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Neandertal: Modern Bilim Onların Hikâyesini Yeniden Yazdı
Neandertallerin hikâyesi, yeni keşifler ve değer yargılarını altüst eden bilimsel yenilikler sayesinde değişikliğe uğramıştır.
Artık Avrupa’daki evrimlerinin ve Asya’ya yayılımlarının izini sürmek, DNA’larını incelemek ve nasıl yaşayıp nasıl öldüklerini anlamak mümkün. Neandertallerin davranışları, günümüzün basmakalıp düşüncelerinden çok uzak, şaşırtıcı derecede moderndi:
- Hastalarına bakıyorlar,
- Ölülerini gömüyorlar,
- Büyük hayvanları avlıyorlar,
- Kırmızı boya kullanıyorlar,
- ve konuşuyorlardı.
Peki, Neandertaller bu kadar gelişmiş bir türse, neden onlar yok oldular da Homo sapiens hayatta kaldı? Neandertallerin hikâyesine bütünüyle baktığımızda çok büyük bir sır ortaya çıkıyor: İnsan olmak ne demektir?
“Neandertaller hakkında bilgili olduğunuzu düşünüyorsanız tekrar düşünün. Önyargılarınızın yıkılmasına ve insanlıkla ilgili düşüncelerinizin sorgulanmasına hazır olun!”
Clive Gamble, Arkeoloji Profesörü
Southampton Üniversitesi
Artık Avrupa’daki evrimlerinin ve Asya’ya yayılımlarının izini sürmek, DNA’larını incelemek ve nasıl yaşayıp nasıl öldüklerini anlamak mümkün. Neandertallerin davranışları, günümüzün basmakalıp düşüncelerinden çok uzak, şaşırtıcı derecede moderndi:
- Hastalarına bakıyorlar,
- Ölülerini gömüyorlar,
- Büyük hayvanları avlıyorlar,
- Kırmızı boya kullanıyorlar,
- ve konuşuyorlardı.
Peki, Neandertaller bu kadar gelişmiş bir türse, neden onlar yok oldular da Homo sapiens hayatta kaldı? Neandertallerin hikâyesine bütünüyle baktığımızda çok büyük bir sır ortaya çıkıyor: İnsan olmak ne demektir?
“Neandertaller hakkında bilgili olduğunuzu düşünüyorsanız tekrar düşünün. Önyargılarınızın yıkılmasına ve insanlıkla ilgili düşüncelerinizin sorgulanmasına hazır olun!”
Clive Gamble, Arkeoloji Profesörü
Southampton Üniversitesi
222 pages, Paperback
First published October 7, 2013
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July 29, 2024
“Most books with the word ‘Neanderthal’ in the title seem to collapse the species into an ahistorical list of features and important sites before morphing into a book on the species that replaced them. We wanted to write a book on the Neanderthals that does not dwell too much on the false turns in the long history of research and does not get easily distracted by the entry of Homo sapiens on to the scene. In short, we envisioned a book on the Neanderthals that is fairly exclusively about the Neanderthals.”
Adhering to the idea that the Neanderthals were a parallel branch of hominids and not, as the thought used to be a long time ago, the lesser-than-us precursor to modern humans or an inferior offshoot that had to move out of the way to give H. sapiens the room to rule, Papagianni and Morse indeed center their book on the Neanderthals, with the current and recent bits of knowledge, from paleoarcheology to DNA. They try to look at these evolutionary cousins of ours not as “they are just like us!” or “they are so different from us!” but just as themselves, through the tiny crumbs of knowledge we have of them.
Bones, stone tools, 4% of H. sapiens DNA belonging to Neanderthal origins, and significant improvement in technology to more accurately date fossils — we know very little despite all the science.
Quite a few cultural preconceptions and stereotypes we now think to be untrue. No more hulking, knuckle-dragging brutes as our Neanderthal concept — that has been accepted for a while. But also there is a newer view of the Neanderthals as being able to competently hunt large game, positioning themselves among apex predators, but also possibly being capable of speech and some symbolic expression.
“ While we are left with some uncertainty whether the earliest humans to reach the Levant were theearly modern humans at Qafzeh and Skhul, or the Neanderthals at Tabun, what we can say is that there is an overall pattern of a modern human occupation giving way to a Neanderthal occupation. This is the only place in the world where this pattern is evident. What it demonstrates is that humans did not evolve – as many used to believe – as a single global population undergoing a series of changes from the earliest Homo to the present. Instead we have a paradigm of diversity, in which there were many human species sharing the planet at any given stage until very recently.”
It’s a very accessible book by people who clearly care about their chosen subject. It’s quite brief — but given how little information we actually have on which we can base our assumptions about the entire parallel lineage of hominids, the brevity is not surprising. The photos included were good, but the maps unfortunately needed improvement. Overall it serves as a decent overview and a good introduction to the subject.
4 stars. Maybe I should look for a few books mentioned in the last chapter, on Neanderthals in popular culture.
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March 31, 2021
"Onları gerçekten özlemle anmamıza, yokluklarının yasını tutmamıza ne engel oluyor? Belki de aradan geçen zamanın uzunluğu."
(s.210)
Bir kitapçıda rafta gördüğümde, her zamanki kitap seçiciliğim tutmuş; "Sapiens tutunca bunu bastılar" deyip yanından burun kıvırıp geçmiştim. Lakin sonra ilgi duyduğum bir konu olduğu için çekimine kapıldım. Adana'da popüler bir kitap mağazasında tekrar karşılaştığımda kitabın gerçekten kitap gibi koktuğunu fark edip kokusunu içime çekip durdum. Meğerse işin sırrı, aralardaki kuşe formalardanmış. Çocukluğumda eve götürür götürmez kokladığım Bilim ve Teknik dergileri gibi kokuyordu.
Velhasıl, 23 Ekim'de kütüphanemin "Aydınlanma Asansörü" adını verdiğim rafında yerini bulunca hemen okuma sıramda torpil yapıp en öne aldım. Elbette kokusu nedeniyle!
Okumaya başladığım andan itibaren, bu kitabın Sapiens ile alakasının olmadığını anlamam bir oldu. Zaten ondan çok önce yazım ve basım çalışmaları başlamış. Kapitalizmin bir günah çıkarması niteliğindeki Hayvanlardan Tanrılara - Sapiens: İnsan Türünün Kısa Bir Tarihi (Yorumuma bakınız) ile kıyasladığımda çok daha bilimsel bir kitap olduğunu da anlamam fazla sürmedi.
Kitabın yazarlarının alanlarından da kaynaklı olarak; öncelikle;
1) Neandertaller üzerine bilimsel çalışmaların yöntemleri
2) Neandertallerin kullandıkları aletler
3) Kazı çalışmalarının sorunları ve teknik imkansızlıklar
4) Bilimsel çalışmaların teknolojik enstrümanlarının geldikleri noktalar
başta olmak üzere; Neandertaller üzerine hemen her konuya değindiğini göreceksiniz (Değinilen konuların tam listesini aşağıya özetledim). Kitaba eklenen, kuşe; renkli görsellerin okuru sıkıldığı anda kendine bağladığı; görsel duyuları gelişmiş okurların kafasında her şeyin daha iyi canlanmasını sağladığı da ortada.
Kitap Neandertaller üzerine çok şey söylerken, onların nasıl insanlar oldukları, neler yaşadıkları konusunda hiçbir şey söylemiyor da diyebiliriz. Bu başta okuru biraz hayal kırıklığına uğratırken; kitabın ilerleyen bölümlerinde sahte bilime yönelik eleştiriler sayesinde bunun nedenini anlarsınız. Yazarlar, bilimsel ispatları olmayan her türlü fantastik öğeyi bu kitaptan uzak tutmaya çalışmışlar. Bu nedenle "Neandertaller yıldızlara bakıp iç geçirdiler mi?", "Neandertaller aşık olurlar mıydı?" veya "Neandertalleri Sapiensler yedi mi?" ya da "Irzlarına geçip katledip yaktılar mı?" gibi fantastik kurguların hiçbirinin cevabı bu kitapta bulunamayacaktır. Bu kitap, Neandertaller ile ilgili;
-Nereden geldiler?
-Ne zaman ortaya çıktılar?
-İnsançocuğunun gelişiminde bir evre miydiler? Yoksa bambaşka bir tür müydüler?
-Sapiensler onlardan mı türedi yoksa ortak atayı mı paylaşıyorlardı?
-Bugün hala yaşıyorlar mı?
-Nasıl yok oldular?
-Nerelerde yaşadılar ve nelerle beslendiler?
