[Ice Age] TL0 Gadgeteers and Civilization-Building

[whswhs]

Jim Kjelgaard wrote a novel about a young man in the Paleolithic cast out of his tribe (he ended up with a young woman who wasn't able to travel and was left behind when the tribe moved)—Fire-Hunter. His character wasn't a Neanderthal, but he clearly fit into this genre: if I recall correctly, in the course of the novel he went from spears to woomeras to bows and arrows. There's a source of inspiration.

There was also Johannes V. Jensen's Fire and Ice, written even earlier, which has one character who masters fire and another who learns to live in an arctic environment. Jensen isn't well known in the United States but he won the 1944 Literature Nobel Prize.

Anyway, in addition to the things Fred mentions, there is fire, a profoundly important technology. There are all sorts of things you can do with it that still count as TL0: making ceramics, smoking meat for storage, burning off woodland and raking the ashes onto a central patch to manufacture high-fertility soil.

I would also mention string; Elizabeth Wayland Barber argues that its invention was profoundly important, for everything from hunting to courtship (the string skirt could be taken as giving a +1 bonus to Sex Appeal).