Technologically advanced Neanderthals?

[BobGreenwade]

According to The Daily Galaxy:

New Research Shows Neanderthal Technology Equal to Homo Sapiens (http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/09/new-research-shows-neanderthal-technology-equal-to-homo-sapiens.html)

This casts a new light on what we think of in Neanderthals -- perhaps those Geico commercials aren't so far off the mark after all.

[L. Marcus]

As far as I can tell, the area where we had the edge over the Neanderthals was social organization and culture. They certainly held the upper ground vis-a-vi physical strength and adaptation to the climate at the time.

Edit: By the by, the link seems broken.

[BobGreenwade]

Apparently Daily Galaxy had a problem with the article posting. I'm sure they'll get it fixed in the next day or two.

(Argh.)

[L. Marcus]

That long?! I'll be old and bald by then! :weep:

... Uh ...

[Lord Liaden]

As far as I can tell, the area where we had the edge over the Neanderthals was social organization and culture. They certainly held the upper ground vis-a-vi physical strength and adaptation to the climate at the time.

They also had slightly larger brains than ours. Really makes you wonder at the importance of particular factors in deciding species dominance.

[L. Marcus]

From what I've seen, their larger brain came down to having a larger body to control. Discovery Magazine (I think it was) had an article that mentioned this a while ago: "The Amazing Shrinking Brain!"

[Lord Liaden]

Good to clarify that point; but that just underlines that our ancestors didn't appear to have any significant intellectual advantage over the Neanderthal.

[L. Marcus]

I think they did. Not in the engineering department, but in the soft sciences. I think I'm right in saying that the Neanderthals lived in rather isolated family groups, perhaps a dozen or so members strong. Cro Magnon bands were larger -- upwards to a hundred individuals -- and they kept in touch with each other with trade. And they saw the world differently than the Neanderthals -- they had culture, art and music (one of the oldest, if not the oldest, musical instruments ever found was a flute found in Cro Magnon deposits).

[Lord Liaden]

Fair enough, but to use your own distinction, is that a function of intelligence, or society and culture? Is societal structure an outgrowth of intellectual predilection, or a random development that became self-perpetuating due to survival benefits? [Flips coin] Darned if I know. :think:

[L. Marcus]

Darned if anyone knows. That's cutting edge research right there. ^^

[Captain Obvious]

I've heard (and tend to believe) that the edge Cro-Magnons had over Neanderthals was domesticated dogs. Sensitive smell and hearing, and not too picky about what they eat.

[L. Marcus]

I thought that dogs had only been domesticated for about ten thousand years.

[dmjalund]

I thought that dogs had only been domesticated for about ten thousand years.but that's 70 000 dog years!

[Lawnmower Boy]

The earliest date for an archaeologically represented, clearly domestic dog (no, I don't how you tell) is 16,000BP. The geneticists, however, push it back much further. As with other mitochrondially-derived dates, other geneticists argue fiercely. They are also divided as to whether domestication took place in east Asia or in Africa. (East Asia is the old consensus, with Africa coming on strong.)
I think that until we find earlier archaeological attestations, we'd better rule out dogs. There are a number of interesting, more main stream hypotheses explaining how Homo Sapiens sapiens displaced Neanderthal, of which the best, to my knowledge, is that our ancestors needed less food.
All that said, I would be very interested in reading this article, to see if researchers have found retouched tools in Neanderthal contexts. I'd have to rethink some of Chapter 1.

[The Main Man]

Speaking of needing to eat less, evidence points to Neanderthals having a far more carnivorous diet than Sapiens. I think that our more omnivorous diet was helpful to survival. I forget, which happened first: the extinction of Neanderthals or the development of agriculture?

[L. Marcus]

Extinction came first, by ten thousand years or so.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Bear in mind, though, that "agriculture" is not a unitary state. In modern agriculture, a farmer has a vast array of choices of agricultural strategy extending through any plant or animal domesticated anywhere in the world. By contrast, our ancestors at Wadi Kubaniya on the Nile circa 18000 years ago reaped a wide variety of marsh grass, Panicum, Chenopodae, even chamomile. They were doing so in what we would now call a "gathering" mode, and may well have ignored the millet grasses that are now an agricultural staple in this same area.

Yet by doing so, they brought together these same varieties on their camps, which incidentally were on the edge of the falling Nile floodplain,where they fished and gathered those same plants. Next year, when the Nile rose and successively swamped these sites, the seeds that they had scattered or passed sprouted and grew, and were still standing in the muck when people came down to make camp there.