-Ne tür aletler kullandılar?
-Ölü gömme gelenekleri var mıydı?
-Bir sanata veya dine sahipler miydi?
-Nasıl görünüyorlardı?
gibi, arkeolojik bulgularla anlaşılıp ispat edilebilecek konulara değinmiş.
Kitapta eleştirebileceğim tek şey başlarda bir "Avrupa merkezli" algı sezmiş olmam. Puanımı da bu nedenle bir yıldız kırdım. Gerçi Neandertalleri Avrupa merkezli yaşadıkları için başka türlü anlatmanın olanaksızlığı ortadayken; "İlk Avrupalılar" yönüyle irdeleyen birkaç paragraf nedeniyle biraz Avrupa merkezcilik de sezilmiyor değil.
Bu kitabı kendine özgü yapan detaylardan birisi; en sonundaki "Kurmaca Eserlerdeki Neandertaller" bölümünün son derece ilgi çekici olması. Kitapta yazarlar Neandertaller ile ilgili yaygın ön yargıları da eleştirirken bu önyargıların kaynaklarını da irdeleyerek yanılgıların kökenlerini ortaya çıkarıyorlar.
Yazarların en büyük eleştirisi ise Onların "ilkel mağara insanları" olarak görülmelerine yönelik. Bunun zaman zaman biliminsanları tarafından da düşülen bir hata olduğu yazarların dikkatinden kaçmıyor.
Kısacası;
Hayvanlardan Tanrılara - Sapiens: İnsan Türünün Kısa Bir Tarihi
Üçüncü Şempanze
popüler kitaplarıyla bir Üçleme olarak okunabilir.
M.B.
https://agacingovdesi.com/2021/03/31/...
Bir kitapçıda rafta gördüğümde, her zamanki kitap seçiciliğim tutmuş; "Sapiens tutunca bunu bastılar" deyip yanından burun kıvırıp geçmiştim. Lakin sonra ilgi duyduğum bir konu olduğu için çekimine kapıldım. Adana'da popüler bir kitap mağazasında tekrar karşılaştığımda kitabın gerçekten kitap gibi koktuğunu fark edip kokusunu içime çekip durdum. Meğerse işin sırrı, aralardaki kuşe formalardanmış. Çocukluğumda eve götürür götürmez kokladığım Bilim ve Teknik dergileri gibi kokuyordu.
Velhasıl, 23 Ekim'de kütüphanemin "Aydınlanma Asansörü" adını verdiğim rafında yerini bulunca hemen okuma sıramda torpil yapıp en öne aldım. Elbette kokusu nedeniyle!
Okumaya başladığım andan itibaren, bu kitabın Sapiens ile alakasının olmadığını anlamam bir oldu. Zaten ondan çok önce yazım ve basım çalışmaları başlamış. Kapitalizmin bir günah çıkarması niteliğindeki Hayvanlardan Tanrılara - Sapiens: İnsan Türünün Kısa Bir Tarihi (Yorumuma bakınız) ile kıyasladığımda çok daha bilimsel bir kitap olduğunu da anlamam fazla sürmedi.
Kitabın yazarlarının alanlarından da kaynaklı olarak; öncelikle;
1) Neandertaller üzerine bilimsel çalışmaların yöntemleri
2) Neandertallerin kullandıkları aletler
3) Kazı çalışmalarının sorunları ve teknik imkansızlıklar
4) Bilimsel çalışmaların teknolojik enstrümanlarının geldikleri noktalar
başta olmak üzere; Neandertaller üzerine hemen her konuya değindiğini göreceksiniz (Değinilen konuların tam listesini aşağıya özetledim). Kitaba eklenen, kuşe; renkli görsellerin okuru sıkıldığı anda kendine bağladığı; görsel duyuları gelişmiş okurların kafasında her şeyin daha iyi canlanmasını sağladığı da ortada.
Kitap Neandertaller üzerine çok şey söylerken, onların nasıl insanlar oldukları, neler yaşadıkları konusunda hiçbir şey söylemiyor da diyebiliriz. Bu başta okuru biraz hayal kırıklığına uğratırken; kitabın ilerleyen bölümlerinde sahte bilime yönelik eleştiriler sayesinde bunun nedenini anlarsınız. Yazarlar, bilimsel ispatları olmayan her türlü fantastik öğeyi bu kitaptan uzak tutmaya çalışmışlar. Bu nedenle "Neandertaller yıldızlara bakıp iç geçirdiler mi?", "Neandertaller aşık olurlar mıydı?" veya "Neandertalleri Sapiensler yedi mi?" ya da "Irzlarına geçip katledip yaktılar mı?" gibi fantastik kurguların hiçbirinin cevabı bu kitapta bulunamayacaktır. Bu kitap, Neandertaller ile ilgili;
-Nereden geldiler?
-Ne zaman ortaya çıktılar?
-İnsançocuğunun gelişiminde bir evre miydiler? Yoksa bambaşka bir tür müydüler?
-Sapiensler onlardan mı türedi yoksa ortak atayı mı paylaşıyorlardı?
-Bugün hala yaşıyorlar mı?
-Nasıl yok oldular?
-Nerelerde yaşadılar ve nelerle beslendiler?
-Ne tür aletler kullandılar?
-Ölü gömme gelenekleri var mıydı?
-Bir sanata veya dine sahipler miydi?
-Nasıl görünüyorlardı?
gibi, arkeolojik bulgularla anlaşılıp ispat edilebilecek konulara değinmiş.
Kitapta eleştirebileceğim tek şey başlarda bir "Avrupa merkezli" algı sezmiş olmam. Puanımı da bu nedenle bir yıldız kırdım. Gerçi Neandertalleri Avrupa merkezli yaşadıkları için başka türlü anlatmanın olanaksızlığı ortadayken; "İlk Avrupalılar" yönüyle irdeleyen birkaç paragraf nedeniyle biraz Avrupa merkezcilik de sezilmiyor değil.
Bu kitabı kendine özgü yapan detaylardan birisi; en sonundaki "Kurmaca Eserlerdeki Neandertaller" bölümünün son derece ilgi çekici olması. Kitapta yazarlar Neandertaller ile ilgili yaygın ön yargıları da eleştirirken bu önyargıların kaynaklarını da irdeleyerek yanılgıların kökenlerini ortaya çıkarıyorlar.
Yazarların en büyük eleştirisi ise Onların "ilkel mağara insanları" olarak görülmelerine yönelik. Bunun zaman zaman biliminsanları tarafından da düşülen bir hata olduğu yazarların dikkatinden kaçmıyor.
Kısacası;
Hayvanlardan Tanrılara - Sapiens: İnsan Türünün Kısa Bir Tarihi
Üçüncü Şempanze
popüler kitaplarıyla bir Üçleme olarak okunabilir.
M.B.
https://agacingovdesi.com/2021/03/31/...
September 17, 2024
The extensive references to Neanderthals made by the character Bruno in Creation Lake reminded me that I had placed this short book on my TBR after reading Nataliya’s enthusiastic review.
The pace of discovery of new facts about the Neanderthals is rapid, given advances in technology that help interpret their artifacts, and in the ~10 years since this book was published there have undoubtedly been many new findings. As the authors note, they were forced to revise sections of the book to incorporate developments during the time they were writing.
Still, I don’t think new findings would affect the impact of the book, which frames the major revision in our understanding of Neanderthals from the non-speaking, culture-less hulks to a species very much like modern humans in many respects. I appreciated the style and structure of the book, which was somehow chatty while remaining fact based. A very easy read despite the abundance of place names, species of hominids, and forms of tools that had the potential to be confusing. The authors are especially good on defining timelines (to the extent that is possible).
All in all, a very enjoyable read. Highly recommended for those who, like me, may be interested in learning a bit more about Neanderthals, but don’t want to get lost in arcane details.
The pace of discovery of new facts about the Neanderthals is rapid, given advances in technology that help interpret their artifacts, and in the ~10 years since this book was published there have undoubtedly been many new findings. As the authors note, they were forced to revise sections of the book to incorporate developments during the time they were writing.
Still, I don’t think new findings would affect the impact of the book, which frames the major revision in our understanding of Neanderthals from the non-speaking, culture-less hulks to a species very much like modern humans in many respects. I appreciated the style and structure of the book, which was somehow chatty while remaining fact based. A very easy read despite the abundance of place names, species of hominids, and forms of tools that had the potential to be confusing. The authors are especially good on defining timelines (to the extent that is possible).
All in all, a very enjoyable read. Highly recommended for those who, like me, may be interested in learning a bit more about Neanderthals, but don’t want to get lost in arcane details.
