Researchers Say Neanderthals Created Cave Art 91
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study that suggests an engraving in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar was made by Neanderthals more than 39,000 years ago. Belying their reputation as the dumb cousins of early modern humans, Neanderthals created cave art, an activity regarded as a major cognitive step in the evolution of humankind, scientists reported on Monday in a paper describing the first discovery of artwork by this extinct species. The discovery is "a major contribution to the redefinition of our perception of Neanderthal culture," said prehistorian William Rendu of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who was not involved in the work. "It is a new and even stronger evidence of the Neanderthal capacity for developing complex symbolic thought" and "abstract expression," abilities long believed exclusive to early modern humans.
Re:Neanderthals = Humans (Score:5, Funny)
I actually know some Neanderthal descendants personally.
Re:Neanderthals = Humans (Score:5, Funny)
I know of a whole social network of people communicating in these # neanderthal signs.
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if they were creating cave art, then they were certainly creating other forms of art. nothing special about caves.
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Most of today's works of art would not survive 10,000 years neglect, the exception being stonework. And we have done very little of that in the last hundred years. If we went away tomorrow, visitors to Earth 10,000 years from now would have trouble determining whether some of our contemporary art was done before or after the Lascaux cave paintings.
So cave art is special in that way.
It is also special because this old stuff was done in the flickering and moving light of torches. Photographs do not capture
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I meant from the cognitive perspective, which is what these articles are typically focused towards. It's not that Neaderthals are creating cave art. They're just creating art...and like you said, this is the form of it that we see.
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To say that Our ancestors mated with Neanderthals is not correct. Neanderthals are our ancestors, at least in some small part.
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To say that Our ancestors mated with Neanderthals is not correct. Neanderthals are our ancestors, at least in some small part.
If the latter is correct, then so is the former, especially given the apparent lack of IVF technology at the time.
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To say that Our ancestors mated with Neanderthals is not correct. Neanderthals are our ancestors, at least in some small part.
If the latter is correct, then so is the former, especially given the apparent lack of IVF technology at the time.
Not necessarily. There's only one alleged case of a Minotaur, for example.
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Circular logic then suggests we are but the spawn of incestuous breeding.
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Indeed. Our ancestral relatives bred with our other ancestral relatives.
Circular logic then suggests we are but the spawn of incestuous breeding.
It's said that all people with blue eyes are descendant from one person who lived near the black sea some 10-12ky ago. Since you need two parents with the blue gene to have blue eyes this means the person who first obtained the mutation did not have blue eyes, nor could his children have them. His grandchildren are the first possible blue eyed people if they bred with a sibling, more likely the first blue eyes were several generations removed from the person who got the original mutation.
As for TFA, the
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Most of the objections stemmed from the lack of mtDNA evidence, though there could have been some old biases leaking in. For a long time Neanderthals were seen as subhuman, more ape than man.
But the nuclear genetic evidence is irrefutable; there is Neanderthal and Denosovian genes in pretty much all the human populations outside of Subsaharan Africa.
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neanderthals were board without TV (Score:3)
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Scrabble [TM]
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What nonsense is this? This is clearly part of a hash-tag: '# ...'
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Tic-tac-toe can be played without a board.
Re:neanderthals were board [sic] without TV (Score:2)
its obvious they were playing tic-tac-toe
Or this was the first attempt at Twitter -- but the format of only 1 character proved overly restrictive, even for teenage Neanderthals with limited communication skills. This poor sap only managed to get the hashtag marker down (#). It only took a few tens of thousands of years to try again with 140 characters -- and now we can communicate with fragmentary badly-formulated thoughts like Neanderthals again.
[/sarcasm]
In all seriousness, what's with calling this "art"? I get how early cave drawings of
The first critic (Score:2)
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Or not being able to get members elected to high council in the Klan.
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Good point. Let's not forget Bill Clinton eulogizing Senator Robert Byrd (D):
"I'll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollers of West Virginia, he was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There are certainly no perfect politicians."
See, you can rationalize anything to stay in power.
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Cristian Fundamentalists (ISIS worldview minus the bombs and beheadings)
MINUS the bombs!? [truth-out.org]
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the ones who want to establish a state in the name of God are evil
Does this definition include those who claim that the US was founded as a Christian nation?
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Yes, Republicans need to reclaim the spirit of Goldwater. Can we hope for Democrats to ever reclaim the spirit of Roosevelt?
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Nooooo...they should be reclaiming the spirit of Roswell. Those aliens cannot all be Republicans.
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What do you mean, 'lately'?
Elephants can paint too (Score:2)
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No. Those elephants are tortured to submission to be controlled by their handler to paint the same paintings over and over again for the amusement of tourists.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/elephantpainting.asp
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Reposting AC's comment [slashdot.org] (as it's slightly more useful to do so than just reply with "mod parent up"):
No. Those elephants are tortured to submission to be controlled by their handler to paint the same paintings over and over again for the amusement of tourists.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/a... [snopes.com]
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Slaughter them? Why? They would have made great slaves.
Humanity is built on slavery, all of the "wonders of the world" were built with slaves.
The United states was built with slaves.
And if you actually look at society today, slavery is still rampant just in different forms and disguise.
not surprised (Score:2)
Monkeys/primates don't look that much like us, and they act very similar. Their intelligence is said to be that of a human child. Nearnderthals looked nearly identical to humans...I'd imagine their brains are just as nearly identical. You'd probably have to have a pretty long conversation with them to suss out any REAL differences in intelligence if there even are any. Likely most of the difference would be cultural, including any clinging to superstition, rather than intellectual.
