Neanderthals living 90,000 years ago in a seafront cave, in what’s now Portugal, regularly caught crabs, roasted them on coals and ate the cooked flesh, according to a new study.
From CNN.
No surprise. Why wouldn't they have roast crabs?
Neanderthals eating crabs 90,000 years ago. Okay, actually, these folks are in Raceland, Louisiana in 1938, but its the same thing, probably right down to the beer. The messiness of eating crab is shown by the newspapers, and that explains also why those looking in the subject cave can tell Neanderthals ate crabs.
This provides, by the way, one more reason that being a vegetarian is nuts. You don't toss out diets that we've been acclimated to for eons.
Homo sapiens and Neanderthals share high cerebral cortex integration into adulthood
From a synopsis by the authors of the study:
A surprising result
The results of our analyses surprised us. Tracking change over deep time across dozens of primate species, we found humans had particularly high levels of brain integration, especially between the parietal and frontal lobes.
But we also found we're not unique. Integration between these lobes was similarly high in Neanderthals too.
I know it sounds flippant, but I'm not surprised. I would have expected our brains, and Neanderthal brains, to be just about the same. And that's because I also believed this:
There's another important implication. It's increasingly clear that Neanderthals, long characterized as brutish dullards, were adaptable, capable and sophisticated people.
I, of course, maintain that Neanderthals weren't a different species at all, but simply a subspecies of our species.
By most reckonings, the humans, and they were humans, who were grilling up the carp were not members of our species, Homo sapiens.
They likely would have been Homo Heidelbergensis or Homo Erectus, the former having at one time been regarded as a subspecies of the latter.
No matter, these people were a lot closer to you than you might imagine. Their brain capacity, for one thing, is just about the same as modern humans at 1200 cc. FWIW, the brain capacity of archaic Homo Sapiens was actually larger than that of current people, members of the species Homo Sapien Sapien. Our current brain sizes are pretty big, in relative terms, at about 1400 cc, although Neanderthals' were bigger, at 1500cc.
About the "archaic" members of our species, it's been said that they're not regarded their own species as they have been "admitted to membership in our species because of their almost modern-sized brains, but set off as ‘archaic' because of their primitive looking cranial morphology".1Having said that, some people say, no, those are Homo Heidlebergensis. It can be pretty difficult to tell, actually, and as been noted:
One of the greatest challenges facing students of human evolution comes at the tail end of the Homo erectus span. After Homo erectus, there is little consensus about what taxonomic name to give the hominins that have been found. As a result, they are assigned the kitchen-sink label of “archaic Homo sapiens.”
Tattersall (2007) notes that the Kabwe skull bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the most prominent finds in Europe, the Petralona skull from Greece. In turn, as I mentioned above, the Petralona skull is very similar to one of the most complete skulls from Atapuerca, SH 5, and at least somewhat similar to the Arago skull.
Further, it is noted that the Bodo cranium from Africa shares striking similarities to the material from Gran Dolina (such as it is). This suggests that, as was the case with Homo erectus, there is widespread genetic homogeneity in these populations. Given the time depth involved, it is likely that there was considerable and persistent gene flow between them. Tattersall (2007), argues that, since the first example of this hominin form is represented by the Mauer mandible, the taxonomic designation Homo heidelbergensis should be used to designate these forms. This would stretch the limits of this taxon, however, since it would include the later forms from Africa as well. If there was considerable migration and hybridization between these populations, it could be argued that a single taxon makes sense. However, at present, there is no definitive material evidence for such migration, or widespread agreement on calling all these hominins anything other than “archaic Homo sapiens.”2
Regarding our first ancestors, of our species, appearance:
When comparing Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens, and anatomically modern Homo sapiens across several anatomical features, one can see quite clearly that archaic Homo sapiens are intermediate in their physical form. This follows the trends first seen in Homo erectus for some features and in other features having early, less developed forms of traits more clearly seen in modern Homo sapiens. For example, archaic Homo sapiens trended toward less angular and higher skulls than Homo erectus but had skulls notably not as short and globular in shape and with a less developed forehead than anatomically modern Homo sapiens. archaic Homo sapiens had smaller brow ridges and a less-projecting face than Homo erectus and slightly smaller teeth, although incisors and canines were often about as large as that of Homo erectus. Archaic Homo sapiens also had a wider nasal aperture, or opening for the nose, as well as a forward-projecting midfacial region, known as midfacial prognathism. The occipital bone often projected and the cranial bone was of intermediate thickness, somewhat reduced from Homo erectus but not nearly as thin as that of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The postcrania remained fairly robust, as well. To identify a set of features that is unique to the group archaic Homo sapiens is a challenging task, due to both individual variation—these developments were not all present to the same degree in all individuals—and the transitional nature of their features. Neanderthals will be the exception, as they have several clearly unique traits that make them notably different from modern Homo sapiens as well as their closely related archaic cousins.3
Well, what that tells us overall is that we were undergoing some changes during this period of the Pleistocene, that geologic period lasting from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago.