June 25, 2024
A fascinating look through the study and findings of research into the Neanderthals. And although they clearly don't mean to, when they get to the bit describing Neanderthals in popular culture, they give a good list of novels to read next. I would recommend this book to anyone who is even the least bit interested in history or culture. Although I will say that it left me feeling rather sad, but then most things do in Lockdown, so I wouldn't blame the book for that.
October 26, 2023
For me, this is an extraordinarily readable 2013 update of James Shreeve’s 1995 chef-d'oeuvre, The Neandertal Enigma. Besides being much more current, this one seems, in some ways, less pedantic and thus more accessible to the mildly enthusiastic science crowd.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
July 19, 2016
Riveting account of newer strands of thought regards Neanderthal people that largely discounts any notion that they died out due to being a 'lesser' hominid and also gives the lie to the notion of them lacking the capacity for speech. Disappointingly, the authors put their disappearance down to 'climate change' (ie we are no further forward on this and have frankly no idea) which seems to be a catch-all for anything Science doesn't know but wants to sound profound about.
My personal theory is a devastating epidemic-type disease - the first Influenza epidemic perhaps? It is a possibility as they could have had no immunity AND may have had a genetic susceptibility- wiped them out almost completely: up to 4% of our genetic structure today remains Neanderthal.
My personal theory is a devastating epidemic-type disease - the first Influenza epidemic perhaps? It is a possibility as they could have had no immunity AND may have had a genetic susceptibility- wiped them out almost completely: up to 4% of our genetic structure today remains Neanderthal.
November 5, 2017
For a book that promises to be all about Neanderthals and not so much about our ancestors, this didn’t totally deliver. The Neanderthals are compared to our (more direct) ancestors in pretty much every chapter, and not just where the two may have met and interacted. Nonetheless, it’s a good survey of what we currently know about Neanderthals thanks to work by people like Svante Pääbo who’ve taken it to the lab, and people who work in the field.
Honestly, it’s not as in-depth as I hoped, but it is an interesting subject and some of the photos in the full-colour plates are well worth a look — reconstructions, sites, skeletons, etc.
Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
Honestly, it’s not as in-depth as I hoped, but it is an interesting subject and some of the photos in the full-colour plates are well worth a look — reconstructions, sites, skeletons, etc.
Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
December 23, 2015
Comprehensive and very accessible look at our not-so-knuckle-dragging cousins. Makes a great case for Neanderthal intelligence, while making the owners of the bones look like characters from the Far Side.
"Perhaps the single child in the group wandered into an uninhabitable cave and fell in a pit. Then one by one the rest of the clan became trapped in the course of failed rescue attempts." And you're wondering why they went extinct?
I laughed. I cried. I knapped myself some flint tools.
"Perhaps the single child in the group wandered into an uninhabitable cave and fell in a pit. Then one by one the rest of the clan became trapped in the course of failed rescue attempts." And you're wondering why they went extinct?
I laughed. I cried. I knapped myself some flint tools.
January 5, 2020
3rd book for 2020.
This offers a good accessible account of current scientific knowledge circa 2015 of research into Homo neanderthalensis. The authors basically make the case that Neanderthals were brighter, more socially competent, and more linguistically gifted than previously appreciated. Although they were largely meat eaters of big game—red deer, reindeer, wild boar, ibex, straight-tusked elephant, woolly rhinoceroses—dental evidence shows evidence of wild grains in their diet and even chamomile (perhaps for medicinal reasons). There is also evidence of cannibalism at multiple sites. There is little evidence for use of jewellery, or other forms of art—though a minority opinion holds that some cave paintings may in fact be Neanderthal in origin—suggesting a limited grasp of symbolic reasoning comparative to Homo sapiens; though how the authors square this with their claim that Homo neanderthalensis had linguistic abilities is unclear. Previous ideas that Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers has no now been dismissed. Pollen grains found previously with Neanderthal bones being now thought to have been deposited by rodents.
The final chapter, which discusses Neanderthals place in popular culture, could have been omitted. This seems more filler than anything, for what is a pretty slim volume.
3-stars.
This offers a good accessible account of current scientific knowledge circa 2015 of research into Homo neanderthalensis. The authors basically make the case that Neanderthals were brighter, more socially competent, and more linguistically gifted than previously appreciated. Although they were largely meat eaters of big game—red deer, reindeer, wild boar, ibex, straight-tusked elephant, woolly rhinoceroses—dental evidence shows evidence of wild grains in their diet and even chamomile (perhaps for medicinal reasons). There is also evidence of cannibalism at multiple sites. There is little evidence for use of jewellery, or other forms of art—though a minority opinion holds that some cave paintings may in fact be Neanderthal in origin—suggesting a limited grasp of symbolic reasoning comparative to Homo sapiens; though how the authors square this with their claim that Homo neanderthalensis had linguistic abilities is unclear. Previous ideas that Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers has no now been dismissed. Pollen grains found previously with Neanderthal bones being now thought to have been deposited by rodents.
The final chapter, which discusses Neanderthals place in popular culture, could have been omitted. This seems more filler than anything, for what is a pretty slim volume.
3-stars.
June 14, 2019
FUZZY ON PHYLOGENY, LANGUAGE, AND MIGRATIONS
[…]
The timeline is not always very clear but let’s put some order in what we get, at times scattered over the pages and chapters. Some humans – it would be more accurate to say Hominins – left Africa two million years ago and reached South East Asia then. That’s fundamental but it is said once page 20 and it will never be exploited anymore. One million years ago the first humans – Hominins would be better here too – entered Europe. Note these very earlier Hominin migrations are not specified. We assume these Hominins were Homo Erectus, though these Homo Erectus were probably less evolved in South East Asia than in Europe. But this is not specified. The authors say that this timeline is going to be repeated for modern humans who will reach South East Asia, and even Australia by the way, before they reach Europe. The times appear to be in hundred thousand years, but it is not clear because the first migration to North Africa is not stated and this one happened long before the two the authors quote. We can assume there were then in North Africa some Homo Ergaster or even Homo Erectus left along the Mediterranean after they moved out of Africa altogether, and the Homo Sapiens who moved from Black Africa to North Africa found these older Hominins and in a way or another they integrated the modern human arriving communities or were caused to become extinct the same way it happened in Black Africa, in several ten thousand years somewhere around 200,000 years ago, or earlier. These earlier surviving Hominins had only one choice, to integrate or just become extinct. That’s the main difference with Black Africa where the older Hominins evolved into Homo Sapiens and thus disappeared by becoming Homo Sapiens. North Africa was different. This first migration – and the authors do not say a word about it because their Hominins are mute, do not speak – covers the territories where today all Semitic languages are traditionally spoken. It would be interesting to ask WHY?
The authors then shift to Europe and Neanderthals. The first Neanderthal traits appeared, they say, around 500,000 years ago and the Neanderthal distinctive form is stabilized around 250,000 years ago, and they clearly say in Europe. They say that they evolved from a certain Homo Heidelbergensis, but they do not specify if these Heidelbergensis migrated to Europe before or if they descended from an older Hominin, Homo Erectus for example. This unspecified origin becomes very fuzzy when they actually bring up the hypothesis that these Homo Heidelbergensis could have migrated to Africa later on, implying that Homo Sapiens could have evolved from them. That sounds greatly debatable. I would favor rather the evolution of Homo Erectus in Europe and in Africa along the same phylogenetic line and the traits of Homo Heidelbergensis could then have been produced both in Europe and in Africa (maybe in Asia too but we are not up-to-date about Asia), and these Hominins were rather evolving fast, hence they were not particularly stable and they evolved in more advanced Hominins, Homo Neanderthals for example in Europe if we accept the authors’ hypothesis. In Africa they may have been pockets of mutating Hominins who did not survive, who became extinct fast because of the competition with other Hominins around them, or the evolution there produced now and then some Heidelbergensis traits that have survived archaeologically though they had no future at the time because the evolution to Homo Sapiens was more dynamic and stronger.. What I want to insist on here is that if you state Neanderthals evolved in Europe you have to state the presence before them of an older Hominin and you have to specify how these older Hominins arrived there in Europe to evolved later on into Neanderthals, assuming what is accepted by everyone that Hominins initially evolved in Black Africa. The authors do not say much on this question that remains misty.
