Posted on 06/15/2012 8:47:02 AM PDT by dead
The famous paintings on the walls of caves in Europe mark the beginning of figurative art and a great leap forward for human culture.
But now a novel method of determining the age of some of those cave paintings questions their provenance. Not that they're fakes — only that it might not have been modern humans who made them.
The first European cave paintings are thought to have been made over 30,000 years ago. Most depict animals and hunters. Some of the eeriest are stencils of human hands, apparently made by blowing a spray of pigment over a hand held up to a wall.
But now scientists are suggesting those aren't human hands, at least in some caves in Spain.
Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England who used a novel technique to get new dates for some of those paintings, says they're older than people thought, and they may just predate the arrival of humans in Europe.
"What we are saying is that we must entertain the possibility that these paintings were made by Neanderthals," Pike says. Those were humans' closest relatives, but they are not our species.
Pike says some of these paintings in Spain are at least 40,800 years old. At that time, Neanderthals had been running around Europe for 200,000 or 300,000 years. Modern humans had just arrived from Africa.
Pike concedes that maybe modern humans arrived in Europe with palette and pigment in hand, ready to paint up the town.
But the paintings could be even older. Pike's technique dates the age of the calcium carbonate that naturally forms in layers on top of the paintings. It's kind of like nature's shellac. Obviously the paintings had to be made before the first layer formed.
Archaeologist Joao Zilhao from the University of Barcelona is part of the team that did the work. He says his gut tells him it's Neanderthal art.
"We can't be 100 percent certain that they did it," Zilhao says. "I think that there is a strong probability. My point is the evidence for symbolic behavior among the Neanderthals already exists."
Neanderthals did perform ritual burials. They made decorative beads and other ornaments. Pike also notes that DNA evidence now suggests that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred.
"Why should it be surprising that Neanderthals produced art?" Pike says.
It does surprise archaeologists like Pat Shipman, who has spent a lifetime studying symbolic behavior. She wonders why Neanderthals waited until about the time humans arrived to get the itch to paint.
"OK, Neanderthals had been there for 300,000 years, and they're not doing this," Shipman says. "If they are not doing it before, why would they suddenly start doing it at that point?"
Ancient Neanderthals challenge us to think about our role as the sole humans on Earth today. A decorative shell ornament attributed to Neanderthals. Study: Neanderthals Wore Jewelry And Makeup
The discovery suggests that early relatives of humans were capable of symbolic thinking.
Shipman notes long before humans made the trek from Africa to Europe, they had been making all sorts of symbolic artifacts — ocher hash marks on stone or symmetrical marks on ostrich eggs.
"I find it easiest to assume that people who are already doing that moved into more figurative representations than thinking that an entirely other species of people suddenly came up with making figurative art," Shipman says.
The research appears in the journal Science. Pike says he needs to find paintings a few thousand years old than he has so far to make his case for Neanderthal art. He and his Spanish colleagues are headed back to find it.
The common name for these interbred creatures is "Democrats"
If Neanderthals could interbreed with "modern humans", then by the definition of "species" they ARE of the same species as us. Neanderthals look like they are just another race of humans.
“Are wolves and coyotes generally considered the same species or even sub-species of each other?”
I’m asking you. What, then, is the definition of species?
My basic understanding is that it is grouping of animals able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Sounds like this is not correct if coyote-wolves are fertile. I get that taxonomy is not an exact science, however. Per my definition, if canids are all able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, then they are really simply sub-species of the same animal - like different breeds of dogs - so closely related so as to be virtually the same animal even though the outer morphology is different. We designete them as different species for convienience sake.
On the other hand, my education on the subject is 25+ years old and I am always eager to learn.
What, besides an inability to breed fertile offspring, defines species?
I’m getting this scene, where the teen son of a ‘modern human’ has this neadertal teen girl out on a ‘date’, and he takes her into a cave where he shows her a neat trick with pigment, making an image of her hand on the cave wall, as evidence of their ‘undying love for each other’. And he adds his hand image with hers as his proof so she can go bakc next week and see the proof.
Now THERE is a real humdinger of a Romeo and Juliet scenario!
Gronk: Ooogla! Don't you understand that he is a Hairless? You can't really believe you have a future with him!
Oogla: But Daddeeeee....I love him! He's so smooooooth!
So although wolves and coyotes do occasionally interbreed - a population of coyotes and a population of wolves almost exclusively breed within their own group. Moreover they have distinct characteristics brought about by having large differences in DNA. Wolves are larger and howl, coyotes are smaller and yip.
The problem comes because people like to fit things into well defined ‘boxes’ and nature is not so obliging.
