24 horas en la Edad de Piedra: no durarías ni una

35,000 years ago, you needed 4,000 calories a day just to avoid freezing. The bone marrow in a horse femur has more calories than a chocolate bar. Discover how a piece of wood could turn your arm into a catapult reaching speeds of 150 km/h, why someone spent 400 hours carving a useless object, and what all this has to do with the extinction of the Neanderthals. Upper Pleistocene, Aurignacian culture. You are 28 years old, 1.81 meters tall, and weigh 74 kilos—taller than the current average Spaniard. You manufacture birch glue at 400 degrees Celsius, monitoring the temperature by the color of the smoke. Your clothes are sewn with 40,000-year-old bone needles, with seams that seal out the cold better than many modern jackets. A spear thrower extends your arm and fires projectiles at 150 km/h. Your flint knife produces 2 meters of cutting edge from a single block—Neanderthals managed 15 centimeters. And at night, someone plays a flute made from a vulture bone, the oldest musical instrument in the world. But what truly separated your species from the Neanderthals wasn't strength or tools: it was the capacity to believe in things that don't exist. If you could travel back 35,000 years, what would be the first thing you'd miss? #stoneage #paleolithic #prehistory #aurignacian #35000years #survival #neanderthals #homosapiens #hunting #spearthrower #atlatl WHAT I READ Dale Guthrie — The Nature of Paleolithic Art (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Analysis of the mammoth steppe ecosystem and the relationship between art and survival in the Pleistocene. Steven Mithen — The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames & Hudson, 1996). The theory of cognitive fluidity: how the human mind began to combine separate domains of knowledge. Nicolas Conard — "New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany" (Nature, 2009). Publication of the Hohle Fels flute, the oldest musical instrument with reliable dating. Patrick Schmidt et al. — "Birch tar production does not prove Neanderthal behavioral complexity" (PNAS, 2019). Analysis of the birch tar production process and the temperatures required. Erik Trinkaus — The Shanidar Neanderthals (Academic Press, 1983). Paleopathology of Paleolithic skeletons: fracture patterns and evidence of social care. Robin Dunbar — Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Harvard University Press, 1996). Music and language as technologies of social bonding in large human groups.