Then the authors state the expansion of Neanderthals in Europe and their migrating to the Middle East around 130,000 years ago. Since they know all non-African natives have Neanderthal genes (3 to 5%) and we should also speak of the fact that all Asians, hence a good proportion of all Native Americans, have some genes from Denisovans: one contribution for Southeast Asians and two contributions for the Chinese, and some Denisovan jaws were found recently in Tibet expanding tremendously their territory and explaining why they transmitted a gene to the later Homo Sapiens in the Himalayas that enables them to live at high altitudes. The Denisovans evolved from the same genetic basis as Neanderthals and they could not have evolved from Homo Heidelbergensis. So, we here have a problem. Denisovans seem to have evolved from some Homo Erectus but along their own line, which implies natural selection enables each evolving group to adapt to their local conditions. But to come back to the genetic exchanges between Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis it must have taken place in the Middle East (the vast Middle East that includes Iran and Pakistan) because all Homo Sapiens going out of Black Africa will eventually, one way or another, cross the Middle East and stay there for some time before moving on.
But the book is very disappointing on this subject. If we still today carry 3 to 5% of Neanderthal genes, that means there was some inbreeding, but then the children and probably their mothers were integrated in Homo Sapiens communities, hence taken away from Neanderthal communities, hence depriving Neanderthals from the new genes necessary not to genetically decline (inbreeding) and what’s more, some of the women were taken away. I can say – and here gynecologists and pediatricians would be useful – because Hominins having from the very start broken the natural rule of reproducing to the level permitted by locally available resources, which enabled them to expand and thus to fuel the migrations, to become and then be a migrating species, but not migrating like migrating animals. Migrating in order to conquer new territories and new resources. To do that with species that were fertile from 13 onward up to death with a life expectancy of 29 years, the women had to be pregnant many times (8 to 10 times at least). Only this level of procreation could guarantee the community to have three adults born from each woman, understanding infantile death, death when delivering for the mothers, predators against young children or babies, accidents, and of course diseases, not to mention death of men and women before the normal life expectancy of the species, all these and even some more (like sterility for some women) might have reduced the procreative level of women on the average. That means as soon as 13 years old, all women, all at once, were pregnant, had a child they were breastfeeding for twelve to fifteen months, and one or two other children who needed some care, as long as they were alive. That is only possible if women are the beneficiaries of a sexual division of labor. Women collectively take care of children and since one woman can breastfeed two children or three from time to time, the mothers could rotate in that childcare and those who were freed from child care for the day could do other things, and one thing women did was paint the caves (proved both in Europe and Indonesia in the same historical period) in which they lived, or buried their dead, or contacted the spirits from the other side of reality. With that logic in mind, the hybrid Sapiens-Neanderthal child was kept by the Homo Sapiens community, and the mother, it the Neanderthal parent was the mother, moved along to be able to take care of the child. That was I think an important cause of the decline of Neanderthals. Some today speak of a decline of fertility among Neanderthals. This becomes very simple then. The hybrid children were integrated into Homo Sapiens communities and in three or four generations their specific Neanderthal genes got diluted to reach today 3 to 5%.
In spite of what the authors say, in spite of the new time measuring with new techniques that can finally reach beyond the 40,000-year deadlock of carbon reading, we still have a lot of re-measuring to do but the overlapping period must have been at least a few thousand years and maybe even ten thousand years, as researchers in Bordeaux say.
Then we come to the question of the brains of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. The authors repeat all the time that the size of the brain is similar or even bigger for Neanderthals. They never mention the fact that the size of the brain has to be measured in proportion with the mass of the body, what we call Encephalization quotient (EQ). I have calculated that the bigger brain of Neanderthals is in fact 11% smaller in EQ than Homo Sapiens’ brain. They insist on the fact that Homo Sapiens is slender, an expert runner over long distance and can run-hunt animals they can bring down to exhaustion, though the running hunters don’t reach that point of exhaustion, maybe because they could relay along the way from one runner to another, which would have implied a lot of planning to foresee the route the animal was going to be chased into. They insist on the shape of the Neanderthal brain that is flatter meaning with probably less cortex, particularly in the frontal area where the skull is definitely flatter and that’s the frontal lobe that contains the famous Broca area that is the coordinating area for all complex activities that require a lot of coordination among many organs, muscles, and limbs. One particularly complex activity is breathing for a long-distance runner, and this coordination concerns the various organs that will collaterally produce speech. We can then assume that, since Neanderthals cannot run long distance because his Broca area is flattened, he cannot coordinate complex activities with his hand and thus cannot improve his stone tool production, and cannot produce the same articulated language as Homo Sapiens, not to speak of the jaw structure that may make some consonants difficult to pronounce.
That explains why I am not satisfied with formulas like “complex speech” or “have language.” Language has a phylogeny and this phylogeny cannot be negated because if that phylogeny is not respected, human articulated language will never be produced. First, before even the first articulation Hominins must be able to rotate vowels and consonants, so with four or five consonants and three or four vowels monkeys actually produce seven or eight calls, but humans can produce up to five power four items of the simple pattern CVC, hence 625 items. And it is this rich capability that leads Hominins, and of course Homo Sapiens at the top, to the first articulation: each item becomes a word attached to a referred entity outside the brain. And it is only when this articulation is reached that the next ones can be envisaged: first differentiating spatial hence nominal items from temporal hence verbal items and articulating one nominal item with one verbal item. That’s the basic sentence structure. But to produce a rich sentence and not a two-word sentence like two-year-old children, we have to invest into the various nominal elements functions (the relationships between each nominal element and the verbal element at the center of the sentence), and the tense and mood conjugation into the verbal elements. Language thus grows after the rotation of vowels and consonants, and because of it, from root to stem to foliage from the first to the third articulations. And this Is essential when connected to the three migrations out of Black Africa. The first one around 200,000 years ago to North Africa (all first-articulation Semitic root-languages), the second around 130,000 years ago to the whole of Asia meeting Denisovans there (all second-articulation isolating stem-languages), and the third around 80,000-50,000 years ago in two waves (all third articulation agglutinative Turkic frond-languages, and then third-articulation synthetic-analytical Indo-European and Indo-Aryan frond-languages).
The authors consider that the development of the handaxe is the real turning point among Hominins demonstrating their creativity and in a way their capability at planning the future. I would add that it is also the revealing element that requires a certain level of communication and social organization. I would add that migrating is for me the real turning point that required a social organization and a level of communication implying some linguistic code for this migrating to be simply possible. Then the authors follow, without calling it phylogenic, the phylogeny of stone tools and weapons, hence of a typically human technology developed by human Hominins. This handaxe is connected to Homo Erectus but may have been developed before by Homo Habilis. We must understand one species developed from the previous one or ones and inherited the previous species’ knowledge and know-how, which proves there is some linguistic code involved there. The book is clear that Neanderthals developed a certain level of stone tools beyond the handaxe, but they were not able to go beyond this Levallois and then at most some Mousterian technology. The next phase was developed by the Aurignacian Homo Sapiens (the best-known one is Cro-Magnon) arriving in Europe and then further on by the Gravettians. The authors seem to believe the Gravettians were a new Homo Sapiens migration (the second after the Aurignacians) though they do not see that Homo Sapiens like other Hominins before them developed one technology from the previous one, hence in a continuous movement, just the same way the genetic mutations produced one Hominin species from the previous one. In this case, Homo Sapiens did not develop from Neanderthals (or Denisovans) but from another Hominin species seen as either common to the three species (hence Homo Erectus) or slightly diversified by an intermediary evolution like Homo Heidelbergensis or Homo Ergaster. Note we do not have this intermediary in Asia, and we do not need it since Homo Sapiens in Asia, like in Europe came from Black Africa. The authors state the handaxe that became “common in East Africa and Asian west of the Himalayas’ took more time to become common with the “European pioneers [who] did not use [it] until 500,000 years ago.” First, this clearly states that it was a Homo Erectus invention in Africa and it spread to Asia when Homo Erectus spread to Asia. But since we cannot state there was any communication between Asia and Europe, we have to consider it was brought to Europe by Homo Erectus when he came to Europe from Africa and this implies the first Hominins (at the genetic level of Homo Erectus) arrived in Europe around 500,000 years ago but it is in contradiction with the fact that the first Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe at the same date, which implies it is Neanderthals that brought the handaxe. But then what about Homo Heidelbergensis? It is such elements that are missing here and there in this book. We can only draw them from various remarks scattered around in the chapters. This is yet essential to understand that there is a continuity in this evolution that proves the existence of a phylogeny in such technological evolution and the existence of a transmission of technological heritage from one species to the next, hence of a code that enables that transmission, and what’s more the evolution that goes along with this transmission.
