Another species of humans has been demonstrated by German scientists to possess excellent working memory, mental flexibility, high adaptability, and skilled craftsmanship dating back over 50,000 years.
The findings from the Neanderthal hunter-gatherers—an extinct species belonging to the same genus (Homo) as us—found in the Swabian Alps in southwestern Germany have shocked the scientific community.
Stunning evidence of how another human species crafted tools based on a unified industrial process – (Photo: PLOS ONE)
A new study from the University of Tübingen, recently published in the scientific journal Plos One, reveals that between 45,000 and 52,000 years ago, this group of hunters had a meticulous and organized production process for hunting and labor tools.
The remnants found in the area indicate that they organized their hunting teams very systematically. They had “workshops” that produced blades, scrapers, and various hunting and food processing tools from stone and bone, which were consistent in their characteristics. A “bone workshop” specifically for leatherworking was also discovered.
They also had a “professional” recycling process for hard-to-extract materials like flint: flint pieces were reworked each time their tool became damaged, resulting in another useful tool until it was no longer usable.
According to Ancient Origins, this shocked the research team because to recycle tools, they needed a set of criteria to assess the damage to the tools, identify mineral weaknesses, and predict how the tool would break when chipped, creating a systematic recycling process.
Tools of the Neanderthals – (Photo: PLOS ONE).
The study was based on numerous artifacts excavated from the site since the 1930s, after the site was discovered by local amateur archaeologist Hermann Mohn in 1928.
These findings once again show that Neanderthals were not primitive. They had a remarkable civilization and may have even been ahead of us. This period also belongs to the Paleolithic era of Homo sapiens, but the artifacts left by our direct ancestors were not as “sophisticated” as theirs.
Earlier research has demonstrated that Neanderthals developed skills in fiber weaving and net making even before us—around 44,000 years ago.
In this study, scientists concluded that this other human species had “branched into the future.”
