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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

#31

Post by saalweachter »

InitialLastName wrote: post #24
saalweachter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1491 by Charles Mann goes into this a bit. Some estimates put the die-off of aboriginal North Americans at 90% from the arrival of Europeans (in ~1500) and the early permanent settlements (Jamestown was in 1607). The first descriptions of what's now the US east coast from explorers describe coastlines lined with fires as far as the eye could see, and suggested a fairly densely populated continent. The descriptions fr…

Oh, I'm not talking about the "loosely populated" part. I'm referring to the way that they by and large didn't really consider the inhabitants to be "people". Into the 20th century they were largely denied agency by the colonists, and in the 21st century we still displace Native Americans with roughly the same sort of discussion we have about disturbing turtle populations.

I don't think 16th century Europeans considered the Americas any more inhabited than the Moon. Native populations were just another natural resource the New World was teeming with, not "people".

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

#32

Post by toasterlovin »

80386 wrote: post #30
toasterlovin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the area around Southeast Asia and Australia may have been extremely densely populated by hunter gatherers. During the last glacial maximum, sea levels were several hundred feet lower, which created a massive land mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland

Would there have been a land bridge to Australia?

No, but look at the map on the Wikipedia page I linked. There would have been tons of islands between Sundaland and an expanded Australia.

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

#33

Post by 80386 »

masklinn wrote: post #21
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…

> Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once, possibly intentionally. The Torres Strait is full of small islands bridging the 150km gap between PNG and Australia. Not only that, but much like the Strait of Dover or the Bering Sea it was most certainly a land bridge until the holocene, and it remains extremely shallow.

How about Australia and Tasmania? The indigenous languages on each side of the Bass Strait have at least one feature in common (initial Cr- clusters) that's rare elsewhere in Australia. (There might be more, but information is pretty hard to come by, and the Tasmanian languages are sparsely attested.) That may or may not be indicative of continued contact; it might even be a coincidence, but if it's not, I wouldn't expect the shared feature to stick around for thousands of years.

(If Wikipedia is right about the time of Tasmania's separation from the Australian mainland and Tasmania was already populated at the time, the feature would've had to have been preserved on both sides of the Bass Strait for about twice the time between modern English and Proto-Indo-European.)

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

#34

Post by gpdpocketer »

80386 wrote: post #33
masklinn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once, possibly intentionally. The Torres Strait is full of small islands bridging the 150km gap between PNG and Australia. Not only that, but much like the Strait of Dover or the Bering Sea it was most certainly a land bridge until the holocene, and it remains extremely shallow.

How about Australia and Tasmania? The indigenous languages on each side of the Bass Strait have at least one feature in common (initial Cr- clusters) that's rare elsewhere in Australia. (There might be more, but information is pretty hard to come by, and the Tasmanian languages are sparsely attested.) That may or may not be indicative of continued contact; it might even be a coincidence, but if it's not, I wouldn't e…

Given that the indigenous Australian languages hold the record for the longest-running oral traditions (70,000 years worth of story-telling), it would be no surprise to me to hear that there was such an influence...

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

#35

Post by lkrubner »

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…

A big problem is that so much of human history is now under water. The Mediterranean was likely an extremely fertile region in which to hunt, and likely the largest Neanderthal settlements that ever existed were there. Sadly, they are now under water. Likewise, much of the land between Africa and Saudi Arabia is now under water, though if we could explore it we would learn a lot about how humans migrated out of Africa. And likewise, the spread of humans in south east Asia --- our understanding would be very different if only we could easily see all the old settlements that are now under water.

A significant part of our story has simply been washed away by rising sea levels, once the Ice Age ended.

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

#36

Post by masklinn »

mirimir wrote: post #8
gadders wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them.

What? Cousins are descendants of a recent common ancestor (grandparent for the colloquial first/full cousin), you can breed with them but not doing so doesn't make them non-cousins.

> 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?

Yes? But that didn't spawn a new species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis were already separate and well-defined things when that happened.

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

#37

Post by hliyan »

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…

Between this article and this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837120 (Was there a civilization on Earth before humans?), I suspect we might be on the cusp of some amazing discoveries about the past. Not to say that we will find an advanced civilization, but I think there is a good chance that there has been civilizations before us on Earth, who at least built wooden structures and had a spoken language.

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

#38

Post by kirghiz »

saalweachter wrote: post #31
InitialLastName wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1491 by Charles Mann goes into this a bit. Some estimates put the die-off of aboriginal North Americans at 90% from the arrival of Europeans (in ~1500) and the early permanent settlements (Jamestown was in 1607). The first descriptions of what's now the US east coast from explorers describe coastlines lined with fires as far as the eye could see, and suggested a fairly densely populated continent. The descriptions fr…

Oh, I'm not talking about the "loosely populated" part. I'm referring to the way that they by and large didn't really consider the inhabitants to be "people". Into the 20th century they were largely denied agency by the colonists, and in the 21st century we still displace Native Americans with roughly the same sort of discussion we have about disturbing turtle populations. I don't think 16th century Europeans conside…

An oversimplification perhaps:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valladolid_debate

Not that practice matched theory but...

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

#40

Post by vram22 »

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 Morris West "The Navigator" is a really good read related to this topic (IMO). It's fiction, but I think some of the stuf mentioned is based on facts about the navigation skills the Polynesians had. A National Geographic team had visited many Pacific islands (across many island groups), done a study and made an article (or series) about it. I had read it a while ago.

Just did a quick search:

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=national+geographic+articl...

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2014/03/03/hokulea-the-a...

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070927-poly...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56966.The_Navigator

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