We have the same problem with the case of “cannibalism.” This word is the wrong word for the phenomenon the authors are speaking of. Hominins eating Hominin flesh and probably bone marrow and brains. Cannibalism is a modern concept invented after human sacrifice was banned in Mediterranean society (check Abraham and his son), though it was replaced by public executions and gladiator games by the Romans, and note it was transformed into a rite of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ still in the Roman Empire after Emperor Constantine. This practice of Hominins eating Hominins is another negation of nature. Very few animal species eat their own members, and yet only after death, some kind of species-self-scavenging along with the principle of waste-not-want-not. This is then the second natural law Hominins negate after having negated the natural law of only procreating the children the local resources can support. The eating of the flesh, bone-marrow and brains of dead Hominins, even of sacrificed Hominins is ritualized, for one, and justified by some belief, the most common belief being that you can recuperate the qualities of the dead ones by eating them. We have to note that eating the ritualized “bread” and drinking the ritualized “wine” are for any Christian of any affiliation eating Jesus’ body and drinking Jesus’ blood. This is nothing but ritualized “cannibalism.” That is supposed to give you the purity of Jesus, the divine purity and the divine light of Jesus. To call such an act “cannibalism” is absolutely off the point and even non-empathetic. It is the same for old Hominins. That enables the individuals in the tribe, and the tribe per se, to concentrate the qualities of a class, group, family, clan, etc. It can protect you against dangers in life, and if the eaten person is an enemy who was captured, tortured and sacrificed (put to death) then at times dismembered and the pieces distributed to the various members of the tribe to be cooked and eaten, that should enable you and the tribe not to be attacked anymore by this enemy. Both a ritual that is in a way magic and psychological on the side of the eater, and symbolical in the form of fear on the side of the enemy tribe. The practice of impaling by Vlad Count Dracula and by the Ottomans or the Bey of Algiers a long time ago, or the crucifixion systematically used by the Romans had exactly the same objective: a warning. That’s what is going to happen to you if you attack us. So, eating the flesh, bone-marrow and brains of an enemy is both a religious ritual and a clear military and political warning. The hearts of the sacrificed Mayas were at times eaten by the elite rulers and priests performing the sacrifice. To call that cannibalism is to miss the point.
There is, in fact, a third case of the negation of a natural rule. All, or at least most, mammal species would naturally avoid in-breeding. Yet in some human societies, inbreeding is the rule among rulers like Pharaohs. This in-breeding of brothers and sisters is genetically absurd, and yet it is practiced supposedly to concentrate the qualities of the concerned bloodline. I would even say that one brother killing another brother is also quite common in many religions and mythologies. Think simply of the Bible (Abel and Cain) or of Egypt (Seth and Osiris). We have the same pattern in many civilizations in all continents. It is some kind of brotherly sacrifice necessary to bring up the next phase of history. We might say today it is incest. But this is false because in these civilizations these brotherly sacrifices are regenerating and bringing a new stage of development. It is quite obvious with the subsequent conflict of Isis versus Seth and the fate of Horus, the postmortem-procreated son of Osiris and Isis. But Cain is the founder of the metal civilization and technology, as well as of music in the Bible. Music will only be fully integrated by King David with the instating of the Levite school of music. All that is to say that in archaeology we are not supposed to be anachronistic because then we do not understand what we are speaking of.
[…]
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
[…]
The timeline is not always very clear but let’s put some order in what we get, at times scattered over the pages and chapters. Some humans – it would be more accurate to say Hominins – left Africa two million years ago and reached South East Asia then. That’s fundamental but it is said once page 20 and it will never be exploited anymore. One million years ago the first humans – Hominins would be better here too – entered Europe. Note these very earlier Hominin migrations are not specified. We assume these Hominins were Homo Erectus, though these Homo Erectus were probably less evolved in South East Asia than in Europe. But this is not specified. The authors say that this timeline is going to be repeated for modern humans who will reach South East Asia, and even Australia by the way, before they reach Europe. The times appear to be in hundred thousand years, but it is not clear because the first migration to North Africa is not stated and this one happened long before the two the authors quote. We can assume there were then in North Africa some Homo Ergaster or even Homo Erectus left along the Mediterranean after they moved out of Africa altogether, and the Homo Sapiens who moved from Black Africa to North Africa found these older Hominins and in a way or another they integrated the modern human arriving communities or were caused to become extinct the same way it happened in Black Africa, in several ten thousand years somewhere around 200,000 years ago, or earlier. These earlier surviving Hominins had only one choice, to integrate or just become extinct. That’s the main difference with Black Africa where the older Hominins evolved into Homo Sapiens and thus disappeared by becoming Homo Sapiens. North Africa was different. This first migration – and the authors do not say a word about it because their Hominins are mute, do not speak – covers the territories where today all Semitic languages are traditionally spoken. It would be interesting to ask WHY?
The authors then shift to Europe and Neanderthals. The first Neanderthal traits appeared, they say, around 500,000 years ago and the Neanderthal distinctive form is stabilized around 250,000 years ago, and they clearly say in Europe. They say that they evolved from a certain Homo Heidelbergensis, but they do not specify if these Heidelbergensis migrated to Europe before or if they descended from an older Hominin, Homo Erectus for example. This unspecified origin becomes very fuzzy when they actually bring up the hypothesis that these Homo Heidelbergensis could have migrated to Africa later on, implying that Homo Sapiens could have evolved from them. That sounds greatly debatable. I would favor rather the evolution of Homo Erectus in Europe and in Africa along the same phylogenetic line and the traits of Homo Heidelbergensis could then have been produced both in Europe and in Africa (maybe in Asia too but we are not up-to-date about Asia), and these Hominins were rather evolving fast, hence they were not particularly stable and they evolved in more advanced Hominins, Homo Neanderthals for example in Europe if we accept the authors’ hypothesis. In Africa they may have been pockets of mutating Hominins who did not survive, who became extinct fast because of the competition with other Hominins around them, or the evolution there produced now and then some Heidelbergensis traits that have survived archaeologically though they had no future at the time because the evolution to Homo Sapiens was more dynamic and stronger.. What I want to insist on here is that if you state Neanderthals evolved in Europe you have to state the presence before them of an older Hominin and you have to specify how these older Hominins arrived there in Europe to evolved later on into Neanderthals, assuming what is accepted by everyone that Hominins initially evolved in Black Africa. The authors do not say much on this question that remains misty.
Then the authors state the expansion of Neanderthals in Europe and their migrating to the Middle East around 130,000 years ago. Since they know all non-African natives have Neanderthal genes (3 to 5%) and we should also speak of the fact that all Asians, hence a good proportion of all Native Americans, have some genes from Denisovans: one contribution for Southeast Asians and two contributions for the Chinese, and some Denisovan jaws were found recently in Tibet expanding tremendously their territory and explaining why they transmitted a gene to the later Homo Sapiens in the Himalayas that enables them to live at high altitudes. The Denisovans evolved from the same genetic basis as Neanderthals and they could not have evolved from Homo Heidelbergensis. So, we here have a problem. Denisovans seem to have evolved from some Homo Erectus but along their own line, which implies natural selection enables each evolving group to adapt to their local conditions. But to come back to the genetic exchanges between Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis it must have taken place in the Middle East (the vast Middle East that includes Iran and Pakistan) because all Homo Sapiens going out of Black Africa will eventually, one way or another, cross the Middle East and stay there for some time before moving on.
But the book is very disappointing on this subject. If we still today carry 3 to 5% of Neanderthal genes, that means there was some inbreeding, but then the children and probably their mothers were integrated in Homo Sapiens communities, hence taken away from Neanderthal communities, hence depriving Neanderthals from the new genes necessary not to genetically decline (inbreeding) and what’s more, some of the women were taken away. I can say – and here gynecologists and pediatricians would be useful – because Hominins having from the very start broken the natural rule of reproducing to the level permitted by locally available resources, which enabled them to expand and thus to fuel the migrations, to become and then be a migrating species, but not migrating like migrating animals. Migrating in order to conquer new territories and new resources. To do that with species that were fertile from 13 onward up to death with a life expectancy of 29 years, the women had to be pregnant many times (8 to 10 times at least). Only this level of procreation could guarantee the community to have three adults born from each woman, understanding infantile death, death when delivering for the mothers, predators against young children or babies, accidents, and of course diseases, not to mention death of men and women before the normal life expectancy of the species, all these and even some more (like sterility for some women) might have reduced the procreative level of women on the average. That means as soon as 13 years old, all women, all at once, were pregnant, had a child they were breastfeeding for twelve to fifteen months, and one or two other children who needed some care, as long as they were alive. That is only possible if women are the beneficiaries of a sexual division of labor. Women collectively take care of children and since one woman can breastfeed two children or three from time to time, the mothers could rotate in that childcare and those who were freed from child care for the day could do other things, and one thing women did was paint the caves (proved both in Europe and Indonesia in the same historical period) in which they lived, or buried their dead, or contacted the spirits from the other side of reality. With that logic in mind, the hybrid Sapiens-Neanderthal child was kept by the Homo Sapiens community, and the mother, it the Neanderthal parent was the mother, moved along to be able to take care of the child. That was I think an important cause of the decline of Neanderthals. Some today speak of a decline of fertility among Neanderthals. This becomes very simple then. The hybrid children were integrated into Homo Sapiens communities and in three or four generations their specific Neanderthal genes got diluted to reach today 3 to 5%.
