Evidence for Creationism and Against Evolution

[Lief Erikson]

Jerseydevil, did you read the article you posted?

From the article
Rawhide is an amazing material. I even created a blade from it with a serrated edge and used it to cut a tomato. It can be used in the construction of shields, armor, boats, masks, drums, and all manner of things (not forgetting that it can also be tanned and made into leather), and as a binding is very strong and useful in both construction and repair.

However, most fascinating from an archaeological perspective is that it is virtually invisible in the archaeological record. Not only time and decay play a role here in consideration of human artifacts. Rawhide is so irresistible to dogs that anything discarded (and some things no doubt even before they were willingly discarded) would have been made short work of by camp or wild dogs.

But even if rawhide artifacts shone forth from the archaeological record as brightly as stone, I doubt, based on the results of this experiment, that we would find skin pots that had been used for cooking over a fire. Neandertals and other hunter-gatherers had better things to do with their time.

Further information from the article
The pots were suspended over a fire from a tripod constructed of bamboo. While Auel's Neandertals wouldn't have had access to this material, it is strong and readily available when scavenging around a garden centre, since such poles are used as supports for plants. The circular thongs on the pot were attached to leather thongs which in turn were attached to a wire ring with a hook on it (another material Neandertals wouldn't have had access to, but since the home of my sister and her partner is on the site of the garden centre, coat hangers were easy to scavenge as well).

You see, your article was describing Neanderthal cooking techniques, and the precision and difficulty of such achievement. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't as intelligent as humans, but plainly they were fairly close to us, to have such developed methods of cooking, construction of tools and making of recipes. They weren't too far from our brains, as your article shows.