Posted on 06/14/2007 5:56:19 PM PDT by blam
Neanderthals 'were ahead of their time'
Last Updated: 2:42am BST 14/06/2007
Big, brutish and stupid - it's a commonly held view that our prehistoric predecessors were as wild and unsophisticated as the animals they hunted.
Neanderthal man was 'as smart as we are'
But Neanderthal man was not as slow-witted as he looked and was in reality as smart as we are, an archaeologist claims.
They were actually innovators who used different forms of tools to adapt to the ecological challenges posed by harsh habitats as they spread through Europe. Although our ancestors have become the butt of jokes about people who are stupid or unenlightened, they were years ahead of their time.
Dr Terry Hopkinson, of Leicester University, said Neanderthals were far from behaviourally static and incorporated different forms of tool construction into a single technique.
He said: "There has been a consensus that the modern human mind turned on like a light switch about 50,000 years ago, only in Africa."
But the modern traits accompanying the change such as abstract art, the use of grindstones and elongated stone blades, and big-game hunting began to accumulate in Africa from 300,000 years ago.
Archaeological finds from across Europe also show the Neanderthals fused two forms of tool-making called the faconnage and the debitage techniques. Neanderthals had previously been thought of as incapable of innovation, said Dr Hopkinson, as it was assumed to be something unique to Homo sapiens.
They welcomed the homo sapiens into their country assuming they would want to assimilate.
The rest is, as they say, history.
Isn't the mainstream Macroevolutionist view that Neanderthals aren't ancestors of humans (including Europeans) today, and that modern humans are completely homo sapiens?
However, see earlier post, the current idea is that it is neuron density rather than brain size which determines intelligence. (or it's brain cell density--it's density of some sort--going to look....).
Seems to be both general brain density (brain cells) and neuron density.
They are us.
Interbreeding of Neanderthals and modern humans without transmission of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA: effect of mating preferences
If male Neanderthals mated with female modern humans the offspring would have inherited mitochondrial DNA only from the female modern humans.
This mating was more likely than the mating of male modern humans with female Neanderthals because of the preference of human males for gracile females. It was also more likely because of the preference of human females for robust males.
The mating of a female Neanderthal with a modern human male was unlikely because she would find him gracile and he would find her robust.
If the mating preferences of Neanderthals were similar to those of modern humans, which are well documented, the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthal fossil bone will not indicate whether Neanderthals and modern humans did or did not interbreed. The work of M. Krings et al, for example, shows only that female Neanderthals did not mate very often with male modern humans.
References: Krings, M. et al. Cell 90, 19-30 (1997).
Ward, R. & Stringer, C. Nature 388, 225-226 (1997).
Published 21 January 2000. © Andrew Gyles
Density ~ as in “Belgium is the most densely populated country in Europe” ~ which, in French, cutely comes across as “the Belgian people are really stupid”.
The things we could learn if we were only smart enough to understand them....
I'm not sure, but Christopher Columbus ant the Crusades are probably to blame.
Does this mean the Geico cavemen are going to finally end their boycott?
I will believe that when I see a whale walk on the moon.
Bwhahaha. Good one!
Yes....I was being flippant.
*...as slow-witted as he looked*???????
And how do we know what they looked like? Those stupid artists renditions? That's real reliable.
Details, details....
All cats are Felines but no one would assert that a tiger is a tabby.
This research makes sense to me. I’ve just never been attracted to neanderthal women myself.
Lynndie England: the missing link between neanderthals and modern man?
They forecast the creation of the 17th Amendment, and the inevitable result?
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