And that, dear reader, points out that we're a Pleistocene mammal.
It also points out that we don't have yet a really good grasp as to when our species really fully came about. We think we know what the preceding species was, but we're not super sure when we emerged from it. And of course, we didn't really emerge, but just kind of rolled along mother and father to children.
Which tells us that Heidlebergensis may have been pretty much like us, really.
Just not as photogenic.
On that, it's also been recently noted that the best explanation for the disappearance of the Neanderthals, which are now widely regarded as a separate species that emerged also from Heidelbergensis disappeared as they just cross bread themselves out of existence. Apparently they thought our species was hotter than their own.
Assuming they are a separate species, which I frankly doubt.
Here were definitely morphology differences between Heidelbergensis and us, but as we addressed the other day in a different context, everybody has a great, great, great . . . grandmother/grandfather who was one of them.
And another thing.
They ate a lot of meat.
A lot.
I note that as it was in vogue for a while for those adopting an unnatural diet, i.e. vegetarianism, to claim that this is what we were evolved to eat.
Not hardly. With huge brains, and cold weather burning up calories, we were, and remain, meat eaters.
The early Middle Pleistocene site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel (marine isotope stages 18–20; ~0.78 million years ago), has preserved evidence of hearth-related hominin activities and large numbers of freshwater fish remains (>40,000).
People like to eat fish, and save for the oddballs who like to eat sushi, for which there is no explanation, they like their fish cooked.
Most places, people like to eat carp too. For some odd reason, there's a prejudice against carp in at least the Western United States, but elsewhere, not so much.
So, our human ancestors 780,000 years ago. . . put another carp on the barbi. . .
Regarding a set of Neanderthal remains found in Siberia:
When Skov started comparing the genomes from Chagyrskaya, he got the surprise of his career. Two individuals, an adult male and a teenage female, shared half of their DNA, a situation that could occur only if they were siblings or a parent and child. To determine the relationship, the researchers examined mitochondrial DNA — which is maternally inherited and would therefore be identical between siblings and between a mother and child, but not between a father and child. This differed between the male and female, suggesting that they were father and daughter.
A new discovery has released the shocking news that Neanderthals buried their dead, released as this thought hadn't occurred to us before, which is odd as we've uncovered at least one Neanderthal grave with the deceased covered in flowers before.
Here's more shocking news. Neanderthals were people.
We're unfortunately in a "splitter" era in terms of linnean classifications. There have always been two such groups for such things, one being lumpers who hold that species are big groups with a fair amount of diversity, and splitters who hold the opposite.
I'm a lumper as they are correct.
The classic definition of a species is when two members of the same genus can breed and reproduce. We're well aware that's the case with "our species" and Neanderthals, as most Europeans and now, we've learned, some Africans are packing around Neaderthal DNA.
But we should have known that all along and indeed some biologist and archeologist long held that. And in fact at one time our species was referred to as Homo Sapien Sapien; Cro-Magnon man as Homo Sapien Archiac (or something like that) and Neanderthals as Homo Sapien Neaderthalensis. Looked at that way, there was one species that had at least three subspecies, maybe more, but those are the ones we knew about.
And that definition is correct.
So now we've confirmed, not discovered that Neanderthals buried their dead. Of course they did. We already know that due to some of the injuries they had, and recovered from, they cared for their injured as well.
They were simply people after all. Every bit as smart or dull witted as we are.
More significantly burying the dead implies that they knew of an afterlife. Their art may imply that as well. Which likewise shouldn't surprise us.
The overall problem, however, is that distinguishing between hemp and marijuana isn't really completely possible overall, as the difference between the two is somewhat like the difference between wolves and wolfy dogs. Is that a dog, or a wolf? It's hard to tell
Which leads me to a science item, having nothing to do with hemp or marijuana, but oddly illustrating the point in a way.
