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New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal
ThinkComp writes "In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus that has held for decades, recent research suggests that the traditional conception of Neanderthals being "stupider" than Homo sapiens may in fact be misleading. As articles about the research findings state, 'early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.' The data used in the study is available on-line along with a visual description of the process used."
We have known for a long time that Neanderthal had a larger brain than modern human and a sophisticated culture, including burial rites. There was no scientific consensus that Neandethal was stupid.
that's because Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens are the same species!
The conclusions of this study are not exactly news. It's been known for some time that early homo sapiens tools were no more advanced than Neanderthal tools. But at some point, there was an explosion of creativity and inventiveness in modern man that the Neanderthals could not equal, probably due to home sapiens having superior language skills and capabilities, and the ability to share and communicate ideas in ways the Neanderthals could not. Modern man then evolved superior cultures and technologies that surpassed the Neanderthals.
One on one, raised without the benefit of language and culture, a modern man would probably be no brighter, and in fact considerably physically weaker, than a Neanderthal. But collectively, Neanderthals were no match for modern men with their more advanced languages, societies, and weapons.
That's not really analogous at all. Sticks may very well be the optimum way of getting insects out of nests. But in the case of more advanced tool kits, there are certainly better kinds of tools for hunting and dismembering. The difference between the Paleolithic and Neolithic tool kits is substantial. The later stone tool kits used by modern humans included barbed fish hooks, spearheads and the like, innovations that simply did not exist among bipedal hominids. More importantly, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that a tool kit might hang around during the Paleolithic with little or no change, the Neolithic saw radical innovations at a relatively fast pace.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No one in Anthropology has seriously considered Neanderthals stupid for the last 30-40 years. The first Neanderthal skeleton was of an old, very arthritic male, hence the bowed posture and unlockable knees.
semantics are everything!
[citation needed]
the great global swindle the 'documentary' has been debunked repeatedly, hell channel4 even got a bitchslap from OFCOM (equivilent of fcc). And its not like scientists are rich powerful men that can manipulate the media like the neocons
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
The difference with man is that we kill eachother on a massive scale. The video you linked showed nothing but Buffalo protecting their own, Lions trying to eat them, and Crocodiles trying to eat everything else. This is no different than us eating a hamburger.
I can only think of a couple of other species that are as warlike as homo sapiens, and that's bacteria or virii. Many animals are territorial and will kill their own. But we have taken it to an entirely new level.
OFCOM ruled that channel4 was "unfair in its treatment of the IPCC and leading scientists..." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/ofcom.channel4?gusrc=rss&feed=media and "it was in breach of due impartiality...". It did not rule that the program had materially misled the audience. So, I'm sorry, the OFCOM ruling does not debunk "The Great Global Warming Swindle".
While scientists may not be "rich powerful men who can manipulate the media", many of the public voices for global warming alarmism are (not all persons who advocate for action against global warming are alarmists, but many of the most prominent one's are. for example, Al Gore).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
A lot of scientific consensus held by mainstream scientists is often no longer supported by evidence and needs to be debunked. As Max Planck said:"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A troll's silicon brain (i.e. bunch of rocks) just overclocks better when cooled properly.
Actually we don't know that Homo Sapiens hunted down Neanderthals either.
Warfare only appeared in Homo Sapiens around the time we discovered bows and arrows, about 20,000 years ago, in Africa. It's hard to tell if that was cause or effect or just a spurious correlation, but suddenly we get mass graves of people with arrow heads embedded in their bones and cave paintings of groups of archers shooting at each other.
At any rate:
1. There is no evidence of warfare before that. Neither in Homo Sapiens, nor in Neanderthals.
2. By the time missile weapons arrived in Europe, the Neanderthals were going extinct on their own. The long decline in numbers and area had happened before that.
Vengeful we may be, but killing someone in melee is actually an extremely traumatic thing. Unless you're a sociopath, you're still wired like an animal to not kill members of the same species. Overcoming that is very traumatic. The Romans for example recognized that and rotated the rows of a legion, so the soldiers would get some time to recover in the middle of a fight. Ranged killing seems to actually be easier, and it puts a wall of plausible deniability between you and the victim. Maybe it wasn't your arrow that killed that guy, after all.
From there we learned to manipulate people and use group-think to make them kill each other even in melee. But it took an awfully long time to get there, and the Neanderthals were already extinct by then.
Furthermore, Neanderthals were, if you'll pardon the bad WoW metaphors, all survival-spec hunters. Melee hunters. _Everyone_ hunted with spears, including the women. And they seemed pretty capable to cooperate in a group. Plus, see that thing about using the women too. If someone actually managed to start a war back then between a tribe of Homo Sapiens and one of Neanderthals, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter would have had the upper hand.
Exactly why they went extinct... now that's still a good question.
One theory was that they were strictly carnivore and their prey was going extinct due to both climate change _and_ over-hunting. Another one is that they just couldn't compete with us. The Homo Sapiens were hunters _and_ gatherers, and could survive and continue hunting a species into extinction even past the point where predator-prey balance would normally allow the prey to rebound. The Neanderthals relying only on that prey, would have been royally shafted.
Me, I'm wonder if we didn't kill them sexually, so to speak. Consider the following:
A. See, one way to get a species of, say, insects extinct, is to release lots and lots of sterile males. If enough females of that species mate with those, the population drops very fast.
B. There seem to be _no_ genes we inherited from Neanderthals. Considering that the areas for us and them overlapped for thousands of years, I find it unlikely that _no_ horny male of one species wouldn't find a female of the other species attractive enough, or viceversa. I mean, so they were short and stout lasses with sloped foreheads. A lot of people screw worse looking women nowadays. And conversely going to the pub and getting laid by a neanderthal is still a tradition for some girls ;)
It is very likely that the offspring of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals were either sterile or non-viable. Plenty of closely related species produce sterile offspring when crossed. E.g., lion and tiger, horse and donkey, etc.
C. The sterile case is actually the funniest, because it may not be immediately obvious that it's a dead end. And in a lot of species such hybrids are bigger and stronger (a liger is twice the weight of a tiger, for example), so for a primitive sentient species it may even look like giving your children more chances of survival that way.
D. Both species had a chronic shortage of women, due to a life expectancy disparity. Death in birth or from resulting complications took a heavy toll.
So _if_ they were desirable enough (e.g., because Homo Sapiens tribes
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.