Neanderthals may have been advanced Stone Age "chemists" - scientists have found hints that the first natives of Europe may have used manganese dioxide to light fires.
The first natives of Europe lit their fires using high-tech developments in the Stone Age - excavations show that they used manganese dioxide and other oxidants to ignite wood, according to an article published in Scientific Reports.
For quite a long time, anthropologists and paleontologists believed that the Neanderthals, the European "cousins" of our ancestors, were noticeably inferior to them in cultural development, lacking the gift of speech, culture, religion and even the ability to kindle a fire. Over the past five years, all of these, as it turned out, myths have been successfully broken by new finds in Croatia, Israel and Spain.
Peter Heyes from Leiden University (Netherlands) and his colleagues found that Neanderthals were noticeably more "advanced" than Cro-Magnons in making fires, revealing the unusual purpose of one of the minerals, which, as scientists previously believed, the first inhabitants of Europe used exclusively in decorative purposes.
According to researchers, at the sites of Neanderthals in France and in other parts of Europe, paleontologists often find a kind of "cubes" of a dark mineral, manganese oxide.
Its purpose, as it seemed at first, was quite obvious - traces of this substance can be found on the walls of almost any Neanderthal cave, where its inhabitants left drawings. Black, red and brown paints based on this substance, according to modern anthropologists, were used by Neanderthals as a basis for body drawings or tattoos.
Studying pieces of manganese dioxide from the Pesch-de-Lazet cave in southern France, the authors of the article drew attention to the fact that all fragments of this mineral were composed exclusively of manganese dioxide, a rarer subspecies of this metal oxide, and not just manganese oxide, which has the same color and other "decorative" properties.
On the other hand, manganese dioxide, as you know from any chemistry textbook, is a powerful oxidizing agent and catalyst for oxidation and combustion reactions. This prompted scientists to believe that the inhabitants of the cave appreciated the "cubes" not because of their color, but because of their chemical properties.
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Since the surface of each of these oxide blocks had many scratches and traces of rubbing, Hayes and his colleagues suggested that the Neanderthals ground up the manganese dioxide and used the resulting powder to light a fire. Scientists tried to repeat their "know-how" - they prepared a set of wood shavings and tried to set fire to fire, gradually heating them.
As this experiment showed, the addition of even a small amount of oxide powder lowers the ignition temperature by more than 100 degrees, from 350 to less than 250 degrees Celsius, making it possible to light a fire using those tools and techniques that could have been available to Neanderthals 40-50 thousand years ago.
Scientists emphasize that their findings are not direct evidence that the Neanderthals actually used such "chemical" means to speed up fire-lighting - direct evidence of this has not yet been found.
On the other hand, given the similar coloration of manganese dioxide on the one hand and "common" manganese oxide and ash on the other, it is difficult to find a rational reason why the people of Pesch de Laz spent time and resources looking for the rare dioxide. Accordingly, if these ideas are confirmed in the course of future excavations, we will receive further evidence that the Neanderthals were much smarter than we are used to thinking.
