Those Neanderthals are beginning to look very much like humans and not so much like grunts as the great and the good thought not so many years ago. The story is at a number of links including https://phys.org/news/2026-05-neanderthal-dentists-stone-drills-cavities.html …. Neanderthals from the Chagyrskaya Cave in SW Siberia, going back between 60 and 70 thousand years ago, were able to treat tooth infections – by removing decayed parts of the teeth. They did this with a very thin stone drill. Modern dentists use metal drill pieces but Neanderthals had only stone to utilise for the same job. It required manual dexterity, planning and foresight, and mind over application. Presumably the process hurt but patients survived – much as modern people survive a dentist drilling into a tooth with live nerve endings. The Russian excavators and the scientists working on the skull and teeth experimented on a modern tooth and that of two teeth from earlier in the Holocene. They proved that a thin stone drill could reproduce the same kind of hole as in the Neanderthal tooth. The tool was capable of rapid removal of decayed dental tissue. Curing debilitating tooth ache.
They also say that the group of Neanderthals in question, located in SW Siberia, had migrated into that region between 60 and 70 thousand years ago. Migrating from central and eastern Europe. This appears to reflect another migration in response to natural disaster – the so called 70,000 years ago event.
In the same generalised vane we have hunter gatherers and their containers – at https://phys.org/news/2026-05-history-ancient-technology-hundreds-thousands.html … containers were used to carry food and tools, we may imagine – and water. Yet, it has been a largely neglected fact of life as far as mobile hunter gatherers are concerned. Neolithic people had containers of all sorts for a variety of tasks. Hunter gatherers probably used material that has not survived in the archaeological record. Containers must have been used when travelling, or bringing water from a spring to their place of abode, and collecting berries and roots and tubers etc. Now, a group of scientists have trawled through thousands of excavation reports and discovered 700 of them in use by hunter gatherers. These include a stone lamp, to see in the dark, hollowed out shells, as well as containers painted on rock art. Containers allowed stone age people to carry food and water, as well as infants, as an example. Containers would have been vital for human mobility.