Birch bark tar

If you had an open wound, A, it would suture the wound together, kind of close it off, but it also had pretty potent antimicrobial effects.

The researchers tested samples and they found that every type of birch tar that they produce.

They try to replicate, you know, kind of the way that the Neanderthals would have done it, you know, the simple fire and, you know, like covering it up so that the sap would run out of the birch.

And The birch tar that they produced was able to inhibit the growth of even Staph aureus.

That's a bacteria associated with very serious wound infections.

So researchers are turning their attention to the birch tar.

They're trying to find out what is the secret sauce within the birch tar that may yield new findings.

Antibiotic resistance is emerging, and we're looking for new substances to fight our eternal war against bacteria, which...

Neanderthal birch tar may have doubled as ancient antibiotic.

For decades, the sticky black tar that Neanderthals cooked out of birch bark has been filed away in the archaeological literature as prehistoric glue.

A new round of laboratory experiments suggest that label is far too narrow.

Researchers in Germany, Britain, Belgium, and Canada made birch tar using methods reconstructed from Middle Paleolithic sites, then tested it against bacteria, and every sample inhibited Staphylococcus aureus, the organism behind many infected wounds.

The work, published in PLOS One, was led by Tjark Siemsen of the University of Cologne and the University of Oxford.

A glue that did much more than stick.

Birch tar is found at Neanderthal sites across Europe, often still clinging to stone tools.

It was made by heating birch bark under low oxygen conditions, a process called dry distillation, and used to bind flint points to wooden shafts, a technique known as hafting.

But as cool as Crane is, the thing that blew my mind wasn't the bone.

It was the tool, the birch pitch tool.

Ah, yes.

The artifacts found by Willy van Wingerden.

They had to build a specialized earth oven, bury the bark in a sealed container, perhaps made of clay, control the vicarious temperature precisely from the outside without any thermometers, and understand the exact sequence of the chemical process.

It definitively proves complex cognitive sequencing.

You simply cannot make Birch Pitch by accident.

It shows forward planning, working memory, and a really deep empirical understanding of material properties.