Heyes Peter J, Anastasakis Konstantinos, de Jong Wiebren, van Hoesel Annelies, Roebroeks Wil, Soressi Marie
Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Einsteinweg 2, 2333CC Leiden The Netherlands.
3mE Process and Energy, Delft University of Technology, Leeghwaterstraat 39, 2628CB, Delft, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2016 Feb 29;6:22159. doi: 10.1038/srep22159.
Several Mousterian sites in France have yielded large numbers of small black blocs. The usual interpretation is that these 'manganese oxides' were collected for their colouring properties and used in body decoration, potentially for symbolic expression. Neanderthals habitually used fire and if they needed black material for decoration, soot and charcoal were readily available, whereas obtaining manganese oxides would have incurred considerably higher costs. Compositional analyses lead us to infer that late Neanderthals at Pech-de-l'Azé I were deliberately selecting manganese dioxide. Combustion experiments and thermo-gravimetric measurements demonstrate that manganese dioxide reduces wood's auto-ignition temperature and substantially increases the rate of char combustion, leading us to conclude that the most beneficial use for manganese dioxide was in fire-making. With archaeological evidence for fire places and the conversion of the manganese dioxide to powder, we argue that Neanderthals at Pech-de-l'Azé I used manganese dioxide in fire-making and produced fire on demand.
法国的几个莫斯特文化遗址出土了大量黑色小石块。通常的解释是，这些“锰氧化物”因其着色特性而被收集，并用于身体装饰，可能用于象征表达。尼安德特人习惯用火，如果他们需要黑色材料用于装饰，烟灰和木炭很容易获得，而获取锰氧化物的成本要高得多。成分分析使我们推断，佩什德阿泽I号遗址的晚期尼安德特人在刻意挑选二氧化锰。燃烧实验和热重测量表明，二氧化锰降低了木材的自燃温度，并大幅提高了焦炭燃烧的速度，这使我们得出结论，二氧化锰最有益的用途是生火。有证据表明当时有壁炉，而且二氧化锰被转化成了粉末，我们认为佩什德阿泽I号遗址的尼安德特人在生火时使用了二氧化锰，并能按需生火。
