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Researchers Say Neanderthals Created Cave Art
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study that suggests an engraving in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar was made by Neanderthals more than 39,000 years ago. Belying their reputation as the dumb cousins of early modern humans, Neanderthals created cave art, an activity regarded as a major cognitive step in the evolution of humankind, scientists reported on Monday in a paper describing the first discovery of artwork by this extinct species. The discovery is "a major contribution to the redefinition of our perception of Neanderthal culture," said prehistorian William Rendu of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who was not involved in the work. "It is a new and even stronger evidence of the Neanderthal capacity for developing complex symbolic thought" and "abstract expression," abilities long believed exclusive to early modern humans.
We keep going over this, but Modern humans contain the genetics of Neanderthals which means they were not cousins, but ancestors.
Oh yeah and frost prist
its obvious they were playing tic-tac-toe
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I wonder how look it took before the first art critic came into existence.
Those having no Neanderthal genes are so stupid compared to those having Neanderthal genes.
We know that african elephants are capable of painting beuatifull pictures, so it is quite easy to imagine Neanderthals doing that and much more then that. It seems, that intelligence is not "so special" as we tought. We probably slaughtered Neanderthals, otherwise we could have 2 intelligent species already (and probably many more to come in the coming millions of years).
839*929
ISTM that Republican anti-science-ism is mostly limited to two areas, evolution denial and global warming denial. The latter is easily explained by the party's tradition of ruling for the benefit of Koch types (and having their campaigns funded by same), and the former is easily explained as an easy way to get religious traditionalists to vote against their own best interests.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Monkeys/primates don't look that much like us, and they act very similar. Their intelligence is said to be that of a human child. Nearnderthals looked nearly identical to humans...I'd imagine their brains are just as nearly identical. You'd probably have to have a pretty long conversation with them to suss out any REAL differences in intelligence if there even are any. Likely most of the difference would be cultural, including any clinging to superstition, rather than intellectual.
The idea that neanderthals are too dumb for cave art is just as rediculous as the notion that some humans are practically animals compared to other humans (what most racists believe).
40 kya is pretty old, even as far as cave art is considered. But Neanderthals certainly didn't pain Lascaux - too recent for that.
Ezekiel 23:20
Cristian Fundamentalists (ISIS worldview minus the bombs and beheadings)
MINUS the bombs!?
Ezekiel 23:20
the grid patterns are a way of doing maths
[site]
They survived in a hostile ice age climate for eons before we turned up. You don't manage that unless you A) Have a heavily adapted physiology (eg mammoth) or B) Are damn smart.
Anyway, the fact that apparently we interbred with neanderthals and the DNA got passed on - ie the offspring weren't sterile - means they were almost certainly the same species as us - probably just a different race. And we know how well races meeting can turn out.. If anyone wants to know why the died out , well maybe thats a clue.
The lesson from the recent bout of frantic backpedaling on Neanderthals is not to take the slightest bit of notice of the extrapolations of archaeologists. The raw data of their findings is interesting, but it's always open to interpretation. However, archaeology as a science seem to be largely incapable of objective interpretation. Maybe it's time they stuck to digging things up and stopped trying to interpret what they find. That interpretation really requires quite a different discipline.
From the documentary 'History of the World, Part I'
But, I am a stand up philosopher, so my facts could be wrong.
Which is ironic since from what I've read they not only had bigger brains than most modern humans, but they also contributed a good chunk of DNA to Indo-European peoples...
Art critics didn't last very long in those days.
Critic: Me not like Ogg's art
Ogg: Me bash critic over head
Considering where Neanderthals lived, in Europe, not a lot of melanin was necessary to protect the skin.
I guess the real difference is that the ones who want to establish a state in the name of God are evil, and the ones who can destroy the world in the name of Jesus are the good guys.
the ones who want to establish a state in the name of God are evil
Does this definition include those who claim that the US was founded as a Christian nation?
Ezekiel 23:20
Further research shows that the Neanderthals formed a Cave Painting Artists Association (CPAA) to protect the copyrights and the intellectual properties of these cave painters. CPAA then started suing all other people who made copycat paintings as copyright infringers. Since the early drawings were little more than scratches on the rock faces, anything anyone else did that made any scratch anywhere was deemed to be a copy cat drawing and copyright infringement. All the activities of all the people of the species ground to a halt. Unable to find food they just starved to death.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yes.