In spite of what the authors say, in spite of the new time measuring with new techniques that can finally reach beyond the 40,000-year deadlock of carbon reading, we still have a lot of re-measuring to do but the overlapping period must have been at least a few thousand years and maybe even ten thousand years, as researchers in Bordeaux say.
Then we come to the question of the brains of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. The authors repeat all the time that the size of the brain is similar or even bigger for Neanderthals. They never mention the fact that the size of the brain has to be measured in proportion with the mass of the body, what we call Encephalization quotient (EQ). I have calculated that the bigger brain of Neanderthals is in fact 11% smaller in EQ than Homo Sapiens’ brain. They insist on the fact that Homo Sapiens is slender, an expert runner over long distance and can run-hunt animals they can bring down to exhaustion, though the running hunters don’t reach that point of exhaustion, maybe because they could relay along the way from one runner to another, which would have implied a lot of planning to foresee the route the animal was going to be chased into. They insist on the shape of the Neanderthal brain that is flatter meaning with probably less cortex, particularly in the frontal area where the skull is definitely flatter and that’s the frontal lobe that contains the famous Broca area that is the coordinating area for all complex activities that require a lot of coordination among many organs, muscles, and limbs. One particularly complex activity is breathing for a long-distance runner, and this coordination concerns the various organs that will collaterally produce speech. We can then assume that, since Neanderthals cannot run long distance because his Broca area is flattened, he cannot coordinate complex activities with his hand and thus cannot improve his stone tool production, and cannot produce the same articulated language as Homo Sapiens, not to speak of the jaw structure that may make some consonants difficult to pronounce.
That explains why I am not satisfied with formulas like “complex speech” or “have language.” Language has a phylogeny and this phylogeny cannot be negated because if that phylogeny is not respected, human articulated language will never be produced. First, before even the first articulation Hominins must be able to rotate vowels and consonants, so with four or five consonants and three or four vowels monkeys actually produce seven or eight calls, but humans can produce up to five power four items of the simple pattern CVC, hence 625 items. And it is this rich capability that leads Hominins, and of course Homo Sapiens at the top, to the first articulation: each item becomes a word attached to a referred entity outside the brain. And it is only when this articulation is reached that the next ones can be envisaged: first differentiating spatial hence nominal items from temporal hence verbal items and articulating one nominal item with one verbal item. That’s the basic sentence structure. But to produce a rich sentence and not a two-word sentence like two-year-old children, we have to invest into the various nominal elements functions (the relationships between each nominal element and the verbal element at the center of the sentence), and the tense and mood conjugation into the verbal elements. Language thus grows after the rotation of vowels and consonants, and because of it, from root to stem to foliage from the first to the third articulations. And this Is essential when connected to the three migrations out of Black Africa. The first one around 200,000 years ago to North Africa (all first-articulation Semitic root-languages), the second around 130,000 years ago to the whole of Asia meeting Denisovans there (all second-articulation isolating stem-languages), and the third around 80,000-50,000 years ago in two waves (all third articulation agglutinative Turkic frond-languages, and then third-articulation synthetic-analytical Indo-European and Indo-Aryan frond-languages).
The authors consider that the development of the handaxe is the real turning point among Hominins demonstrating their creativity and in a way their capability at planning the future. I would add that it is also the revealing element that requires a certain level of communication and social organization. I would add that migrating is for me the real turning point that required a social organization and a level of communication implying some linguistic code for this migrating to be simply possible. Then the authors follow, without calling it phylogenic, the phylogeny of stone tools and weapons, hence of a typically human technology developed by human Hominins. This handaxe is connected to Homo Erectus but may have been developed before by Homo Habilis. We must understand one species developed from the previous one or ones and inherited the previous species’ knowledge and know-how, which proves there is some linguistic code involved there. The book is clear that Neanderthals developed a certain level of stone tools beyond the handaxe, but they were not able to go beyond this Levallois and then at most some Mousterian technology. The next phase was developed by the Aurignacian Homo Sapiens (the best-known one is Cro-Magnon) arriving in Europe and then further on by the Gravettians. The authors seem to believe the Gravettians were a new Homo Sapiens migration (the second after the Aurignacians) though they do not see that Homo Sapiens like other Hominins before them developed one technology from the previous one, hence in a continuous movement, just the same way the genetic mutations produced one Hominin species from the previous one. In this case, Homo Sapiens did not develop from Neanderthals (or Denisovans) but from another Hominin species seen as either common to the three species (hence Homo Erectus) or slightly diversified by an intermediary evolution like Homo Heidelbergensis or Homo Ergaster. Note we do not have this intermediary in Asia, and we do not need it since Homo Sapiens in Asia, like in Europe came from Black Africa. The authors state the handaxe that became “common in East Africa and Asian west of the Himalayas’ took more time to become common with the “European pioneers [who] did not use [it] until 500,000 years ago.” First, this clearly states that it was a Homo Erectus invention in Africa and it spread to Asia when Homo Erectus spread to Asia. But since we cannot state there was any communication between Asia and Europe, we have to consider it was brought to Europe by Homo Erectus when he came to Europe from Africa and this implies the first Hominins (at the genetic level of Homo Erectus) arrived in Europe around 500,000 years ago but it is in contradiction with the fact that the first Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe at the same date, which implies it is Neanderthals that brought the handaxe. But then what about Homo Heidelbergensis? It is such elements that are missing here and there in this book. We can only draw them from various remarks scattered around in the chapters. This is yet essential to understand that there is a continuity in this evolution that proves the existence of a phylogeny in such technological evolution and the existence of a transmission of technological heritage from one species to the next, hence of a code that enables that transmission, and what’s more the evolution that goes along with this transmission.
We have the same problem with the case of “cannibalism.” This word is the wrong word for the phenomenon the authors are speaking of. Hominins eating Hominin flesh and probably bone marrow and brains. Cannibalism is a modern concept invented after human sacrifice was banned in Mediterranean society (check Abraham and his son), though it was replaced by public executions and gladiator games by the Romans, and note it was transformed into a rite of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ still in the Roman Empire after Emperor Constantine. This practice of Hominins eating Hominins is another negation of nature. Very few animal species eat their own members, and yet only after death, some kind of species-self-scavenging along with the principle of waste-not-want-not. This is then the second natural law Hominins negate after having negated the natural law of only procreating the children the local resources can support. The eating of the flesh, bone-marrow and brains of dead Hominins, even of sacrificed Hominins is ritualized, for one, and justified by some belief, the most common belief being that you can recuperate the qualities of the dead ones by eating them. We have to note that eating the ritualized “bread” and drinking the ritualized “wine” are for any Christian of any affiliation eating Jesus’ body and drinking Jesus’ blood. This is nothing but ritualized “cannibalism.” That is supposed to give you the purity of Jesus, the divine purity and the divine light of Jesus. To call such an act “cannibalism” is absolutely off the point and even non-empathetic. It is the same for old Hominins. That enables the individuals in the tribe, and the tribe per se, to concentrate the qualities of a class, group, family, clan, etc. It can protect you against dangers in life, and if the eaten person is an enemy who was captured, tortured and sacrificed (put to death) then at times dismembered and the pieces distributed to the various members of the tribe to be cooked and eaten, that should enable you and the tribe not to be attacked anymore by this enemy. Both a ritual that is in a way magic and psychological on the side of the eater, and symbolical in the form of fear on the side of the enemy tribe. The practice of impaling by Vlad Count Dracula and by the Ottomans or the Bey of Algiers a long time ago, or the crucifixion systematically used by the Romans had exactly the same objective: a warning. That’s what is going to happen to you if you attack us. So, eating the flesh, bone-marrow and brains of an enemy is both a religious ritual and a clear military and political warning. The hearts of the sacrificed Mayas were at times eaten by the elite rulers and priests performing the sacrifice. To call that cannibalism is to miss the point.
