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.
I’ve always wondered how the cavemen could be reconciled on a time scale with Biblical teachings of Adam & Eve being the origination of humans?
“Lynndie England: the missing link between neanderthals and modern man?”
Ah, but, to my knowledge, she’s managed to crank out several (fatherless) babies... In my neighborhood, she would be considered a Darwinian success story.
Whales brains have a very large task-specific portion of their brain, which appears devoted to sonar and associated spatial navigation. As I recall, Neanderthal's brain is enlarged most prominently in the areas associated with the visual cortex and navigation.
Really? I knew a dozen or so sounds that each of my dogs would make, and what each meant. The problem was more that they would use the same "word" for a score of different things.
Use the same definition of "human".
The 'Hobbit' skull(s) found on the Indonesian island of Flores have a Broca's Area four times larger than Modern Humans. No-one knows why.
It is a good joke, one I will lie about to people. Thanks for the ammo.
Mark
Size alone does not dictate intelligence... The surface area of the brain certainly seems to have a large impact in general. But overall size by weight or by volume does not.
Alleys, late at night, one at a time.
We were all created. Many devolve.
'So long and thanks for all the plankton'?
Neanderthals were men. They may not have been as similar genetically as two people randomly selected from around the world today, but they were human.
As for Neanderthals, Creationist models vary. One idea is that modern day Europeans and people in the Levant and Central Asia (the places where Neanderthals used to live) are the descendants of Neanderthals.
Another is that they could have been people who actually obeyed the command to spread out after the Flood, and sort of became a subspecies of humans while the rest of humanity loitered in Mesopotamia, and after Babel, some of those Mesopotamians--the ancestors of modern mankind--wiped out the Neanderthals.
A rarer view is that Neanderthals were humans living in the antediluvian world; this hypothesis is chiefly for other advanced hominids such as Homo erectus and Homo habilis and similar homo species (as in Latin nomenclature)--less advanced homo species were probably just types of ape that have since gone extinct (and humans aren't apes).
It isn’t the volume (at least that is the modern, general consensus).
For those of us who follow these stories, the above line has become a painful cliche. It is included in EVERY story about Neanderthals. No well-read person thinks they were dumb brutes any more, and hasn't for the past 30 years. Sheesh ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.