” team member Clive Finlayson of The Gibraltar National Museum and Liverpool John Moores University explained. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Quaternary Science Reviews. To read about a Neanderthal engraving in another cave in Gibraltar, go to “Symbolic Neanderthals.”

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Source: archaeology.org