Posted on 01/18/2010 1:38:03 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Recently at Discovery News I told you about Neanderthal-made shell jewelry that suggests these hominids were as smart and creative as modern humans were at the time the jewelry was made, 50,000 years ago. University of Bristol archaeologist Joao Zilhao, who led the project, told me about some other interesting discoveries he and his team made about Neanderthals. One concerns how they harvested shellfish for consumption... Note that the Neanderthals didn't wear their dinner discards, just as we don't today. (Or usually don't. Maybe someone out there has made a necklace out of last night's oyster or lobster remains.) The Neanderthals instead chose different shells based on beauty for use as jewelry/body ornamentation. These species included Pecten (pilgrim shell), Glycymeris (dog cockle) and Acanthocardia (Moroccan cockle). The shells accumulate on sea bottoms "where wave action throws them onto the beaches where Neanderthals could harvest them, must as you or I would when holidaying in the summer," Zilhao said. Getting back to the shellfish as food and not art, for consumers even today, shellfish pose challenges. As Zilhao and his team point out, "They rot very rapidly and must be eaten or cooked extremely fresh." By packaging the harvested shellfish in water-soaked algae, the Neanderthals helped to preserve the shellfish from the point of collection to the place where they ate them, such as Aviones Cave in Spain. This cave is right near the entrance of Cartagena harbor, so it provided "rooms" with a view as well as water resources. Algae remains were found among the shells within the cave. We always hear about the big game hunting talents of Neanderthals, but this new research suggests that at least some groups enjoyed surf and turf meals. Or surf one night and maybe turf the next.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Oh, they were human all right.
I remember a photo of a grave holding the skeletons of a young woman with a young child cradled in her arms, both lying on a bed of flower pedals.
That is definitely a sign of humans mourning the loss of someone that was loved.
Nothing more human than that.
;’) They probably ate a lot of take-out, “hey Og, could you take out another slab of meat from that mammoth, I’ve got to step around the corner a second.”
I guess the experts were right, we are what we eat — and Neandertals were all mussel.
:’)
It wasn’t long ago that Neandertal was regarded as never haven eaten fish, because no fish bones had been identified in their old refuse piles. That was mostly I think another part of the kinda weird anti-Neandertal bias that has been around since shortly after the first discovery of their fossils.
“Here, hold muh fermented mastadon milk...”
I can't believe I forgot that.The Neandertal EnigmaFrayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]
by James Shreeve
in local libraries
Just because something is not proved wrong does not mean it is fact. There are more theories than facts on Neanderthals.
Just because something is not proved wrong does not mean it is fact.Just because a series of people opposed to the idea that humans were not created as-is has rejected Neandertal as ancestral to living humans since R. Virchow doesn't mean there's anything to the persistent fiction that Neandertal was inferior and went extinct. Morphology proves that Neandertal *is* ancestor to living humans.
Must have been tricky to milk those.
Worth it, though. No beer for another few thousand years. ;0)
There is no DNA theory, there are some inherently flawed studies by people who set out holding the conclusion as one of their assumptions (that Neandertal went extinct, iow, has no living descendants).
Hey, they probably would have invented beer, but until some early form of football is is discovered and attributed to them...
You are clearly right on this. I defer to your historical insight.
But they weren't stupid. There's evidence that they invented cheerleaders many eons before the discovery of ball games of any kind.
There was no fraud involved with "Nebraska Man". It was a mistake.
BTW, the primary researchers never even referred to it as a "man". That was an over enthusiastic English scientist, who made this suggestion in the popular press there. The serious scientific advocates of this short lived fossil phenom were only claiming that it was an anthropoid ape of some sort. That was extraordinary enough, as no apes whatever are known from the Americas, and not even monkeys from North America.
It was a single badly worn molar, actually from a pig as it turned out. Unfortunately, not only are pig teeth and ape/human teeth grossly similar (ironically the primary researcher studying and describing Hesperopithecus had made just this point in a previous paper!) but this particular tooth had been rotated in the jaw in life, in such a way that it acquired a human-like wear pattern.
Anyway, within a few years they found more of the material. The claim was corrected and retracted in 1927. (The tooth was first described in 1922.)
See this article for more.
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