Scientists, last year, but only revealed within the last week or so, discovered an 18,000 year old puppy in a lump of frozen mud in Siberia. It's very well preserved. It's a male.
They've sequenced its genes and can't tell if its a wolf, or a dog.
That's not really that surprising, and this conundrum has happened before with really old canine remains. Early dogs were nearly wolves. The first canines that hung out in human camps were wolves. Shoot, for all we know the very first canine to be incorporated into a human society as a pet may have been a wolf puppy.
Now, that doesn't argue, as some folks will do, that humans should keep wolves as pets. Wolves are a wild animal and even if acclimated to humans it doesn't make them a pet. They're still wolves. But the distance between the first dog and wolves isn't a very far distance. At some point, that distance must have been nearly non existent.
In another stunning discovery that's not really all that stunning, archaeologist in combination with other scientist have discovered that the neolithic people in what is now Germany were feeding infants milk at least as far back as 7,000 years ago.
I guess I never thought of this topic before, but given that I think pretty much every culture that keeps livestock does this, well. . .
Not that it's not an important. It is. It's just not that surprising. If semi aboriginal people feed infants milk now, why wouldn't they have done so 7,000 years ago?
The more frustrating things in these reports in the ongoing reporting that continues to present the shift to agriculture as one in which John Smith, Neolithic dude, came home one day and said something like "Martha! I've got it! Let's become farmers, build a house, get rid of this tent, and give up hunting and gathering".
We know that didn't happen that way.
Just as somebody whose been around farming would suspect, the whole "shift" isn't so much a real shift as much as it was a shift in emphasis. Early on aboriginal people actually did some cultivation, just as they still do today (why we ignore the today in such analysis is mysterious). Then over time they came to be less aboriginal and rely more on their crops and livestock, but they never actually gave up hunting or gathering.
Indeed, the only places where hunting and gathering were much reduced are those places where the development of agriculture managed to put a class in power that didn't farm. Those classes universally operated on the "everything is mine" thesis, and kept the game for themselves while expropriating a percentage of the crops for themselves as well. When those classes fell, as they did over time, hunting and gathering tended to resume, save for urbanites who can't avail themselves of nature.
making it the oldest such object found in North America and pushing human settlement of North America back earlier, once again, than previously believed.
In noting that this was a found item, I have to wonder how many such ancient, ancient items have been picked up here and there in North America and simply found their way into drawers, were they were subsequently lost or perhaps remain?
This related to the item I just posted about Neanderthals and allergies, and I've posted directly on this topic, in regards to our ancient ancestors, before. But I'm doing so again, as the way this topic has been historically treated is rather interesting. It says something, well. . . about us. Not them
It's invariably the theory amongst any historical or scientific work written by Europeans or European Americans that our ancestors were Bad. And those Baddies killed off any other group of people that they came in contact with. Always.
Well, DNA studies are showing not so much.
And I'm not surprised.
Perhaps the classic example of this is the long accepted story of the Anglo Saxon invasion of Great Britain. Classically, the story is that Horsa and Hengest came in as mercenaries and saw that Britain, or at least southern Britain, was ripe for hte taking and this sparked the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. They came in, killed all the British save for those basically north of Hadrian's Wall and who didn't manage to hold out in Wales, and established the series of Kingdoms that became England in later years. Some, like Winston Churchill in his classic History of the English Speaking Peoples, allowed for the survival of a British woman here and there, but not much.
Brothers Horsa and Hengest come with the tribe, as depicted in the Renaissance. In reality, they probably not only didn't look this calm, but they wouldn't have looked this modern, if you will, either. They probably looked a lot like what we imagine Vikings to look like, as they really weren't much different. Assuming they existed at all. Their names, oddly, mean "horse" and "horse", and they might be allegorical.
Well, a study of DNA on Great Britain reveals that the British, including the English, are mostly truly British. That is, while that German DNA is in there, it's not in there so much. Seems the Germanic invaders came in, or sort of meandered in really, and ultimately gained political dominance over any one region, but never gained a population dominance. And while entire tribes moved, once settled, they started marrying amongst the existing population.
Gee, what a surprise.
This is true, by the way, for the Vikings too.
Now, I'm not saying the Vikings weren't bad. They really were. And I don't appreciate the latter day revision of them which would hold that they were a bunch of misunderstood hippies. Baloney. They did invade, and they ultimately brought their families with them.
