Did you know that Neanderthals lived in houses, used fire, wore clothes, used musical instruments, spears, axes, hammers and even glue with which they held together various parts of their hunting and labor tools?
The Neanderthals not only lived in caves and under rock ledges, but also built shelters. Holes were found at two sites in France for wooden pegs and posts that supported the canopy.
Numerous finds of hearths indicate that the Neanderthals owned fire.
It was the Neanderthals who first invented music. Researcher Ivan Turk, who discovered the oldest known musical instrument in Divya Baba (Slovenia), attributed its creation to the Neanderthals. This bone "flute" was created 43 thousand years ago.
Neanderthals wore clothes made of tanned animal skin.
They hunted rhinos and adult mammoths. They adapted their hunting strategies to the surrounding terrain: they attacked lonely prey in the forests, looked for bison and other herd animals in the steppes, and collected birds, rabbits and sea animals on the shore.
The Neanderthals required a lot of skill and ability to plan their actions to create the tools typical of the Mousterian culture (300,000-30,000 BC). To create a chopper with a hammer stone, it was necessary to carefully prepare the workpiece. "They developed techniques that are difficult for modern humans to recreate," says Thomas Wynn of the University of Colorado Springs, USA.
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The Neanderthals created and used composite tools, for example, 127 thousand years ago, they invented the first spear. There is also evidence that 80 thousand years ago, Neanderthals created glue with which a stone tip was glued to the handle of a spear.
The Neanderthal glue is completely different from the modern version and is made mostly of tar. But tar just can't be found, it has to be made, and most of its production methods require tools and materials that were not available 200,000 years ago.
To make tar, Neanderthals most likely had to use a dry distillation process, that is, burn birch or oak bark in a fire, obtaining gases that condense into tar. But here's the catch: this requires vessels that could hold the gas, and there were no ceramics or even clay pots back then.
So how did the Neanderthals do it? A team of researchers from Leiden University tried to solve this problem using exclusively tools and materials available 200,000 years ago. And, as it turned out, even the simplest method worked. Scientists took strips of birch bark and buried them under the hot coals from the fire, resulting in enough tar to make a small tool.
In the past, there was a widespread point of view explaining the technological achievements of the Neanderthals, which appeared towards the end of their existence, by copying the lifestyle of H. sapiens, but the study of the Neanderthal sites in southern Italy (42 thousand years BC) refutes this. In this region at least, the Neanderthals created many different stone and bone tools than those used by the early humans living to the north.