Stone age superglue!

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By Gareth Branwyn
Posted 2009/05/18 @ 4:45 pm
Category Science

From National Geographic:

Ancient people in what is now South Africa whipped up a glue of powdered red ochre and acacia-tree gum to keep their tools (above, a replicated tool with adhesive made by scientists) intact, a May 2009 study says.

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3 Responses to Stone age superglue!

Sean Michael Ragan on May 19th, 2009 at 12:10 pm said:

I’m gonna make some of this and see how well it works. It would be pretty incredible if you can make a glue that would work well enough to bind axeheads to handles by mixing just two natural materials.

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Lawrence on May 24th, 2009 at 6:51 am said:

It could well have been coincidence that some gum from an Acacia tree (giraffes love these leaves) was dripping onto the soil beneath (containing red ochre) mixed with some stones lying around and became stuck together over time. Some lucky ancient hunter was wandering along, saw the mix and went: “Mmmm … that’s interesting!” What’s the point of harvesting gums from various trees and trying out with different soil mixes. Better be out hunting, instead.

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Sean Michael Ragan on June 2nd, 2009 at 11:31 am said:

The process used by these scientists is described in great detail here:

http://witsetd.wits.ac.za:8080/dspace/bitstream/123456789/1757/2/Preliminaries2.pdf

Be warned, it’s a 160 page .pdf, but if you’re interested in this it’s got all the detail you need.

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