Is this agriculture? Or do we have to wait until the day when a farmer in Yuma can look up a seed catalogue and decide that he is going to grow ginseng in a specially cooled greenhouse and jojoba in the fields, selling the oil and feeding the crushed joboba beanmeal to a herd of beefalo? And it what was practiced at Wadi Kubaniya belongs somewhere on the spectrum from a pure "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle to modern agriculture, then what about people who fish and hunt small animals, as these Neanderthals did? According to the hunter-gatherer hierarchy of resource exploitations, this lifestyle entails the more intensive exploitation of a smaller range. Isn't that a step along the path to "agriculture?"

[The Weapon]

Fair enough, but to use your own distinction, is that a function of intelligence, or society and culture? Is societal structure an outgrowth of intellectual predilection, or a random development that became self-perpetuating due to survival benefits? [Flips coin] Darned if I know. :think:

From the wikipedia entry "Dunbar's number"
" The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain. The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain. The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain. "
"In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 38 primate genera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genus), Dunbar predicted a human "mean group size" of 148 (casually rounded to 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230)."

[Markdoc]

Just a couple of minor points:
It now looks like neanderthals and modern humans co-existed for tens of thousands of years. If there really was an evolutionary advantage possessed by modern humans, it must have been a pretty slight edge - so slight that major advances like domesticating animals or established agriculture are almost certainly not it. It's probably something so minor that we are going to have a hard time identifying it, for the simple reason that if it was a noticeable advantage, it wouldn't have taken H. sapiens sapiens so long to displace their slightly heavier neighbours. The most convincing explanations I have seen so far simply suggest that modern humans have a skeletal structure that is slightly better adapted to a bipedal gait, giving them more endurance for walking and running, letting them travel on less food than neanderthals. In good times that wouldn't matter but in times when food was scarce (or when energy demand was high, like during a conflict), it could be life-saving. And over time, even a small advantage is likely to prove decisive.

As for agriculture, the definition I am familiar with is the intention to settle down and cultivate crops. That requires a larger investment - you not only have to plant and harvest the crops but you have to preserve them - and implies a sedentary lifestyle. The idea of planting (deliberately or not) and then simply harvesting the next time you are passing by and the plant is in fruit is what I have always called pastoralism: many pastoralist peoples today supplement their animals in exactly this way. It's grey zone, of course. There's no single feature that divides peoples into hunter-gather <-> pastoralist <-> agriculturalist and there's plenty of grey zones: pastoralists, hunter gatherers and even agricultural societies all use the "swing by this place when the fruit is in season" or for that matter "when the fish are running". Pastoralists and hunter gatherers will occasionally set small deliberately protected gardens to return to later. But agriculture - as I understand it - removes that "come back later" part. It's the avowed intent to stay more or less in one place* and live off what you can get to grow there.

cheers, Mark

* I say "more or less in in one place" because some agricultural societies have seasonal sites.

[The Weapon]

Just a couple of minor points:
It now looks like neanderthals and modern humans co-existed for tens of thousands of years. If there really was an evolutionary advantage possessed by modern humans, it must have been a pretty slight edge - so slight that major advances like domesticating animals or established agriculture are almost certainly not it. It's probably something so minor that we are going to have a hard time identifying it, for the simple reason that if it was a noticeable advantage, it wouldn't have taken H. sapiens sapiens so long to displace their slightly heavier neighbours. The most convincing explanations I have seen so far simply suggest that modern humans have a skeletal structure that is slightly better adapted to a bipedal gait, giving them more endurance for walking and running, letting them travel on less food than neanderthals. In good times that wouldn't matter but in times when food was scarce (or when energy demand was high, like during a conflict), it could be life-saving. And over time, even a small advantage is likely to prove decisive.

As for agriculture, the definition I am familiar with is the intention to settle down and cultivate crops. That requires a larger investment - you not only have to plant and harvest the crops but you have to preserve them - and implies a sedentary lifestyle. The idea of planting (deliberately or not) and then simply harvesting the next time you are passing by and the plant is in fruit is what I have always called pastoralism: many pastoralist peoples today supplement their animals in exactly this way. It's grey zone, of course. There's no single feature that divides peoples into hunter-gather <-> pastoralist <-> agriculturalist and there's plenty of grey zones: pastoralists, hunter gatherers and even agricultural societies all use the "swing by this place when the fruit is in season" or for that matter "when the fish are running". Pastoralists and hunter gatherers will occasionally set small deliberately protected gardens to return to later. But agriculture - as I understand it - removes that "come back later" part. It's the avowed intent to stay more or less in one place* and live off what you can get to grow there.

cheers, Mark

* I say "more or less in in one place" because some agricultural societies have seasonal sites.

Agriculture means that humans need less area, and so are less likely to fight over neanderthal territory. The question isn't "how much better are we than them" it's "how much do we displace them?". If humans and neanderthals rarely use the same resources then human numbers don't affect neanderthal extinction. If we use only the same resources then it's critically important. The truth is probably towards the latter but technological advances would change that (e.g. if we learn to fish and they don't). You can't go directly from "slow extinction" to "small edge for the humans".

