Heavy Brows, High Art?

[Adsos Letter]

Newly Unearthed Painted Shells Show Neandertals Were Homo sapiens's Mental Equals (article title)

Source: Scientific American
Charles Q. Choi

Newly discovered painted scallops and cockleshells in Spain are the first hard evidence that Neandertals made jewelry. These findings suggest humanity's closest extinct relatives might have been capable of symbolism, after all.

Body ornaments made of painted and pierced seashells dating back 70,000 to 120,000 years have been found in Africa and the Near East for years, and serve as evidence of symbolic thought among the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens). The absence of similar finds in Europe at that time, when it was Neandertal territory, has supported the notion that they lacked symbolism, a potential sign of mental inferiority that might help explain why modern humans eventually replaced them.

Although hints of Neandertal art and jewelry have cropped up in recent years, such as pierced and grooved animal-tooth pendants or a decorated limestone slab on the grave of a child, these have often been shrugged off as artifacts mixed in from modern humans, imitation without understanding, or ambiguous in nature. Now archaeologist João Zilhão at the University of Bristol in England and his colleagues have found 50,000-year-old jewelry at two caves in southeastern Spain, art dating back 10,000 years before the fossil record reveals evidence of modern humans entering Europe.

At the Cueva (Cave) Antón, the scientists unearthed a pierced king scallop shell (Pecten maximus) painted with orange pigment made of yellow goethite and red hematite collected some five kilometers from that site. In material collected from the Cueva de los Aviones, alongside quartz and flint artifacts were bones from horses, deer, ibex, rabbits and tortoises as well as seashells from edible cockles (Glycymeris insubrica), mussels, limpets and snails; the researchers also discovered two pierced dog-cockleshells painted with traces of red hematite pigment. No dyes were found on the food shells or stone tools, suggesting the jewelry was not just painted at random.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neandertal-art-human

[Warpy]

1. In every way imaginable, they were human

A part of me keeps hoping we interbred with them, that they didn't die out.

Here's a facial reconstruction: http://www.peabody.yale.edu/exhibits/fossils/fossils/neanderthal.html

He looks oddly familiar, someone who wouldn't draw stares on the street.

[Adsos Letter]

2. Very interesting link, Warpy! I had not seen a reconstruction like that before.

[Warpy]

6. Check out the forensic reconstruction of a child

(from a stupid site with too many racist, creationist fundies on it)

http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=112181

[kwassa]

3. Heavy brows, high art ....

Frida Kalho would agree.

[David Zephyr]

4. I doubt Neanderthals were as mentally agile as Cro-Magnons. They probably lacked speech.

While speech is somewhat inherent within even chimpanzees, it appears that our human predecessors developed a genetic change around 50,000 years ago that led to our ability to string sentences together and not just grunt words out. The tools of Cro-Magnons contemporary to Neanderthals were also superior, even though they were vastly outnumbered.

Our Neanderthal cousins do get a bad rap though and I'm happy to see this news.

It is still an open question as to whether or not Neanderthals buried their dead. There is some "evidence" that they did, but it is so minute that a conclusion either way can not be made yet.

Thanks for the fascinating article and the link.

To all interested in learning more, please read the terrific "Before the Dawn" book.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. I, OTOH, do believe they possessed speech. The very successfully

hunted big game and made sophisticated tools in Europe for 200,000 years - that's not something that you can organize without complex vocal interactions.

It may not have been recognizable as speech to the invading CroMagnons, and it is very possible that Cro Magnon speech was more advanced, but I don't see how they could have lasted so long without it.

And the evidence for Neandertal burials is no more sparse than evidence of Cro Magnon burial.

[David Zephyr]

7. Genetic evidence says otherwise.

As I said, Neanderthals more than likely were able to utter words, just as I'd mentioned even Chimpanzees seem to have innate knowledge of words that signal "danger from the sky" and "jump into the bush", but they could not string words into sentences.

We now know that syntax construction is something that must be developed within the very first years of a child's life. Stringing words together, that capacity has been traced back to a genetic change within to humans around 45,000 to 50,000 years ago in Africa. This gave us a great advantage over the poor Neanderthals, who we pretty much wiped out after whatever the Younger Dryas did not.

Our predecessors did bury their dead. It's evidence is clear and bountiful from India through Siberia and eventually throughout Europe. Not sparse at all. The few instances of Neanderthal "burials" is still an open question.

Don't get me wrong. The Neanderthals have gotten a very bad rap historically for far too long. They dominated all of Europe and were spread clear to Siberia and, as you point out, really had the lay of the land for hundreds of thousands of years. Our species are whippersnappers compared to their long history. It's just that it appears that a stroke of genetic luck in evolution benefitted us with the capacity for real speech.

Check out "Before the Dawn" by Nicholas Wade from 2007.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41IllYJ%2BffL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg