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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."
Now what am I supposed to call my brother-in-law?
So easy a caveman can do it.
This is refuted by the discussions on this board. There are stupid neanderthals posting here every day!
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.
Netcraft confirms it: the Neanderthal is dead!
It's pretty simple. They weren't aggressive enough and we wiped them out through brute force like we do everything else that's different.
Big shock.
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
That's stoned, not stupid :)
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We tend to try to compare individual intelligence but this is probably meaningless. The real reason for our species' success is not that we're individually brilliant, but that we are very good at dividing up large problems to solve collectively. This works thanks to our social instincts: respect for authority, sense of fairness, competitiveness, group belonging, etc. etc. The whole gamut, the reason why we read and post to Slashdot, because we're a social species and bloody good at it.
Neanderthals, larger, individually smarter, were presumably generalists that could do more by themselves but could not compete as well a group of modern humans, when it came to hunting and perhaps fighting.
Of course I'm defining "intelligence" very much in the sense of "how humanity thinks and solves problems". It's easy to claim superiority when one is the species writing history.
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It turns out the the sticks that monkeys use to dig bugs out of trees are no more efficient than the sticks that biologists use to dig bugs out of trees. From this I can conclude that monkeys are equally as smart as humans.
I see an error on thier logic.
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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.
Yes, but Neanderthals open sourced the design of their tools. Unfortunately, the designs are considered not as user-friendly and the better advertised homo sapien tools prevail. The good news is, I just read an article telling me that this is FINALLY The Year of Neanderthal Tools!
No, we really are not that violent, and we are getting more peaceful as time drags on. As a human, the chances of dying in war are very small. In fact, your chances of dying a violent death have been rapidly plummeting as time has moved on. Even our most horrific industrial wars kill vastly fewer people as a percentage of the population than simple day to day tribal conflict.
If you want to compare us against animals, we really don't rate that high. Society wide genocide is pretty common for insects. Other primates are at least as aggressive as us and suffer far more violent deaths. Many animals suffer pretty grievous loses to violent conflict over mating.
The only thing humans have going for them when it comes to the mass slaughter is that we have absolutely blasted our internal social limits on empathy. As a human, you are hard wired to live in a society no big than roughly 400 people. That is the limit of how many faces you can keep track of at a time, a pretty well documented limit of purely egalitarian human societies. Egalitarian tribal societies that get that big inevitably split. Through various methods of division of labor and hierarchies we have slowly been bumping up the size of a viable society. We are now to the point where a few hundred million is a perfectly reasonable size for a society.
France is a great example. This is a society of 60 million people. In general, they feel that they share a common bond and they feel empathy for each other. In general, they trust each other more than they trust others, and they think of each others needs over outsiders. True, one Frenchmen doesnâ(TM)t have as tight of a bond as his fellow country men as two men in a 100 unit tribal society, but it is close enough where they are a clearly distinct society. Just a couple of weeks ago 10 Frenchmen were killed in war (in Afghanistan). That is 0.000016% of the population. Despite this, it was a big deal in France. People acted like their social order had just taken not worthy losses and reacted accordingly.
Hell, take a step back and look at something more âoehorrificâ. 9/11 killed roughly 3000 people. That is 0.001% of the US population. That is 1 in every 100,000 people in the US died. We are talking about a miniscule number of people as compared to the society as a whole, yet despite this, Americans took the losses psychologically like family members had died.
My point is this; our murdering of fellow man has not increased. It has actually dropped, and dropped by a substantial amount. Further, compared to nearly all other species, as a human you are vastly less likely to suffer a violent death. The only thing that makes humans unique, is our empathy. Human empathy has grown and increased to the point where we care about millions and millions of people, rather than three or four around us. In our growing empathy, our old brains hardwired for societies less than 400 people have not kept up. As a result we think that the loss of 1 person in a tribe of 400 is less of a tragedy than the loss of 3000 people in a society of 300 million.
To put it more succinctly, your old monkey brain is fooling you. Humans are remarkably peaceful creature who get more peaceful with time, your old monkey brain just canâ(TM)t grasp that.
Maybe they are. Have faith, and remember you don't get to meta-moderate God.
Only because God doesn't post on Slashdot.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo