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The world’s first industrial process likely began with the Neanderthals. In this video, watch as NOVA reenacts the Neanderthal technique of pitch extraction through a complex called dry distillation.

This “superglue” suggests Neanderthals weren’t as primitive as once thought.

Neanderthal Superglue

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<div class="rich-text">
	Neanderthals devised what is thought to be the world's first known industrial process. In this video, watch as NOVA attempts to recreate the Neanderthal technique of pitch extraction through a complex process known as dry distillation.
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This "superglue" suggests Neanderthals weren't as primitive as once thought.

<div class="rich-text">This "superglue" suggests Neanderthals weren't as primitive as once thought.</div>

Evolution

<div class="rich-text"><h3>
 Decoding Neanderthals
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 PBS Airdate: January 9, 2013



 NARRATOR:
 
 This is the world's oldest-known synthetic material. It makes Neanderthals, and not us, the inventors of perhaps the first industrial process. But how could an allegedly primitive species have done this?


 To find out more, Wil Roebroeks decides to mount an experiment with a colleague, Friedrich 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 burning.


 Roebroeks and Palmer need to heat the bark to 400 degrees centigrade. Any less, and it won't produce pitch; any more, and it will simply burn.


 After eight hours, any pitch should have condensed on the stone within the skull. Today, Roebroeks and Palmer manage to extract only a tiny smear of pitch. They are on the right track, but it isn't nearly enough to glue a spearhead to a shaft, as the Neanderthals did.



 FRIEDRICH PALMER:
 
 It's sticky.



 WIL ROEBROEKS:
 
 It's not much. It's very small quantities.



 NARRATOR:
 
 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.
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