There's been a couple of recent very interesting discoveries about our early ancestors recently, which have drawn some conclusions that, frankly, are less than amazing. Its an application of Yeoman's First Law of History at work.
First of all, within the last couple of days human footprints have been found in the UK which are at least 800,000, if not 1,000,000 years old. That's pretty cool. The temperature of the UK, at that point in time, was also pretty darned cool. Scandinavian like, in fact.
This has lead to a lot of pondering (why were they stomping around in the mud, for example?), but it's also lead to at least one amazingly dense comment from a scientist who wondered aloud if they had the ability to make clothing.
Seriously?
Of course, they did. The question is idiotic.
Which leads me to my second item.
Scientist have recently confirmed that modern human beings of European descent carry a few genes they can trace to Neanderthal human beings, thereby confirming that Neanderthals and what were once commonly called Cro Magnums, but now are generally called "archaic" modern man, um. . .well you know.
No kidding, no surprise there. Or at least there should be. We're actually all in the same species. The bigger surprise there is that apparently Neanderthals, and we were on the edge of genetic comparability. That does surprise me because, as noted, we're in the same species. Neanderthals were only unique in that they were genetically adapted to extreme cold by having short, but stout, bodies. Modern populations of humans now feature quite a variety in body types, which our archaic ancestors actually did not at that time, so that's not as big of a deal as it might seem. Included in our current adaptations are body forms that contemplate high heat and intense cold. That an isolated population of human beings living in Ice Age Europe would have adaptations to their environment isn't that surprising.
But it's been oddly surprising to some that these populations would mix. In our true European "we feel guilty about everything" outlook, we've often assumed that this must have been the result of violence.
Well, some probably were, but our surprise is probably because of the long-standing tradition of depicting Neanderthals as really ugly, which they probably were not. They probably just looked different, as many current populations do. Looking different, while often a cause of hatred amongst people, has often been an attractant too, and so far there hasn't been one single example of any group of people encountering another in which mixing didn't occur. And chances are high that Neanderthals didn't look like brutes, but rather were dressed in a fashion similar to any new population they were encountering. So, it's a pretty good bet that it didn't take long before some archaic member of our species was saying something like, "have you seen that cute Neanderthal girl that gets water down by the stream. . . . I wonder if she'd like to come over and share some Aurochs some evening?"
On this, I'd also note that within the last year I've seen something that seemed to confirm that Neanderthals could "speak". No kidding, they were human beings and talking is something we all seem to be able to do. For what it's worth, their brain cases had bigger volume than modern man's. For that matter, archaic members of our own species also did, and I saw the same speech speculation about them a couple of years ago. I have no doubt that both populations spent the evenings yakking it up and could speak just fine. I also suspect that having a bigger brain case than modern humans means exactly what we might suppose it meant.
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