The idea that neanderthals
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I imagine that, prior to the discovery of evidence that they painted cave art, the argument was that there was no evidence that they had, not that they were unable.
No, there's a long tradition of viewing the Neandertals as "incapable of symbolic behavior". In the latest edition of Scientific American there's still a guy peddling the argument with moved goal-posts.
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The irony is that anatomically modern humans were stuck in the same kind "stasis" for tens of thousands of years as well. Modern human anatomy predates the earliest signs of modern human behavior by something like 40k to 50k years.
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I suspect people put too much emphasis on brain evolution as an explanation for technological innovation. Think how slow innovation would be coming now if the world population was 50,000 and we didn't have writing.
Our ancestors of maybe 10,000 years ago had a material culture closer to the apes than to us, but we probably hyaven't changed much during that period.
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...
Our ancestors of maybe 10,000 years ago had a material culture closer to the apes than to us, but we probably hyaven't changed much during that period.
Since humans of 10,000 years ago made woven clothing, observed celestial events and linked them to earthly activities, produced very sophisticated stone tools (which had a long distance distribution system of some kind), and art at a high level, I would say that their culture was much closer to us than to apes.
Genetic studies show that the rate of human evolution has been accelerating, and since the advent of agriculture have become 10-100 times faster than in the paleolithic, so that 10,000 years could ma
*Old* cave art? (Score:2)
not art but maths (Score:1)
the grid patterns are a way of doing maths
Who thinks they were dumb anyway? (Score:2)
They survived in a hostile ice age climate for eons before we turned up. You don't manage that unless you A) Have a heavily adapted physiology (eg mammoth) or B) Are damn smart.
Anyway, the fact that apparently we interbred with neanderthals and the DNA got passed on - ie the offspring weren't sterile - means they were almost certainly the same species as us - probably just a different race. And we know how well races meeting can turn out.. If anyone wants to know why the died out , well maybe thats a clue.
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We don't know how fertile the offspring were. There are species where if species X is male and species Y is female the offspring are fertile but not the other way around. There are also hybrids where only occasionally the offspring are also fertile such as mules where there are only a couple of recorded pregnancies.
Species is more a spectrum thing then binary and Neanderthals are different enough to be considered at least a different subspecies if not a different species.
Lesson (Score:1)
The lesson from the recent bout of frantic backpedaling on Neanderthals is not to take the slightest bit of notice of the extrapolations of archaeologists. The raw data of their findings is interesting, but it's always open to interpretation. However, archaeology as a science seem to be largely incapable of objective interpretation. Maybe it's time they stuck to digging things up and stopped trying to interpret what they find. That interpretation really requires quite a different discipline.
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Agreed. I have no idea why they think this is even art, and the article shows no justification for it.
It's some gouges carved into rock on a shelf-ish thing (just a flat area where some tools were found). They say it would have taken at least 54 strokes with their tools to create one line, and there's only a handful of lines, and they say this was not where they cut animal hides. From that, they say it must have been art.
I'm not archaeologist, but my first guess would be that someone was bored, and I think
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... From that, they say it must have been art. I'm not archaeologist, but my first guess would be that someone was bored, and I think that's a MUCH more likely explanation...
You don't think your doodling during lecture is art? I do. Not good art, probably. But definitely art.
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"archaeology as a science seem to be largely incapable of objective interpretation"
"Objective interpretation" is an oxymoron, moron.
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"Objective interpretation" is an oxymoron, moron.
Yeah? Explain.
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Re:Dumb neanderthals (Score:4, Informative)
Which is ironic since from what I've read they not only had bigger brains than most modern humans, but they also contributed a good chunk of DNA to Indo-European peoples...
Actually, to almost everyone outside of Africa, in varying degrees.
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Which is ironic since from what I've read they not only had bigger brains than most modern humans, but they also contributed a good chunk of DNA to Indo-European peoples...
Yeah, sure, but how many of them published in *peer reviewed* journals? Amateurs.
Actually it explains their extinction too. (Score:3)
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So you'd like to convert the discussion to why we have the kind of God we have instead of why we have the kind of universe we have? Maybe we have an infinite number of Gods, each slightly different?
what art? (Score:1)
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Gotham's Cave? (Score:1)
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study that suggests an engraving in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar was made by Neanderthals more than 39,000 years ago.
Tell me I'm not the only one to read that as Gotham's Cave...
The real news ... (Score:2)
Neanderthal/Sapiens hybrid (Score:1)
Given that the highest incidence of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is found in the Tuscany region of Italy where the greatest artists of the Renaissance were located it may be that the Sapiens/Neanderthal combination is responsible for great visual art.
#neanderthal (Score:2)
#neanderthal #40kBC
And they created their own music too! (Score:2)
(It survived till our days in a form of hip-hop.)
Maybe not art (Score:2)
This is a mountain being made out of a mole hill. What we have is evidence that a series of hash marks were made for no reason we can see. Therefore, it must be symbolic. I'm not buying it, even if they are selling.
First, we have to remember that the Neanderthals did not much change their tool set for something like 260,000 years. If you find a Mousterian tool set anywhere you have Neanderthals. That is weird in it's self. Think about it, for 2600 centuries everywhere from Afghanistan to Gibraltar all Neand
30,000 years after South Africa (Score:1)