New Scientist has a short story synthesizing all the accumulating data that Neandertals weren't that primitive, and that the inflection point of cultural creativity 40-50 K BP was the culmination of a gradual process.
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Neandertals and moderns mixed, and it matters:
Twenty-five years ago, the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe could be represented as a straightforward process subsuming both the emergence of symbolic behavior and the replacement of Neandertals by modern humans...Over the last decade,…
Dienekes points me to a new paper in Science which purports to add an archaeological layer of data to the "Out of Africa" paradigm which initially burst onto to the scene in the 1980s due to the molecular clock & mtDNA (though Chris Stringer and others long argued for a form of "Out of Africa"…
Around 395 million years ago, a group of four-legged animals strode across a Polish coast. These large, amphibious creatures were among the first invaders of the land, the first animals with true legs that could walk across solid ground. With sprawling gaits and tails held high, they took…
So, I'm teaching a freshman seminar right now, and covering, among other things "summary of current research topics" - to kinda tease the students about what is out there that might be interesting.
Two of the topics covered are exoplanets and modern cosmology.
I found I could fit a nice summary of…
Thank you for the link to the story. Follow my link to find out why... Look for the J-Dog post.
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=46705232…
well, i did some research....
You say neandertal.
They say neanderthal.
Who is correct ?
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/neandertal_or_neanderthal.html
This period is commonly thought to be characterised by long periods of little change in technological and perhaps also cognitive development....
Archeology is always about finished events from long ago, but our knowledge is sketchy and we draw curves through a very few points. In the absence of data the tendency is to make the curves smooth, but this is risky. Anyway, the distant past can change enormously in the course of a modern year.
It would seem possible to write an archeology-prehistory textbook outlining all of the plausible scenarios, and if the book were well-written it would be very informative and not terribly confusing. The other two options, presenting the consensus or presenting the facts with as little inerpretation as possible, seem much worse.
the façonnage and the débitage techniques. In the former a stone core is shaped by chipping off flakes of flint, the latter involves producing sharp-edged flakes from a core. In the Lower Palaeolithic, more than 300,000 years ago, the two techniques were practised separately, but Hopkinson argues that during the Middle Palaeolithic they were fused into a single method, the Levallois reduction technique
This gives new meaning to the word "gradual".
I've read a lot more impressive arguments for Neathertal smarts than this piece.