Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
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Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#2> But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.
Weren't they more like parents than cousins? Except for Africans, modern humans have apparently inherited genes from Neandertals and their non-European contemporaries.
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#3>> The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says.
A two-off accidental stranding would be another explanation
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#4I wonder what it was like for them to live in a world that was so big and unpopulated and unknown. Someone must have been the first to cross the Bering land bridge into North America, or walk the Nile delta out of Africa into the Levant. Pre-history is deep and wide.
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#5Neanderthals had advanced jewelry drills, could make their own clay dishes, could treat diseases with herbs and simple surgeries, and they even had some knowledge of dentistry. They were able to construct furnaces, had advanced (at the time) weapons, social structures, and created underground settlements and tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers.
The popculture image of grunting, snorting primitive cavemen is more fitting for Homo Sapiens than Homo Neanderthalensis.
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#6Neanderthals had advanced jewelry drills, could make their own clay dishes, could treat diseases with herbs and simple surgeries, and they even had some knowledge of dentistry. They were able to construct furnaces, had advanced (at the time) weapons, social structures, and created underground settlements and tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers. The popculture image of grunting, snorting primitive cavemen is more…
>> tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers
Do you mean tunnels that are hundreds of kilometers long? Sounds interesting. Can you point us to some reading on that?
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#7> But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. Weren't they more like parents than cousins? Except for Africans, modern humans have apparently inherited genes from Neandertals and their non-European contemporaries.
I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from inter-breeding.
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#8> But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. Weren't they more like parents than cousins? Except for Africans, modern humans have apparently inherited genes from Neandertals and their non-European contemporaries.
I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from inter-breeding.
Yes, inter-breeding.
But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them.
There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No?
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#9Neanderthals had advanced jewelry drills, could make their own clay dishes, could treat diseases with herbs and simple surgeries, and they even had some knowledge of dentistry. They were able to construct furnaces, had advanced (at the time) weapons, social structures, and created underground settlements and tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers. The popculture image of grunting, snorting primitive cavemen is more…
Agreed, and apparently we killed them all. We're the savage ones :D
Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean
#10I think there's a trend in archaeology of us realizing we've been underestimating the past.
The Polynesians were capable of voyaging across the Pacific to South America, and another Austronesian group made it all the way to Madagascar. This was pretty controversial until Kon-Tiki; even now, Polynesian-South American contact isn't fully accepted.
(IIRC, we weren't sure how the Polynesians even found so many islands, until an archaeologist asked a few of them and discovered that there's a simple algorithm for it: follow the birds.)
Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once, possibly intentionally.
Stone tools can be pretty good, especially obsidian. There are surgeons today who use obsidian knives.
Roger Blench has a paper on Greco-Roman lamps turning up as far afield as Palau, which implies more complex trade networks at an earlier stage than most people would think: http://www.academia.edu/9237516/The_Romans_in_Palau_how_did_...
And now, Neanderthals with boats. This isn't really new -- Homo floresiensis (the ebu gogo, maybe) had to have gotten there somehow. But it's part of an important trend.