Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, 2628CD, The Netherlands.
Department of Chemical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, 2629HZ, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2023 Sep 7;13(1):14727. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-41898-5.
The intentional production of birch bark tar by European Neanderthals as early as 190,000 years ago plays an important role in discussions about the technological and behavioural complexity of Pleistocene hominins. However, research is hampered because it is currently unknown how Neanderthals were producing birch tar. There are several different techniques that could have been employed, but these differ in their apparent production complexity, time and resource efficiency. Identifying production processes in the archaeological record is therefore paramount for furthering research on the technical behavioural repertoire. Organic biomarkers, identified with Gas Chromatograph-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), have been used to identify possible production processes during the Neolithic. Here we test whether these biomarkers can also distinguish Palaeolithic (aceramic) tar production methods. We produced tar using five different methods and analysed their biomolecular composition with GC-MS. Our results show that the biomarkers used to distinguish Neolithic tar production strategies using ceramic technology cannot be reliably used to identify tar production processes using aceramic Palaeolithic techniques. More experimentation is required to produce a larger reference library of different tars for future comparisons. To achieve this, complete GC-MS datasets must also be made publicly available, as we have done with our data.
欧洲尼安德特人早在 19 万年前就有意生产桦树皮焦油，这在讨论更新世人类的技术和行为复杂性方面发挥了重要作用。然而，由于目前尚不清楚尼安德特人是如何生产桦焦油的，因此研究受到了阻碍。有几种不同的技术可能已经被使用，但这些技术在明显的生产复杂性、时间和资源效率上有所不同。因此，在考古记录中识别生产工艺对于进一步研究技术行为能力至关重要。通过气相色谱-质谱联用仪（GC-MS）鉴定出的有机生物标志物已被用于鉴定新石器时代可能的生产工艺。在这里，我们测试了这些生物标志物是否也可以区分旧石器时代（无陶器）焦油的生产方法。我们使用五种不同的方法生产焦油，并使用 GC-MS 分析它们的生物分子组成。我们的结果表明，用于区分使用陶瓷技术的新石器时代焦油生产策略的生物标志物不能可靠地用于识别使用无陶器的旧石器时代技术的焦油生产过程。需要进行更多的实验来为未来的比较生成一个更大的不同焦油的参考库。为此，我们必须像我们所做的那样，公开提供完整的 GC-MS 数据集。