They're talking about this checkerboard pattern as an example of abstract art, but a better hypothesis might be that it's part of a game, especially for when it's raining outside. Like us, the Neanderthals got bored.
Keep in mind why scientific opinion of the Neanderthals has had to be revised. Evolutionary thinking served as a kind of mental straight-jacket. Neanderthals, it was thought, had to be one of the missing links between apes and men, therefore they had to be stupid and brute like. A century ago, G. K. Chesterton, a Catholic writer, was mocking that idea, but it reigned supreme in science until very recently despite the lack of evidence.
Science is as much about dogma as evidence, as illustrated by all the efforts to promote a strange multiple universe theory to answer the problems associated with fine tuning. Our universe is uniquely tuned to make life possible. It can't be designed that way, scientific dogma asserts, that would mean a designer, hence God. On the other hand, the possibility of that happening by chance is exceedingly remote. Therefore there must be an infinite number of universes, each slightly different. As theories go, it's extraordinarily complex and wasteful--not to mention stupid.
its obvious they were playing tic-tac-toe
Or this was the first attempt at Twitter -- but the format of only 1 character proved overly restrictive, even for teenage Neanderthals with limited communication skills. This poor sap only managed to get the hashtag marker down (#). It only took a few tens of thousands of years to try again with 140 characters -- and now we can communicate with fragmentary badly-formulated thoughts like Neanderthals again.
[/sarcasm]
In all seriousness, what's with calling this "art"? I get how early cave drawings of animals or whatever could be significant in attesting a new kind of representative thought process. But a few carved lines in a wall? I get the point of early 20th-century abstract artists who were trying to break away from Romanticist and Realist ideals of representation in painting, but I hardly think we can ascribe such ideas of "art" to Neanderthals.
TFA seems to imply that it's the apparent lack of functionality that makes it "art," but that itself is a definition of "art" that pretty much was made up by philosophers of aesthetics in the 19th century. Prior to that time, "art" was largely viewed in society as a general kind of craft -- "artists" were generally employed by patrons or had shops in towns where their work was seen to serve some sort of important social purpose, not just be some sort of generic outlet of egotistic creativity. (We still retain that meaning in words like "artisan" and phrases like "The Art of X" which often means something more like "Important Skills for X.") Again, it seems like a rather anachronistic idea.
Rather, what we have evidence of here is apparently some Neanderthals carving lines in a wall for a reason we can't ascertain yet. That is *interesting*. But just because we can't imagine why some primitive hominid might have a good reason to try something like this doesn't mean there's no possible reason. It could have been an elderly crazy Neanderthal whacking a stone tool into a wall. It could have been some young crazy kids doing something stupid. Moreover, anyone who has spent time with pet dogs and cats has surely seen all sorts of animal behavior that we humans can't comprehend and which seems to serve no "purpose," but could easily result in some sort of odd damage or scratch marks or whatever.
Don't get me wrong: this still seems really interesting, but the term "art" causes readers of TFA to make all kinds of potentially unwarranted assumptions about creativity or leisure time or intelligence or whatever. These kind of assumptions are really hard to sort out -- fundamentally, they amount to questions of "intelligent design"... literally. To all those who say that such questions are beyond the realm of science when we talk about evolution, here's a real example that requires us to consider in detail: (1) is this an example of something "designed," or a naturally occurring phenomenon caused by erosion or whatever, and (2) what level of intelligence or intention may have been required to create it, and for what purpose? These are questions archaeologists have to deal with all the time: is this a naturally occurring rock, or an arrowhead shaped and designed by an intelligent being.
(By the way, I'm absolutely NOT advocating the religious sham that goes by the name "intelligent design," which is usually less interested in these actual questions than in restoring creationism in schools. However, I think when debating that issue, it's helpful to realize that scientists do have to confront those exact kinds of questions -- where past events require interpretation and falsifiability is hard to quantify.)
What do you mean, 'lately'?
Yes, Republicans need to reclaim the spirit of Goldwater. Can we hope for Democrats to ever reclaim the spirit of Roosevelt?
Wish I could mod you up.
Or not being able to get members elected to high council in the Klan.
