Colombian researcher participated in the study of the first materials created by early modern humans and Neanderthals: interview

A team of scientists created a new method to measure the complexity of the adhesive production process by Neanderthals in Europe and early modern humans in Africa.

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis were a species of the genus Homo that lived in Eurasia approximately 400,000 years ago, until their extinction about 40,000 years ago.

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Named after the Neander valley in Germany where its remains were initially discovered, this species seems to have been the first capable of transforming a material. Specifically, they crafted adhesives using tar extracted from the birch tree, native to Eurasia.

Homo sapiens in Africa, on the other hand, would have been able to produce adhesives some 70,000 years ago.

We spoke with Sebastián Fajardo, a Colombian researcher who participated in the study at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, investigating how early modern humans and Neanderthals used and developed adhesive technology.

An anthropologist from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and PhD in archaeology from the University of Pittsburgh, Sebastián Fajardo, is currently working as a computational anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Research in Computer Science at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands.

In this interview, which you can watch on video at the top of the page, Sebastián tells us about the research process and the most interesting findings from the nearly four-year study.

You and the research group you are part of have been investigating Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens). Could you tell us about the anatomic, social and technological differences between these two groups and where they lived?

We could summarize the answer in that Neanderthals were the first humans to be located in Europe, as compared to Homo sapiens, who started first in Africa and then moved to other parts of Asia and Europe.

Neanderthals probably had a more robust physique, from what we know from the remains.

What we have been finding is that the technologies they had, while not exactly the same, were more or less at the same level. Both groups also engaged in the production of art.

Neanderthal populations probably formed smaller groups compared to the social groups made by humans [Homo sapiens].

I think, broadly speaking, those would be the main differences.

In 2019 the project, led by Professor Geeske Langejans, started. What was the goal and what is the status of the project?

The project was developed at Delft University. The goal was to create a new method to measure the complexity of technologies developed in the past, because we wanted to compare how difficult it was to conduct certain technological processes.

Specifically, we wanted to compare adhesive technologies that Neanderthals and early humans produced. Adhesives were produced from the birch tree in Europe, as well as from other plants in Africa.

The project is now coming to its last year and we are presenting the results and conclusions of the work we did during the last four years.

Why is there a need for a new method to measure process complexity for adhesives?

The need has to do with the fact that, to date, we were thinking about technology in terms of whether it was complex or simple. But we weren’t really thinking about how much difficulty or what resources we were using as humans to develop those technologies or to produce them.

I mean the resources of our mind, our social resources, and what kind of skills we used to produce a new technology.

We needed to measure that in some way to go a little bit further than saying “this is a simple technology and this is a complex technology”, and rather break down much more the different aspects that a technology has and the way it is produced.

For that we needed a model, which is the easiest way in which one can measure certain aspects of a process.

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Why did you focus on ancient adhesives?

That’s a very interesting question. The focus was because adhesives are one of the first materials produced by humans —Neanderthals about 200,000 years ago and humans probably 70,000 years ago.

By this I mean that birch tar, specifically, is a material that comes out of a tree, but it is not really a resin, a wax, or an exudate that the tree produces.

Birch tar can be obtained through a technological process. Neanderthals took the tree and turned it into an adhesive in a way that is not very direct, as with technologies like lithic tools, where you simply change the shape of a material that already exists, the rock itself.

Instead, in this process, Neanderthals changed the chemical composition of natural resource, as we see it on a day-to-day basis, to make a different material and use it.

What can be inferred from these adhesives and the products in which they were used about the societies that created them?

We think of producing a technology or a technology itself as something that allows humans to solve a problem. What we see is that early modern humans and Neanderthals may have had several options for solving their problems.

One option was to solve the problems on their own, that is, to produce the technology with individual capabilities, but another very possible solution was to work in a group.

Working with other people probably happened. If it did, it happened when they needed to produce very large quantities of an adhesive material. We would have to wait for more archaeological evidence to see that, but what we see is that both processes were possible.

And the interesting thing about this is that both ways of working were very complex, that is, working alone or working in a team required different cognitive skills. It is possible that both options were already being implemented in the past.

But we have to wait for new studies, more archaeological remains, and more evidence about this to reach more definitive conclusions.

Research has focused on Europe and Africa, but what is known about the Americas?

We know about the use of rubber, which is much later. It occurred when societies had already formed larger groups and sedentary societies.

We especially have evidence of the use of rubber in the area of Mexico, in Central America, where it was very important.

On the other hand, a very interesting study was recently published on how certain archaeological sites in the Amazon are correlated with the more dominant vegetation that exists today in that region.

This has suggested to researchers that much of what we see today of the Amazon forest is a transformation and an environment created by the first humans that inhabited the Amazon.

And, within that, one of the species is the rubber tree. It is a fairly common plant in the Amazon. It seems that this predominance was built, also, in an interaction with human beings.

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