For example - I walk from a forest into a swamp. Few would argue that where I started was forest; and that were I ended up was a swamp. But there was not a clear line where one side was forest and the other side was swamp. I walked through a swampy forest and then a foresty swamp before I arrived at total swamp land.
Pan chimpanzees and Bonobo chimpanzees do not interbreed in the wild (there is a river in the way and chimps do not swim) and have distinct characteristics brought about by having different DNA. Usually they are considered “sub species” of each other because they look so similar and live so close to each other.
It is exactly what one would expect if the river (the Congo IIRC) was in flood a long time ago and changed beds so that now it ran through the middle of the chimpanzee range. Not being able to cross rivers - differences accumulated in each separate population until Bonobo chimps were noticeably smaller and more sex crazed than their ‘cousins’ across the river.
Tigers and Lions are able to produce fertile offspring - but their ranges no longer overlap in the wild - and so they are different interbreeding populations and obviously (in morphology and behavior) different species.
The total inability to produce fertile offspring is a reproductive barrier that shows that there should be no argument that the two populations are the same species - but a river can be a reproductive barrier as well (leading to an accumulation of differences).
I tend to like language analogies with evolution because there are so many points of agreement. Languages change over time and different populations separated from each other tend to accumulate differences over time.
English spoken by the English and American style English are different from each other (both being different from the English of Victorian times) - but American English is not it's own language..... yet. Americans and English CAN converse together and make each other understood - with some difficulty.
But Italian and French are both derived from Latin over many years, and a speaker of only Italian cannot usually make himself understood to a speaker of only French. Clearly they grew over time to become different languages.
I hope that cleared things up rather than confusing the issue. ;)
Yes, thank you.
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KEYWORDS: neandertal; neandertals; neanderthal; neanderthalsThe 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
Neandrathals are not human? Only in the minds of ivory towered paleontologists who must have some excuse for their research.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck...
Neanderthals aren’t apes. Neanderthals walked upright. Neanderthals used their hands. Neanderthals looked human, so I would consider them human — maybe a different branch, but human.
Neanderthals also, on the average, had larger brains than H. Sapien. Put that is your pipe and smoke it.
Not necessarily. Closely-related species can interbreed, albeit not too often or too successfully. Wolves and dogs, tigers and lions, etc.
C & D look like the same bone structure drawn differently, but I’m not a scientist.
You picked the thoughts right outa my brain! Eggs Ackley!
“Closely-related species can interbreed...”
As I learned today. My working definition didn’t fit with reality :p
Allmendream explained it far better than I did.
My working definition didn’t fit with reality :p
Under Darwinian theory, you would expect that species would not be rigidly-separated boxes, but would bleed into each other at the margins. Which is exactly what we see in nature.
I’ve always thought there was something strange about them Spainerds.
70,000-year war with Neanderthals created modern humans
Neanderthals were a race of super-predators that hunted early humans to the edge of extinction in the Middle East until, at one stage, there were only about 50 of our ancestors left. These resilient survivors evolved into modern humans and staged a fight-back that led to the extinction of the Neanderthals.
A major new study of the Neanderthal genome published in the prestigious journal, Science has provided dramatic evidence supporting an Australian author's theory that Neanderthals hunted and raped early humans.
'The Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome' is one of the largest genetics studies ever undertaken involving almost 60 authors and hundreds of technicians around the world. Among its unexpected findings are that Neanderthal males mated with early humans in the Middle East.
The study, led by Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany report the interbreeding occurred between 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the humans dispersed across the globe.
These findings were predicted in Australian evolutionary detective, Danny Vendramini's 2009 book, Them and Us: how Neanderthal predation created modern humans released last year.
At the time, Vendramini's theory that Neanderthals were 'apex predators' who hunted, cannibalized and raped early humans in the Middle East between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago was considered controversial. Now that theory has been confirmed by the Draft Neanderthal Sequence, which reveals that between 1- 4% of human genes come from Neanderthals.
According to Vendramini, Neanderthals hunted our ancestors for over 50,000 years and almost wiped them out. “The only humans to survive were those born with modern traits like high intelligence, creativity, aggression, language and guile.” He said. “These fully modern Cro-Magnons turned the tables on their former predators and eventually annihilated them.”
"They also killed most of the hybrids that had accumulated because they considered them mutants.
He says that when the Cro-Magnons left the Middle East on their global migration, they inevitably took a few recessive Neanderthal genes with them.
Here is a series of Neanderthal reconstructions that ignore modern human bias.
www.themandus.org
Madder root. You mix it with animal dung to make red dye. I’m sure Neanderthals or early man would have been capable of this. It’s not rocket science. Squeeze it through a punctured fish bladder and voila. Or however you say voila in Spanish.
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