That is simply the place where they lopped off limbs of there captured foes... probably ate them at the Number Six Dance later on.
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study that suggests an engraving in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar was made by Neanderthals more than 39,000 years ago.
Tell me I'm not the only one to read that as Gotham's Cave...
... is that this appears to confirm the Neanderthals IP rights to the octothorpe, and Twitter owes them tons of back royalties.
Nooooo...they should be reclaiming the spirit of Roswell. Those aliens cannot all be Republicans.
Given that the highest incidence of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is found in the Tuscany region of Italy where the greatest artists of the Renaissance were located it may be that the Sapiens/Neanderthal combination is responsible for great visual art.
#neanderthal #40kBC
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Good point. Let's not forget Bill Clinton eulogizing Senator Robert Byrd (D):
"I'll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollers of West Virginia, he was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There are certainly no perfect politicians."
See, you can rationalize anything to stay in power.
That's your stupidest troll yet greenwow. Off topic, pointless, and totally moronic.
They were LESSONS for younger males most likely, as in "Dad *may* not be home after this stuff, so you WILL need to know how this is all done, so you & the rest of the family here, can eat (after I am gone)" - same idea as writing in more modern times (I consider it our "racial memory" that allows us to stand on, & build upon, a foundation left by 'giants' before us, in fact).
* Think about it...
(I mean, the odds of you surviving a hunt for say, wooly mammoths OR mastodons, using spears for Pete's sake, couldn't have been very good - toss in a saber-toothed tiger in the mix, & you "get my point"/"catch my drift" here...)
APK
P.S.=> So, my point's that these drawings were made by TEACHERS in their times, mostly for young males - guidebooks in illustrated form basically, for hunting... apk
(It survived till our days in a form of hip-hop.)
The idea that neanderthals are too dumb for cave art is just as rediculous [sic] as the notion that some humans are practically animals compared to other humans (what most racists believe).
Actually humans ARE animals, although we share about 43% of our DNA with lettuce, so I guess we're part plant too. It's a common linguistic fallacy that people are "just like the animals" for the simple reason that there is no "just like." That's like saying a glass of water is just like a glass of water.
The fact that we share DNA with plants certainly explains a lot about my brother-in-law.
...pole dancing.
One look at the rock carving and you can see that, right?
This is a mountain being made out of a mole hill. What we have is evidence that a series of hash marks were made for no reason we can see. Therefore, it must be symbolic. I'm not buying it, even if they are selling.
First, we have to remember that the Neanderthals did not much change their tool set for something like 260,000 years. If you find a Mousterian tool set anywhere you have Neanderthals. That is weird in it's self. Think about it, for 2600 centuries everywhere from Afghanistan to Gibraltar all Neanderthals used the same set of technologies. Not a lot of original thinking going on there. This has all sorts of problems, like where did they all learn the same tool set? Where did that knowledge come from and why didn't it change?
Second, the hash marks are not associated with anything else, nor is it reported that they are repeated anywhere else. One set, one place, once. Walk into a cave, find Mousterian tools, you have Neanderthal. Walk into a cave and it's painted like a '70s Brooklyn subway car, and everything else had been doodled on, the tools set is one of dozens locally, and you have humans.
Third, the definition of art is off. Art may not serve a practical purpose, but does do something specific. The Soluterian culture, which was modern human and followed the Mousterian, would make flint blades several time larger then normal and so thin and delicate that the could never be used as a blade. They are being used as symbols. They are art. What was found is not understood and drawing conclusions is not warranted.
Some researchers said "the artifacts may not have been made by Neanderthals but by modern humans." Until the truth of that be known, it is too soon to re write human history, However 2001 in South Africa, at a site called Blombos Cave, is found 70,000 year old writing and art on "two pieces of ochre rock decorated with geometric patterns." The patterns could in no way be considered to be accidental or anything other than deliberate. Maybe the re write should have already began. http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads... Full article http://www.accessexcellence.or...
ISTR that one explanation of the abstract patterns of lines is that they're a kind of language, possibly a form of heraldry or signature (more akin to the traditional fishermen's jumpers worn in parts of the British Isles than anything done by the college of heralds, but the same general concept). IIRC similar patterns have been found on grave goods and other small items.
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