Abstract

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.

Highlights

  • Whether the Neanderthal archaeological record testifies to the kind of symbolic behaviours that are considered typical for ‘modern’ humans is a highly debated topic within palaeoanthropology, with the use of coloured materials such as ochres and manganese oxides one of the possible indicators of such behaviours[1,2]

  • We report here on a series of compositional analyses, combustion experiments and thermo-gravimetric measurements for three commercial manganese dioxide grades, a barium manganese oxide compositionally similar to materials found in the Dordogne region and three black manganese oxide blocs from a Neanderthal context at the Pech-de-l’Azé I site in the Dordogne region of south-western France

  • The three blocs from the excavation spoil at Pech-de-l’Azé I used in the combustion experiments were from the same compositional population as blocs from archaeological contexts; their combustion behaviour is probably representative of the behaviour of all the blocs except PAI-G8-1100, but this remains to be tested

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Summary

Introduction

Whether the Neanderthal archaeological record testifies to the kind of symbolic behaviours that are considered typical for ‘modern’ humans is a highly debated topic within palaeoanthropology, with the use of coloured materials such as ochres and manganese oxides one of the possible indicators of such behaviours[1,2]. Several Mousterian and Châtelperronian sites in France have yielded large numbers of small black blocs (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Information 1) and the usual interpretation is that these are manganese oxides collected for their colouring properties, perhaps for body decoration and potentially for social communication and symbolic expression[3,4,5,6,7]. The use of such carbon-rich materials for body decoration is documented in the ethnographic literature[15] In contrast to these fire residues, manganese oxides would have had to have been sourced and transported, at considerably higher costs. Pech-de-l’Azé I is not unique and Table 1 in Supplementary Information 1 lists other Mousterian sites in France that are reported to have produced ‘manganese ore’ blocs and preserve evidence of combustion features

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