birch tar was its own prehistoric “Betadine”
In recent years, the image of the brute Neanderthal has gone fading based on the different discoveries that are being made. Now we know that buried to their dead, who they made art and? they dominated the firebut we also now know that they were the first in the chemical industry to create the world’s first synthetic glue: birch tar. Although under his ingenuity, this can also be a great member of high prehistoric medicine. The new thing we know. Beyond being a great glue, the Neanderthals could have used this tar as a powerful antiseptic to heal wounds and avoid deadly infections, like the ones we have in our home medicine cabinet. This is something that is known thanks to the research published this March in the magazine PLOS One which has tested the effectiveness of this prehistoric material in healing wounds. To ensure that their conclusions were faithful to the reality of the Pleistocene, the team did not limit itself to analyzing modern samples purchased in the laboratory, but rather they replicated Neanderthal extraction methods. How it was done. To do this, they used techniques accessible to the hominids of the time, such as distillation in primitive clay wells and the condensation of birch bark smoke on stone surfaces. Putting it to the test. Once they had this “Neanderthal-style” tar, they pitted it against several common bacterial strains in the laboratory. And the result showed that he had strong antibacterial propertiesbeing especially useful for attacking bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, which is a bacteria that can cause infections in wounds on the skin. And if we go further, in our daily lives we are also ‘putting up’ with it because it is one of the famous ‘superbacteria’ against which we have fewer and fewer antibiotics to act on. More than a band-aid. If you got a cut or wound hunting 100,000 years ago, a simple infection could be a death sentence. This is why the study suggests that Neanderthals, by manipulating birch bark to make their adhesive, probably discovered its medical benefits empirically. Simply by observing that, by putting it on the wound, they saw how it did not start to look bad. That is why we are faced with a discovery that transforms our vision of the technological resources of the Neanderthals, since we now know that the product was a true ‘multipurpose’ product of the time. Its uses. The first of them is as an industrial adhesive to be able to manufacture composite weapons, but also as an antibiotic and antiseptic against cuts, as if it were our precious ‘betadine’ or chlorhexidine. Now a door is also opening to see its use in our daily lives, although there is still a lot of research ahead on the many open fronts to be able to find any substance that can attack bacteria that they are giving us more headaches. Images | Marc Tremblay In Xataka | Manufacturing materials to produce chips in space is not science fiction. It is a very real plan that is already underway