In the beginning, the primordial ooze sat right on the surface of the earth in pools of black, tar-like gunk. It was tar, and it was gunk. It is bitumen. It was so easy to get at that the Cree Indians spooned it off the ground, out of puddles, and coated their wooden canoes with the tar, thus waterproofing their rides. It is not quite that simple to harvest the bitumen in the 21st century and certainly not as easy to capture as the sweet crude that explodes out of the ground in the Middle East.
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