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Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

sciencemag.org

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Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#11

Post by mantas »

kewafb14 wrote: post #9
nukeop wrote: post #5

Neanderthals 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

And had kids with quite a few of them..

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#12

Post by hutzlibu »

mantas wrote: post #11
kewafb14 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and apparently we killed them all. We're the savage ones :D

And had kids with quite a few of them..

What would interest me is, if this was more a love/voluntarily thing, or more rape and owning the women of the defeated tribe ...

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#13

Post by nukeop »

amorphid wrote: post #6
nukeop wrote: post #5

Neanderthals 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?

Here's an article on one such underground site: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291

The tunnels themselves were not that long or linked up, but apparently all those that were found under Europe add up to hundreds of kilometers.

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#14

Post by amvalo »

amorphid wrote: post #6
nukeop wrote: post #5

Neanderthals 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?

No way that's true. Maybe he have meant trade routes?

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#15

Post by amvalo »

nukeop wrote: post #13
amorphid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

Here's an article on one such underground site: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291 The tunnels themselves were not that long or linked up, but apparently all those that were found under Europe add up to hundreds of kilometers.

What do you mean by the word "tunnel" here? They seem to be talking about an arrangement of stones on a cave floor.

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#16

Post by chx »

80386 wrote: post #10

I 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, u…

> 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;

Too funny: Kon-Tiki went from South America to the Polynesian and it's only more recent research which indicates it might have been the other way around.

What we realize now is how little we know.

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#17

Post by mantas »

hutzlibu wrote: post #12
mantas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And had kids with quite a few of them..

What would interest me is, if this was more a love/voluntarily thing, or more rape and owning the women of the defeated tribe ...

I guess both. Sometimes tribes having hard times would join better off tribes. Naturally women would be expected to procreate. Taking women during raids was common too. Or if men were killed in warfare, women may have "voluntarily" joined the other tribe.

This is common to overall tribe relations. For example, Baltic and Fino-Ugric people in North/east Europe. Baltic people came as part of Indo Europeans while Fino-Ugric people lived there before that. Modern Lithuanians and Latvians have much more Fino Ugric genome in women-specific parts. Some of traditionally women arts were also carried from Fino Ugric tradition into Baltic. Conclusions are pretty clear...

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#18

Post by saalweachter »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #4

I 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.

One question I suspect the archaeological evidence is insufficient to answer is how far from the last village/roving band of hunter-gatherers the next band into the wilderness would settle. When you broke off would you stay within a day of your old village or would you walk hundreds, thousands of miles before stopping, completely alone?

As far as the mindset goes, I’d say keep in mind that when Europeans landed in the Americas and Australia, they considered those continents to be “empty”, free for the taking. Their world may not have been so different from the first human to walk out of Africa.

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#19

Post by misja111 »

mantas wrote: post #17
hutzlibu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would interest me is, if this was more a love/voluntarily thing, or more rape and owning the women of the defeated tribe ...

I guess both. Sometimes tribes having hard times would join better off tribes. Naturally women would be expected to procreate. Taking women during raids was common too. Or if men were killed in warfare, women may have "voluntarily" joined the other tribe. This is common to overall tribe relations. For example, Baltic and Fino-Ugric people in North/east Europe. Baltic people came as part of Indo Europeans while Fino-U…

So when relating your analogy to the article, the Finnish would be the Neandertals?

Re: Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

#20

Post by dboreham »

saalweachter wrote: post #18
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #4

I 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.

One question I suspect the archaeological evidence is insufficient to answer is how far from the last village/roving band of hunter-gatherers the next band into the wilderness would settle. When you broke off would you stay within a day of your old village or would you walk hundreds, thousands of miles before stopping, completely alone? As far as the mindset goes, I’d say keep in mind that when Europeans landed in th…

In some cases they actually were empty. Because all the inhabitants had recently been killed by diseases spread by the Europeans. One proposed mechanism for this is that infected pigs roamed wild "ahead" of the colonizers, killing the indigenous population.
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