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Archaeologists made bonfires using manganese oxide, which was often found in Neanderthal campsites, writes Success in UA.
This was done in order to test the hypothesis that the Neanderthals used this chemical compound precisely for kindling a fire, and not as a pigment. They managed to discover that the addition of manganese oxide to tinder would have significantly reduced the time and energy needed to start a fire and this could be a technological innovation of the Neanderthals, reports nauka.ua.
Previous studies have already shown that the addition of manganese oxide MnO2 to beech wood lowered its ignition temperature. To test this experimentally, archaeologists mixed powdered manganese oxide with various types of tin that were common in northwestern Europe during the Middle Paleolithic, including poplar wood, cattail straw, and tin fungi.
The experiments were carried out using only those materials that would have been available to Neanderthals, that is, the fire was kindled using flint and pyrite cresal. Compared to tinder, to which manganese oxide was not added, the addition of this compound doubled both the accuracy and the speed of ignition of the hearth. Adding crushed pyrite to the tinder also improved ignition, but the researchers hypothesized that manganese oxide was more readily available to Neanderthals and was more commonly used to start the fire.
