DID NEANDERTHALS USE CHEMICALS TO LIGHT FIRES? Yes, probably. Some researchers still believe that Neanderthals couldn’t make fires from scratch and only used those taken from naturally occurring lightning-strike fires. Having experienced four winters in Germany, it’s always been hard for me to imagine Neanderthals surviving for more than 250,000 years in Ice Age Europe relying solely on opportunistic fires. Although the Neanderthal body type was cold adapted, Aiello and Wheeler (2003) determined that our cousins could only tolerate about 4°F colder temperatures than modern man. Their research indicated that Neanderthals needed both clothes and fire to survive Ice Age winters. Other recent studies support the idea that Neanderthals not only made fires from scratch, they even used manganese dioxide powder as an accelerant. The Pech-de-l’Azé cave in SW France has yielded blocks of manganese dioxide with lots of scratch marks. Scientists used to think Neanderthals used the mineral for body decoration. But many other minerals are more suitable for that purpose and more readily available, and Neanderthals mostly collected the dioxide. Heyes et al. (2016) determined that the manganese dioxide lowered combustion temperatures for wood from above 650 °F to 480 °F, making fire starting much easier. So we can likely add chemistry to the growing Neanderthal repertoire.
Manganese dioxide makes it much easier to spark a flame
They also made a tar from birch bark that was inspired. I saw an article in a recent forestry mag here where a local startup is trying to bring the birch bark oil that native tribes used as medicines, etc to market. The original method could take 60 hours so modern techniques are being tried to make it economic.
So many assume that our ancestors were less intelligent – however you measure that – than we are. Yet those same ancestors not only survived in a world that would kill most of us, but they created the world that allows us to live in relative safety and comfort.
We “stand on the shoulders of giants.”