Slashdot Mirror
The Neanderthal's Necklace
The Neanderthal's Necklace is an engrossing and informative introduction to the Neanderthals, setting them in the context of human evolution and prehistory more generally, and of broader ecological and environmental history. In it Luis Arsuaga touches on anatomy, demographics, systematics, evolutionary psychology, philosophy of mind, and more, but he does so sensibly, not trying to cram in too much and not getting distracted from his basic subject. He does focus on Spain and to a lesser extent on his own digs - he is one of Europe's leading paleoanthropologists - but while his passion for his subject is clear, The Neanderthal's Necklace never becomes autobiographical.
The first two chapters are an account of early human prehistory: the other apes, the various species of Australopithecus and Homo, early toolmaking, and so forth. This includes a brief introduction to systematics. Chapter three continues this with an account of the evolution of the Neanderthals in Europe and our ancestors in Africa, and an overview of their comparative anatomy and morphology.
Two chapters describe the environment in which this happened, presenting a history of the flora, fauna, geology and climate of Spain (and in less detail of Europe) over the last few hundred thousand years. Here Luis Arsuaga brings to life the mountains and forests of Spain, and the cave bears, mammoths, reindeer, and other animals that inhabited them. With bears and hibernation as the link, he goes on to consider the problem of finding enough to eat in this environment, especially in glacial periods. He looks at foraging and hunting (or scavenging) as sources of food, at the development of hunting technology, and at the extinction of many species. A chapter on demographics and life histories then explains how the archaeological record is used to estimate population densities, life expectancies, and so forth for both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.
Luis Arsuaga includes just a little bit of abstract philosophy of mind in an overview of debates over consciousness, sentience, language, and their evolutionary origins; he argues that Neanderthals had language and self-awareness, but lacked our more advanced symbolic abilities and vocal anatomy; evidence for "funerals" or other ritual behaviours is not conclusive. And he reconstructs the contact between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, with the latter's superior tools and social organisation giving them an edge in the last glaciation, and the last Neanderthals living in southern Spain. A brief final chapter recapitulates the story and glances at what came next, at agriculture and domestication.
Only a few rough sketches, graphs and maps are included in The Neanderthal's Necklace: a decent map of Spain is probably the major omission for non-Spanish readers. The publisher of this translation has, rather annoyingly, converted all the units from metric to Imperial, though the subject is surely scientific enough to warrant having left them. And a digression explaining the "grandmother" theory of menopause seems awkwardly "tacked on". Otherwise, there is not much to fault - this is a superb piece of popular science, one that does justice to its fascinating subject.
If you enjoyed this review, you might like to check out Danny's other paleoanthropology and popular science reviews. You can purchase The Neanderthal's Necklace from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Just to clear this up a bit, and yes I was an anthro major...
There's still a LOT of debate in the anthropological/archaeological community about the evolution tree of modern humans. Originally it was thought that it was a simple straight line of evolution from ape like 'missing links' to modern humans.
These days there's a lot more in the middle there.
Neanderthals may or may not be related to modern humans, as the time period when they existed has a very jumbled fossil record. There are at least 3 distinct human-like species (or sub species) from this era, and as one poster already refered to, they may have been able to interbreed.
There's way too much going on still in trying to sort this all out, so for now just be happy thinking that these may or may not be humanity's ancestors.
Because we don't know the truth yet.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
It is comenly acepted that neanderthals where a branch in the family tree that produced Homo Sapiens. Thay apear to have been a more docile race then cro magnon and ether where driven to extiction by cro magnon or interbread, creating modern man and explaining why some people look like "cave men".
If you want to find out more you could look at Neanderthals and Modern Humans. It explains who neanderthals where and what posibly hapened to them.
A while back, an article in the journal Nature indicated that labs in Germany and the US isolated small fragments of DNA from Neanderthal bones. These indicated that the differences between Neanderthal sequences and the equivalent sequence in modern humans is greater than the difference among various populations of modern humans. They interpreted this to indicate that Neanderthals had branched off the the population of homo-like species well in advance of the development of modern humans, and thus that they compromised a separate species, with no indication of interbreeding with modern humans.
I'm sure those who disagree could give a cogent counter argument, but i don't work on evolution, so i can't.
Cheers,
Jay
______ This mind intentionally left blank.
Look again. M-W has both pronunciations.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Religion is a brittle, petrified structure that requires blind faith in its one underlying assumption. It all falls apart if that one underlying assumption is allowed to be questioned
Depends who you talk to.. What's wrong with questioning God? Who says you cannot? Sure, a lot of churches and church people don't want to question it, but the Bible actually says that you are supposed to have faith based on knowledge.
- Neandertals no longer exist, and their distinguishing physical characteristics (projecting midface, occipital bun, small mastoid processes) no longer appear at appreciable frequencies in recent people. However, some Neandertal characteristics (horizontal-oval mandibular foramen, suprainiac fossa, lambdoidal flattening) do occur in the Europeans who directly follow Neandertals, indicating to many scientists that their genes were swamped by immigration from outside Europe, rather than being replaced by it.
- Neandertal mtDNA sequences from ancient bones lie as an outgroup to those of recent people. To many scientists this is evidence of their distinctiveness. However, their mtDNA does not differ from that of living people to the extent that chimpanzee subspecies differ from each other, and the evolutionary pattern of mtDNA in living people may reflect recent selection on the molecule rather than the spread of a distinct non-Neandertal people.
- Neandertals are different from their contemporaries and distinguishable by many anatomical criteria, interpreted by some scientists as evidence they did not interbreed with their contemporaries. However, the level of differences has not been shown to indicate a great genetic difference (for example greater than that among living human geographic groups), and it is clear that these differences could have arisen even without any isolation of Pleistocene Europe.
So for these reasons, the debate about Neandertal relationships continues.The bone structure of Neanderthals is actually just like the structure of a normal human being with Vitamin D deficiency. There is a group of people (probably on a Pacific island, though I don't remember exactly) with the same problem. They look like Neanderthals.
That is not true. All the vitaim D deficiency in the world will not give you a 40% larger cranium, or any of the other distinguishing features of Neanderthals.
Here we go again. Can't someone put their arrogance aside and make a post that doesn't insult someone?
What, did he threaten you somehow? Are you so untrusting of your evolutionary theory that you can't just write a refutation, you have to call people names and insult their faith?
Asshole.