[The Main Man]

I also wonder if early Sapiens had a faster gestation period than Neanderthals. A faster rate of reproduction would mean that populations could grow more quickly, and thus the need for more resources.

[The Main Man]

Discussions like this make me wish we could clone a Neanderthal. Last I checked, the genome is too deteriorated to do so. :P

[Markdoc]

Agriculture means that humans need less area, and so are less likely to fight over neanderthal territory. The question isn't "how much better are we than them" it's "how much do we displace them?".

Agriculture is red herring in this case, since it didn't arise until well after the Neanderthals were history. But the two questions you pose are intimately related (to the point of being more or less the same). I don't think anyone (except maybe Jared Diamond) is proposing that Homo sapiens sapiens decided to wipe out Homo sapiens neanderthalis - it's just that in the competition, they clearly lost out. The process was very, very slow, which actually pretty much rules out active war anyway (though I guess that if both sides were closely matched that might explain it. However we have no evidence to suggest such a conflict). So essentially the best explanation we have right now is that they were simply outcompeted: in other words the displacement was because we were "better".

So the question here is "If we were able to compete more effectively ... why? What was our competitive advantage?"


If humans and neanderthals rarely use the same resources then human numbers don't affect neanderthal extinction. If we use only the same resources then it's critically important. The truth is probably towards the latter but technological advances would change that (e.g. if we learn to fish and they don't). You can't go directly from "slow extinction" to "small edge for the humans".

We know however that modern humans and Neanderthals competed directly - not just for food, but also for living space and probably (given the tool finds) for things like easily accessible flint. So, as to the first point "slow extinction" is a given. We know that happened and given the current state of genetics we know that Neanderthals were not simply absorbed into the greater human population (though there does seem to have been some small degree of interbreeding). We also know that Neanderthals expanded and flourished for about 150,000 years before their gradual disappearance (maybe a half million years if you include the proto-Neanderthals). Either way you slice it, they colonised the middle east and Eurasia long before modern humans. We also know that as modern humans spread out of Africa they first overlapped with and gradually replaced Neanderthals everywhere. Again the question is "Why?"

And the best answer we have so far is "Some small - as yet undefined - competitive advantage". Originally people proposed that we were smarter. Maybe, but we have no evidence for that. Then people proposed it's because we were better (or more advanced) tool makers. That hypothesis seems to be under threat too, as more and more unequivocally Neanderthal tools and jewelry turn up. The one hypothesis that seems to have gained in strength with time is the idea that anatomically modern humans may have had a slight advantage in walking and running. It's likely we'll never know for sure, but the idea of a minor edge allowing one population to displace another is certanly consistent with all of biology and also with what evidence we have in this case.

cheers, Mark

[concord]

Here is a link to an article on Discovery News

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/neanderthals-more-intelligent-than-thought.html

[Escafarc]

I thought it was Beer and Pron that made us more successful?

[Peregrine]

I think this says it all..

37139

[Markdoc]

I think this says it all..

37139

Ah, but modern humans turned up, we were the minority ... the Neanderthals had already spread out over the landscape.

cheers, Mark

[BobGreenwade]

Here is a link to an article on Discovery News

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/neanderthals-more-intelligent-than-thought.htmlThis one does seem to cover the same ground as the original article, and no less informatively.

That article is still not back up, but I did find where someone (http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/2A95ED3D-607D-4C8D-A5F2-640745B59CEE/) clipped a few paragraphs:

For decades scientists believed Neanderthals developed `modern' tools and ornaments solely through contact with Homo sapiens, but new research from the University of Colorado Denver now shows these sturdy ancients could adapt, innovate and evolve technology on their own.



The findings by anthropologist Julien Riel-Salvatore,assistant professor of anthropology at UC Denver, challenge a half-century of conventional wisdom maintaining that "They were far more resourceful than we have given them credit for." His research was based on seven years of studying Neanderthal sites throughout Italy, with special focus on the vanished Uluzzian culture.

About 42,000 years ago, the Aurignacian culture, attributed to modern Homo sapiens, appeared in northern Italy while central Italy continued to be occupied by Neanderthals of the Mousterian culture which had been around for at least 100,000 years. At this time a new culture arose in the south, one also thought to be created by Neanderthals.

So it's made me start to imagine modern Neanderthals using high-tech devices... like I said, maybe the Geico commercials aren't so far off the mark. But we could have alternate timelines where Uluzzians fly spaceships, get around in rocket-packs, perform microcellular surgery, and know how to get the VCR to stop blinking 12:00 all day long.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Isn't it supposed to do that?