There is, in fact, a third case of the negation of a natural rule. All, or at least most, mammal species would naturally avoid in-breeding. Yet in some human societies, inbreeding is the rule among rulers like Pharaohs. This in-breeding of brothers and sisters is genetically absurd, and yet it is practiced supposedly to concentrate the qualities of the concerned bloodline. I would even say that one brother killing another brother is also quite common in many religions and mythologies. Think simply of the Bible (Abel and Cain) or of Egypt (Seth and Osiris). We have the same pattern in many civilizations in all continents. It is some kind of brotherly sacrifice necessary to bring up the next phase of history. We might say today it is incest. But this is false because in these civilizations these brotherly sacrifices are regenerating and bringing a new stage of development. It is quite obvious with the subsequent conflict of Isis versus Seth and the fate of Horus, the postmortem-procreated son of Osiris and Isis. But Cain is the founder of the metal civilization and technology, as well as of music in the Bible. Music will only be fully integrated by King David with the instating of the Levite school of music. All that is to say that in archaeology we are not supposed to be anachronistic because then we do not understand what we are speaking of.
[…]
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
January 2, 2020
A quite interesting nonfiction book that attempts to trace and tell the origins, life, and ultimate fate of the Neanderthals. The authors noted two important issues with their book: 1) the point of the book is to tell the entire Neanderthals story, at least as known; their story not bits as they relate to the homo sapiens story. Though what is going on with other humiods on earth is touched upon. 2) the authors noted that if they had finished their book on their original contract timeline (2008), it would have been out of date right before publication. As it is, they needed to release a revised version (2015) two years after publication (2013). Why? Because there have been massive and rapid advances in technology to examine the period (dating and like) and knowledge about Neanderthals and the time period they lived.
Quite readable and informative.
If I had to point out one thing that could be improved, I'd point at the maps. They were not as informative as they could have been. All they needed to do is add some way to determine which locations on the map belonged to which species. Would not have been hard to do. Just add things like x's and other symbols. Instead of just using dots for all sites.
Rating: 4.5
January 1 2020
Quite readable and informative.
If I had to point out one thing that could be improved, I'd point at the maps. They were not as informative as they could have been. All they needed to do is add some way to determine which locations on the map belonged to which species. Would not have been hard to do. Just add things like x's and other symbols. Instead of just using dots for all sites.
Rating: 4.5
January 1 2020
December 14, 2013
This was an excellent read! Dr. Papagianni has synthesized the latest and greatest archaeological and genetics data and information about our closest human cousins, the Neanderthals. While this book will clearly appeal to the lay-reader, I found it to be a very accurate representation of the latest theories and hypotheses associated with better understanding the long history of the Neanderthals and their place in Human family tree. Dr. Papagianni has also included a relatively comprehensive bibliography that references general publications, specialized and technical books, and an excellent listing of important journal articles addressing significant issues and findings in human evolution.
April 24, 2015
Relatively short and highly accessible account of the development of our knowledge of our extinct human cousins. The book draws a succinct portrait of Neanderthal life and particularly good for relating it to the parallel development of homo sapiens. The book is also thorough in relating Neanderthal history to climate change.
The writers seem to have a strange missionary zeal in attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of neanderthal man in popular conciousness. This pops up throughout the book, but the full chapter dedicated to it, detailing books, movies and cartoons containing neanderthals is rather superfluous
The writers seem to have a strange missionary zeal in attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of neanderthal man in popular conciousness. This pops up throughout the book, but the full chapter dedicated to it, detailing books, movies and cartoons containing neanderthals is rather superfluous
November 7, 2023
Since I first discovered that Neanderthals were a separate species of humans from us I’ve been fascinated by them. The idea that there were more than one intelligent but different species is n our planet and that we interacted and even interbred with Them is a mind blowing science fiction concept. But the evidence is there to support it.
This book in particular doesn’t have any great revelations and definitely doesn’t push any view in particular. It’s more of an overview of where the science is at this point and what some of the polemic ideas and opinions exist in the anthropological community.
Because of that it’s just not as captivating as a book like kindred: Neanderthal life love and art which engages in quiet a bit of whimsical speculation and is a more entertaining pop anthropology book for it.
I particularly liked the ending where they offered their opinion on Neanderthals in popular culture like movies and novels, pointing out how they have evolved in our eyes from savages to our probable equals.
This book in particular doesn’t have any great revelations and definitely doesn’t push any view in particular. It’s more of an overview of where the science is at this point and what some of the polemic ideas and opinions exist in the anthropological community.
Because of that it’s just not as captivating as a book like kindred: Neanderthal life love and art which engages in quiet a bit of whimsical speculation and is a more entertaining pop anthropology book for it.
I particularly liked the ending where they offered their opinion on Neanderthals in popular culture like movies and novels, pointing out how they have evolved in our eyes from savages to our probable equals.
October 26, 2014
Former science teacher here who wanted to be either a paleontologist or physical anthropologist...
Loved this book. Reread several sections more than once. I wish there had been more color photos! (But I think that makes a book more expensive.) I had already read some of the older books on the subject, which these authors often cite, so this was a good update for me. I find the entire subject of our ancestors compelling and the Neanderthals have always fascinated me. It was eye-opening in many ways, including the fact that we, or our immediate ancestors, might have cohabitated for a while. (The inbreeding aspect I'd read about in other books and magazines.) But I've often wondered why, if there are several species of cat in the world, and bear, etc., why only one surviving species of humans?
I am still wondering, but it is books like this that can really open your eyes to the possibilities. One more thing I liked about this book - it raises as many (as yet unanswered) questions as it attempts to answers. The open-mindedness of the authors comes through.
Loved this book. Reread several sections more than once. I wish there had been more color photos! (But I think that makes a book more expensive.) I had already read some of the older books on the subject, which these authors often cite, so this was a good update for me. I find the entire subject of our ancestors compelling and the Neanderthals have always fascinated me. It was eye-opening in many ways, including the fact that we, or our immediate ancestors, might have cohabitated for a while. (The inbreeding aspect I'd read about in other books and magazines.) But I've often wondered why, if there are several species of cat in the world, and bear, etc., why only one surviving species of humans?
I am still wondering, but it is books like this that can really open your eyes to the possibilities. One more thing I liked about this book - it raises as many (as yet unanswered) questions as it attempts to answers. The open-mindedness of the authors comes through.
October 11, 2019
Really interesting insights into homo evolution - some great insights into what must have been an incredible period in our prehistory from the perspective of one of our closest cousins. Good read.
April 12, 2018
2.3/5
Yorumu için: http://kronikokur.blogspot.com.tr/201...
Yorumu için: http://kronikokur.blogspot.com.tr/201...
June 29, 2021
Un studiu foarte interesant și bine documentat despre evoluția Omului de Neanderthal. In ciuda prejudecăților actuale, cartea încearcă să reabiliteze imaginea pe care o avem asupra acestui "verișor îndepărtat" al nostru.
Interesul mi-a fost stârnit după ce am citit articolul Laurei, autoarea Blogului unei cititoare de cursă lungă, și este prima carte selectată din lista recomandată: http://lauracaltea.ro/articlesite/10-...
4.5 / 5
Interesul mi-a fost stârnit după ce am citit articolul Laurei, autoarea Blogului unei cititoare de cursă lungă, și este prima carte selectată din lista recomandată: http://lauracaltea.ro/articlesite/10-...
4.5 / 5
April 8, 2023
Contained new and interesting information relating to the extinction and successes of Neanderthals. I listened to it on audio, and at the time had a difficult time following the organization of points so it seemed a bit all over the place, but it could be my brain and not the book. Probably my brain. Anyway, there were for me some golden takeaways especially about human assumptions vs. actual evidence, and this takeaway I could apply to a wide range of earthly topics throughout history (so that’s fun!).
January 3, 2021
4.5
A short and sweet primer (200 short pages) on our current understanding of Neanderthals. The prose is conversational and easily readable, and the authors do a great job contextualizing our current views as being part of an ever-changing framework of understanding. The final chapter on Neanderthal perceptions in popular culture is really unfocused and feels like they were scraping for examples, but the actual scientific sections of the book (the preceding 7 chapters) really deliver.
A short and sweet primer (200 short pages) on our current understanding of Neanderthals. The prose is conversational and easily readable, and the authors do a great job contextualizing our current views as being part of an ever-changing framework of understanding. The final chapter on Neanderthal perceptions in popular culture is really unfocused and feels like they were scraping for examples, but the actual scientific sections of the book (the preceding 7 chapters) really deliver.