But, missed in the modern stories of them somewhat, their language was intelligible with the Old English of the time, and they weren't all that different in some ways. A huge difference, of course, was religion, as they adhered to a really primitive form of the old Germanic paganism. . . for a time.
But they started converting themselves. By the last Viking invasion of 1066 their king was a Catholic monarch. So, like the Angles, Saxon and Jutes before them, they slowly melted into the existing population. You can tell, by their DNA, where they were strong today, but the British remain the dominant British genetic contributors.
Although some British DNA, it should be noted, like Irish DNA, goes back 10,000 years. That's right. All the way back. Showing, once again, that earlier populations were not slaughtered like people like to imagine.
Now this is becoming increasingly evident about the Neanderthals. The popular imagination has held that the Cro Magnons, i.e., us, came in and killed the whole lot of them, because we are bad. Well, not it appears that the populations, which weren't as different as we imagine, merged. Some would have held that "oh they were too ugly that can't be true", but that's turning out to be less true as well. They did look a bit different, but then existing populations do as well. Existing populations of humans mix readily today and frankly there will come a day when the mixing is sufficiently complete that there will be no differences in human populations (i.e., no races), so why we ever thought that it was the case that no Cro Magnon began to think that some young Neanderthal female wasn't somewhat cute is beyond me.
Now, all of these examples go a ways back. But it might serve to reconsider some ideas that became very popular in the United States in the 1970s, about European Americans and their presence in North America. At that time, the old image of heroic colonist taming a wilderness yielded to an image of savage Europeans dominating the native populations.
Now, the conquering of North America was violent. And, contrary to the popular imagination, the conquering of American east of the Mississippi was much more violent than that event west of the Mississippi. But the use of terms like genocide are really misplaced. The killing impact of disease is very real, but what is probably the case is that it was much more accidental than anything else. That isn't good, but it also isn't quite what its recently been portrayed as. And, as with the other example, populations mixed a lot more than sometimes imagined. This is particularly true in Spanish and French speaking regions of North America, where there tended to be a lot less fighting and a lot more attraction than seems to be commonly considered. Indeed, we should be well aware of this as it's well known that the first Spanish Indian couples showed up as early as Cortez' conquest of Mexico and even English colonial populations, which were amongst the least likely to mix in North America, started mixing right from the onset.
Rebecca Rolfe, the wife of John Wolfe. Known better to history as Pocahontas, although that was a nickname and she had several other "Indian" names. She married John Wolfe in 1614.
So, what's the point of this? Well, perhaps simply a pleas that occasionally we slow down and consider human beings as human beings before getting retrospectively indignant and righteous. It's easy to look back and condemn all of our ancestors for avarice and violence. But truth be known, most people have always been people. And, frankly, most people here are the product of mixed ancestries even if they aren't ware of it. Somebody crossed that color line, cultural line and even that subspecies line at some point. Probably a lot of your ancestors did.
And, let's give ourselves credit. We don't always do the right thing. But we don't have a roadmap to the future either. And we might do the right thing more often than not. And at least here, while it's easy to imagine everyone from our culture, as we belong to that human culture that uniquely feels guilt about itself, was a baddie. More often than not, chances were high that what happened is that young hunter Gronk of the newly arrived Cro Magnons was invited over for aurock by the family of young gatherer Gronella of the old Neanderthals, and things went fine.
As mundane as it might seem, scenes like this probably have a lot more to do with average human ancestry that warfare.
Neanderthals who are in my distant family tree that is.
I've never been bothered by the thought that I likely descend partially from Neanderthals. Indeed, I long ago concluded that the theory that Neanderthals weren't out competed, and weren't wiped out, but disappeared to, well, attraction, was likely the correct theory. And now I'm proven almost certainly correct.
Oh, now I know, you have in mind that obsolete image of a hump backed Neanderthal, but that's no longer the correct one. We know know that while they were heavy boned and stockily built, they probably didn't look all that different from heavily boned stocky people you run into today. Most of us don't look strongly like Neanderthals, but some of us do. And no doubt there were comely Neanderthal.
Anyhow, and not very surprisingly in my view, it turns out that Europeans tend to have a percentage of Neaderthal DNA in their genetic makeup. And apaprently part of that DNA is related to their immune systems, whcih are sort of turbocharged.
That's a good thing in one way, but as allergies are basically an over-response by the immune system to something, that's bad.
And as I'm quite allergic to some things, for me that's a bummer.
But, as interesting as this new information is, I have to wonder why it didn't apparently plague Neanderthals, assuming that it didn't.
