Posted on 05/16/2006 12:51:33 PM PDT by blam
Neandertals take out their small blades
Bruce Bower
From San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting
Excavations of Neandertal artifacts at two caves in northern Spain have yielded an unexpected discovery—a trove of thin, double-edged stone blades that researchers usually regard as the work of Stone Age people who lived much later.
In 2005, Federico Bernaldo de Quiros of the University of Léon in Spain and his coworkers unearthed small stone blades, which they called bladelets, lying amid larger, characteristic Neandertal stone implements in a cave called El Castillo. All the finds came from sediment that had previously been dated to 47,000 to 42,000 years ago. Later, the researchers found nearly identical bladelets in soil at another cave, Cueva Morin, which also contains 50,000-year-old Neandertal tools.
At both caves, Neandertals fashioned bladelets in a series of stone-cutting operations similar to those employed by Homo sapiens several thousand years later, Bernaldo de Quiros now proposes.
Similar breaks near the base of many Neandertal bladelets indicate that the implements were attached to handles of some kind, the Spanish investigator says.
The finds suggest that Neandertals were the intellectual equals of H. sapiens, at least in toolmaking, Bernaldo de Quiros says. Neandertals may have been nudged into the bladelet business by northern Spain's poor-quality rock, which is best suited for producing small tools.
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GGG Ping.
And proud of it!
I'll have the roast duck with the mango salsa........
Women Neanderthals shaved their legs. This practiced died out as later more sophisticated H. Sapien Europii made their debut.........
Next thing they find is a Neanderthal Mach 3 razor blade with three stone chips.
ping for my favorite neanderthal :)
The blades were for spreading the mango salsa, of course.
Not all of us. Show me your official Neanderthal tattoo or our secret Neanderthal handshake.
I call it: Finding out your last guess wasn't right either.
Yeah, well you might wanna do a little research next time.
Nothing for me. I seem to have lost my appetite.
That may have been the origin of those famous "Gillette Blue Blades" I used to shave with back in the 60's.
Just like a Neandertal to bring knives to a gun fight.
Geez guys, this is a serious scientific study, and everybody is craking jokes and making fun of it.
I would hate to think what people would say when a study is done about homo erectus. I think we are all descended from homo erectus.
...I don't have much of an appetite, thank you
Not all of us. I have a friend who has a problem with that. His wife left him and.....
Obviously stolen from an oppressed minority of the time.
Was it the "erectus" or the "homo" part that caused her to leave?
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