February 21, 2016
A thorough, accessible and readable overview of current consensus and debate on neanderthal peoples. Much more in the style of summarising and explaining than polemic, the book is a relatively quick read. The immense likability of the authors, particukarky their gentle humour, suits this very well. I can only hope they agree to keep updating this, as the science evolves at an ever rapid pace.
April 27, 2016
What a great and readable introduction to recent Neanderthal research! Not for specialists or academics, but for the rest of us, this is terrific.
November 30, 2014
It's probably a great, but I couldn't get into it. It felt like I was doing homework.
December 21, 2014
I enjoyed it, but the writing was dry and repetitive.
November 9, 2013
I was quietly excited when I saw that this book was soon to be published. Palaeoanthropology has become a rapidly changing field over the past few years, with new discoveries deepening the complexity of our picture of our stone age past, and the refinement of genetics testing throwing new and surprising light even on old discoveries. The Neanderthals Rediscovered did not disappoint. Bringing the latest debates and discussions to publication, it’s a great up-to-date resource for the already interested reader, and takes the approach of re-examining the Neanderthals with the focus firmly on the species, rather than focusing simply on Homo sapiens and Neanderthals’ interactions with us. For the general reader however, I’d recommend this too. The authors clearly explain any technical terms and concepts for the newcomer, and the text reads fairly smoothly – in other words, it’s not too dry and academic. Perhaps the best point for newcomers is that the authors take care to dispel the myriad of myths and half-truths that have built up in the public consciousness around Neanderthals since their discovery in 1829. I find myself compelled to quote at this point. Here, the authors address perhaps the worst and most long-lived of the preconceptions about the Neanderthals:
“The mistaken notion that Neanderthals walked hunched over dates to a poorly reconstructed skeleton that was excavated in 1908 at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France (pl. XIII). After this skeleton was found, the French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule at the Museum of Natural History in Paris became both the first researcher to study a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton and the first researcher to nearly completely misread a Neanderthal skeleton. Boule gave the ‘Old Man’ of La Chapelle-aux-Saints a decidedly ape-like, stooped posture. Now considered to have died at the age of thirty, this ‘Old Man’, it turns out, had bad arthritis and premature bone degeneration, and but for these infirmities would have stood as upright as anyone today. No amount of new research, tracing full bipedalism and erect posture back millions of years, seems to be sufficient to dislodge the image of the stooped caveman from our iconic vocabulary.”
What surprised me towards the end of the book was that after covering Neanderthal evolution, existence, and extinction, the authors spend some time discussing the modern incarnations of Neanderthal in our social media, and what effect this has had on public misconceptions. As someone who read Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series a few years ago and, as an archaeologist, aware of some of the strange fictions Auel concocts, I can’t resist quoting the relevant passages here:
“A reader who has been exposed to Neanderthals only in fiction might believe that all Neanderthals worshipped cave bears, had rigidly divided gender roles and elaborate rituals (especially surrounding burials), could track game and unfriendly modern humans with a canine-like sense of smell and possessed some sort of telepathic ability – the only question being whether they could ‘see’ through one another’s eyes or ‘share’ memories. It goes without saying that none of these ideas has widespread support in the non-fiction universe. Even the plausible stereotypes are not based on any archaeological evidence.”
“Fiction writers seem to have seized upon minority or out-dated interpretations of three cave sites in particular: Drachenloch in Switzerland is the source of the cave bear cult idea, which Auel has now etched into the public consciousness; Shanidar in the Kurdish province of Iraq has given us the idea that Neanderthals were sensitive beings who decorated graves with large quantities of flowers; and Divje Babe I is a cave in Slovenia where an alleged Neanderthal flute was discovered, on a cave bear femur, forming the basis for Levinson’s The Silk Code, a detective story featuring musical Neanderthals and Amish genetic engineers. In the movie adaptation of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the human heroine is cast out of her adopted Neanderthal tribe when the tribal leader dramatically inserts a cave bear femur into a skull to mark her expulsion. This image comes directly from the excavations in the early 20th century at Drachenloch, where the excavator, Emil Bächler, interpreted this arrangement of cave bear bones, found near some Mousterian stone tools, as being evidence of Neanderthal religion. The current thinking among archaeologists is that this was just a chance configuration and there is no solid evidence that the Neanderthals arranged cave bear skulls in ritualistic ways. Even if a Neanderthal placed the femur into the skull on purpose, it is an isolated find, and there is no reason to think that it was part of a ritual, let alone a cult. Also in The Clan of the Cave Bear film, there is a funeral scene in which Neanderthals decorate a corpse with a pile of flowers. As we discussed in Chapter Five, this comes from Ralph Solecki’s book Shanidar: The First Flower People (1971), about his excavation of Shanidar Cave which had ended ten years earlier. (Auel based several of her characters on particular Neanderthal skeletons unearthed at Shanidar.) Solecki believed that pollen in the soil associated with one of the Neanderthal skeletons at the site indicated a ritual burial with flowers. Since then archaeologists have suggested another more plausible way that the pollen came to that particular patch of dirt: rodents digging holes. Common sense dictates that the evidence of a bouquet of flowers on a burial would not last over 50,000 years, but this has not stopped the spread of the notion that Neanderthals had elaborate burial rituals. For a historian of science it is almost too easy to say that the 1960s counter-culture influenced Solecki’s interpretation.”
“In addition to the popular but unsupported ideas of a Neanderthal cave bear cult, Neanderthal flower children and Neanderthal musicians, the other persistent idea in Neanderthal fiction is that of telepathy. This seems to have arisen from the fact that Neanderthal brains were on average as large as ours. The reasoning goes that if their brains were less powerful in some ways then they must have been more powerful in other ways, to account for all that Neanderthal grey matter. Telepathy also dovetailed nicely with the outdated theory that Neanderthals were unable to speak, because it gave them another way of communicating. In the movie version of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the Neanderthals rely on sign language where their vocal range lets them down, but in the book this is done more with shared thinking. A Neanderthal skeleton discovered at Kebara Cave in Israel in 1983 points to strong similarities between Neanderthal and modern human hyoid bones, which help govern speech; this suggests that Neanderthals could produce a range of sounds similar to ours. And we also know from Robin Dunbar’s theory of group size and the evidence that Neanderthals had the same FOXP2 gene for speech as we do, that Neanderthals almost certainly had spoken language, although it is debatable whether their speech was as complex as ours.”
What do Morse and Papagianni recommend as good Neanderthal fiction? Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age, by Bjorn Kurten. Going to have to check that one out. All in all, a solid read, and more enjoyable and entertaining than many non-fiction texts on the same subject.
8 out of 10
September 19, 2020
A engaging summary of our current knowledge about Neanderthals.
February 6, 2020
Perhaps a 4.5 rating. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is easy to read and covers a lot of information in a highly accessible way.
June 12, 2020
Were the Neanderthals fully human? Everything depends on your definition of course. Neanderthals spoke, made tools and looked after their sick colleagues, but did they have artworks, jewellery and musical instruments? The Neanderthals died out when Homo Sapiens came to Europe, but did they vanish because of the new arrivals or did the newcomers merely occupy lands that the Neanderthals had already abandoned? If the former, did Sapiens triumph through superior genes or superior technology? And was there any interbreeding?
None of these questions is adequately answered by this book.
None of these questions is adequately answered by this book.
July 19, 2021
I found this book easy to read, but as someone with a lot of interest in archaeology at university level- I didn’t learn as much as I’d hoped! I did however learn about how much Neanderthals seem to have influenced media and how those things leak back into popular belief even if it’s far from the proven science.
I read the Earths Children series a few years ago and I never realised how influential it’d become in the general populations ideas around Neanderthals until the role the books played were unpicked and compared to the real discoveries we have now.
Overall really enjoyed it and I look forward to sifting through the bibliography for more reading.
I read the Earths Children series a few years ago and I never realised how influential it’d become in the general populations ideas around Neanderthals until the role the books played were unpicked and compared to the real discoveries we have now.
Overall really enjoyed it and I look forward to sifting through the bibliography for more reading.
October 1, 2015
Very informative and up to date. I particularly liked the explanations of how the newest dating technologies work and where the newest discoveries have been made. Though the book didn't establish beyond reiterating various theories what happened to extinguish this line of humanity, it did reveal some evidence, that I was previously unaware of, that there was interbreeding among Neanderthals and other human lines. I didn't so much care for the social commentary on how Neanderthals are viewed in modern society as "cavemen." That seemed extraneous to the basic science.
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