Kind: captions
Language: en
this is the world's oldest known
synthetic
material it makes neanderthals and not
us the inventors of perhaps the first
industrial
[Music]
process but How Could An allegedly
primitive species have done this
to find out more will Ro Brooks decides
to mount an experiment with a colleague
friederick
Palmer they will try to replicate the
Neanderthal technique of pitch
extraction a complex process called dry
distillation crucially they'll use only
the materials available to neanderthals
250,000 years
ago an upturned animal skull to catch
the pitch
a small Stone on which the pitch would
condense some rolls of birch bark the
source of the pitch and a layer of Ash
to exclude oxygen and prevent the bark
from
[Music]
burning Ro Brooks and Palmer need to
heat the bark to 400°
Centigrade any less and it won't produce
pitch anymore and it will simply
[Music]
burn after 8 hours any pitch should have
condensed on the stone within the skull
[Music]
that's yeah yeah oh look at
that yeah that's a bit
dry today Ro Brooks and Palmer managed
to extract only a tiny smear of
pitch that's not
much they are on the right track but it
isn't nearly enough to glue a spearhead
to a shaft as the Neanderthals did
it seems this experiment is on too small
a scale to produce enough
pitch neanderthals must have figured out
how to scale up the technique in a way
we haven't yet
reproduced however they managed it the
Neanderthals had evidently mastered a
complex thermal process