A glue formula used by people in South Africa 70,000 years ago required more intelligence than archaeologists normally attribute to Stone Age men. It was made by mixing red ochre with the gum of acacia trees. It turns out that the red ochre serves more than a decorative purpose, as researchers found out when they made some of the glue themselves.
Link
"We discovered that when we used ochre, the glue is much more robust, and the stone tool doesn't come off the shaft," said study team member Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
But making the glue wasn't easy for the ancient Africans.
It was mentally taxing work that would have required humans to account for differences in the chemistry of gum harvested from different trees and in the iron content of ochre from different sites.
"They couldn't possibly have known about chemical pH or iron content … but they knew that certain combinations of things worked very well," Wadley said.
Link
They didn't HAVE to know that. Why would they care? It's only science that's concerned with "why?".
@felixthecat
Take that von Daniken channeler! No UFOs for you today!
age people were intelligent. Technology builds on other
technology, and using stone tools is quite intelligent
considering that people hadn't yet discovered how to
work with metals. Was Leonardo da Vinci stupid for not
having invented a computer?
Does that say anything to you? This is a method that prevents you from having to to really know WHY things work. You just learn perhaps over several generations what combination works the best. So you're not going "Hey I know the exact chemical properties of this and that materal. Ergo- If I combine such and such, the chemical molecular result must be X = useful", but you learn perhaps from your grandmother that she had this neat trick with dirt she had from that creek and the sap from that tree. And she mixed it, perhaps said some enchantment and it worked. And then your mother had by accident discovered that if you put that mix for some time in ...a cow's stomach, it got even better. And then after some years doing it like that with the dirt from that creek and the sap from that other tree and by singing the enchantment and storing the stuff in a cow's stomach, YOU discovered that it also worked if you forgot the enchantment and you stored the goo behind the homefire. And then your daughter discovers that the goo works best if you use the sap if it is harvested under the first full moon after the buffaloes have migrated...And so on....After a fwew hundred years the concoction is the best you can get and it has become part of the tribal knowledge, without anyone really knowing why or how it works- it just does if you do it like that. And that's all that counts. In that way you can amass lots of really good working practices and even products without really having any knowledge on HOW it works.
...Let's put it in another way- I can use this computer. I can use this internet to communicate ith you. But really I am not an inch more intelligent than any stone age person- I do not have the foggiest idea on how to repare my computer or my internet-link if it dissapears. And at the same time, as a city-dweller I would perish within a few days (okay, perhaps weeks) when they would drop me in some far off wildland.
I think everyone understand that, I think people on the comment board are just making sarcastic arguments about the last sentence from the study team member who made the comment for the sake of clearing up the misconception shared by a few people that ancient humankind wasn't that bright. It's what to expect from National Geographic, they speak to everyone like they are 8 years old.
I beg forgiveness.
I get somewhat heated up if I read lines like "...70,000 years ago required more intelligence than archaeologists normally attribute to Stone Age men" or "It was mentally taxing work that would have required humans to account for differences in the chemistry of gum harvested from different trees and in the iron content of ochre from different sites".
I've had discussions with lots of traditional-lined archeologists and scientists who still seem convinced that the mere fact that humans lived in the stone age also meant that they therefore could not have equal intelligence capacities to us. Yet after some personal experiences with reënactment and experimental archeology, I am firmly convinced that since those ... roughly 150.000 years ago, have not even gained grains more intelligence. We humans from today are just as intelligent as those stonetool makers from then. They were just as intelligent as us. And this glue is just a point in case. And they dearly needed to use that intelligence to survive in a very dangerous world. Intelligence seemed to be their main tool of survival. The only difference is that we by now after all those years as a whole of humanity accumulated far more little bits of how to do and how to make things and our effictiveness in communicating that information. And that makes that nowadays we live in materialistically highly complicated structures and surroundings. That is not more intelligence- that is accumulation and heritage.
But I'll submit these post also in some different places, where they are more appropriate. :-)
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Modern man has such a dependency on things that are made almost instantly available, that we have lost a great deal of our innovation and creative thinking abilities that we once had. I am a strong believer in tools and methods that are simple yet effective, and agree with the philosophy that sometimes in order to take two steps forward you need to take one step back. So many doors of knowledge we refuse to look in just because we consider them to be obsolete, or that we just have completely forgot they were there in the first place.
Amen.
I'm tired- I go to sleep.