The Mystery of How Neanderthals Got Fire
Fifty-thousand-year-old tools suggest that modern humans weren't prehistory's only pyros.
by Sarah Zhang
Jul 19, 2018
2 minutes
The first step to re-creating 50,000-year-old technology is to collect a bunch of rocks. So began Andrew Sorensen’s plan to study a great mystery in archaeology: how Neanderthals controlled fire.
Sorensen, an archeologist at Leiden University, collected a special kind of rock called flint off the beaches of England. If you hit it in just the right ways, flint will break to expose sharp edges that can
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