4 September 2017 - birch pitch

In the news: Neanderthals made birch pitch. Many are unimpressed; the barista makes latte art. Some are moderately impressed, seeing glue as a smart thing to invent; Donald Trump is not that clever. I am quite impressed. Birch pitch is not useful in itself, it is useful only to make other tools—it is a metatool, like advertising, and inventing it proves capacity for the recursive reasoning that underlies language and civilization itself. All that the Neanderthals lacked to form a modern civilization was a large enough population to advertise to.