NIce picture

All:

This isn't exactly what I had in mind in the way of "Neandernews", but going through the John Hawks Blog, for what I did want, I came across this picture

It's a commemoration of the site in the Neander Valley where the first recorded or published Neandertal remains were found in 1856. There were earlier ones, in particular, a skull at Gibraltar which the finders couldn't figure out, but ths was the site. It's interesting to note that at least until other Neandertal specimens were found, the finders weren't quite able to figure the remains out, either. They kept coming up with the idea that it was some "degenerate" "modern" human, such as an Irish person(the Irish were held in disrepute at the time), or a "Mongolian cossack" who had crawled into the cave to die. A fellow named Schaffhausen began to grasp that these remains were really old, and, eventually, people began to figure out that these specimens weren't exactly "like us". From which a great many controversies have flowed, and are still flowing.

Oh well. Neandertals quickly became, in the minds of many, what I would now call a "despised group". At least modern "despised groups" are around to speak for themselves. Since Neandertals aren't, I hope I'm doing well by them.
Anne G

Neandertals had comfy, organized homes.

All:

I know, I know. I got this item off MSNBC, which may or may not be the most reliable of sources, but -- well, it's another piece of information, useful in part because it sows they liked to make themselves as comfortable and cozy as anybody else. In this, they seem to be more like "modern" humans than some people might suppose.
Anne G

Cloning Neanertals?

All:

Thanks to the John Hawks Weblog I cam across a post on one of the Discover Magazine blogs, that argues yes, we should clone Neandertals

Now I'm not going to argue with this person's reasoning, but I remain queasy about this idea, nevertheless. For one thing, I'm not sure that there is any body that is qualified to do ethical oversight on such a project. And while I share the blogger's enthusiasm for such a project, in that I would like to see how a real Neandertal might behave in the "modern" world. OTOH, this selfsame blogger seems to assume that Neandertals were vastly different from ourselves(not), would be easily recognized(maybe or maybe not), and being vastly different in some fundamental manner, basically inferior(not). The problem is, that there really isn't much evidence for such differences, beyond the "anatomical'. Would we really recognize a Neandertal "on sight"? Again, maybe, maybe not.

There is also the little question of the cloned Neadertal's human status? Would they be accorded "human" status? Judging by the latest discoveries, both prehistoric-archaelogical and various genetic and paleoanthropological studies, they shuuld be., But would they be? This is where some sort of ethical oversight would have to come in. Furthermore, since we primates are social animals, it would be imperative to clone a number of them, so that they wouldn't be alone in the world.

I think that sooner or later, somebody, somewhere, is gong to try to clone a Neandertal in the not too distant future. If that is the case, whether I, personally, am emotionally queasy about this or not, we should start the process of forming this ethical oversight panel. Now.
Anne G

Dissing Neandertals still goes on, despite new discoveries

Gentle Readers:

I came acorss this post Via a review in Salon, of Brian Fagan's book Cro-Magnon. I must say that Dr. Fagan is a well-respected archaeologist and a good writer who has written many books very good books on various aspects of archaeology. I should also mention that I meant to blog this post several days ago, but have not, for various reasons(partly to do with the now-seasonable weather after a very crappy month of May. In any case, the reviewer seems to think the book is already out of date. And I tend to agree with him.

First, the term "Cro-Magnon". It is popularly used as a standin for early "modern" humans living in Eurasia, who are scientifically named Homo(sapiens)sapiens. But scientists prefer "early moern human" or "Early modern European" to "Cro-Magnon", simply because the latter term is much more inclusive. Furthermore there are no apparent "modern" human fossils found coterminous with the later Neandertals(Homo(sapiens)neanderthalensis. Though the Chauvet Cave painings are generally considered to be the work of "modern" humans, there have been no fossils found, that would prove this, one way or another, at least not in most parts of the world where Neandertals and "moderns" apparently coexisted. There are still big arguments about this, with some workers even thinking Chauvet Cave was decorated by Neandertas, but this can't be proven either. Be that as it may, it appears that Dr. Fagan feels that Neandertals were, somehow, just not smart enough to compete(whatever that might mean in the context) with "modern" humans. Why? Because, in his view, "modern" humans had cave art and Neandertals didn't.Wow! He also thinks they were totally separate"species" that died out, perhaps because "modern" humans "preyed" on them. The only trouble with that idea(aside from the fact that Fagan has had this notion for a rather long time, though in other works, he did't dwell on it), is that at the Max Planck Institute, in Leipzig, Gerrmany, Svante Pääbo and his team have been extracting Neandertal genomes for years.

They started first with mitochondrial DNA, which in Neandertals, appeared to be quite different from "modern" humen mtDNA. This led Pääbp amd his team to conclued, in 1997, that, yeah, Neandertals were definitely quite different from outselves. But wait! The moment Pääbo and his team announced this, studies came out from other geneticists suggesting that it wasn't quite that simple. Among other things, modern chimpanzee subspecies, have greater differences in their mtDNA than did Neandertals.

Then there were the archaeological studies over the years between 1997 and 2010, that suggested very strongly that Neandertal behavior seems to have been very similar to ours in a number of areas, given that they mostly occupied different areas, and had different materials and potential food available to them. In a place calld Salzgitter-Lebenstedt, some 60,000 years ago, they were catching reindeer/caribou in a similar fashion(but without guns and snowmobiles or other transportation devices), in very much the same basic way that certain Alaska natives do in Central Alaska: they essentially herded them, or "met" them as they were crossing a stream(just as modern caribou do in Alaska) in order to get to forests to live through the winter(and breed). Fall is mating season among Rangifer tarandus, and it is also the time they migrate from open tundra to forests with deep, protected snow to keep wolves and other predators away. They are also at their best at that season, and provide a lot of food. Neandertals must surely have noticed their migratory habits and took advantage of this to plan their hunts, just like tradtional "modern" humans do.

Then there's a cave in Jordan called Tor Faraj, where Neandertals lived, patterned their living space in that humble cave, built fires near their sleeping areas to keep them warm at night, and so onIthey seem to have done that in various caves in Spain, too). Also, some 60,000 years ago or so, they were using birch pitch to make glue so they could better haft their tools(including "thrusting" spears which they mostly apparently used. Other workers discovered that, later on, Neandertals were associated with the so-called "Chatelperronian" style of tool making(and symbolic objects like necklaces or pendants. Some of these imply that Neandertals understood symbolism just as well as "modern" humans did. This strikes me as being very sophisticated indeed. And the archaeologist Francisco d'Errico claims that they came up with this "Chatelperronian" style independent of any "modern" humams. Others pooh-poohed him, claiming that the Neandertals "only imitated" what they saw on "moderns". This is one of the stupider conclusions I've seen, because aside from imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, it takes anunderstanding of symbols and like characteristics, to be able to imitate anything. But then, people used to think that the native people of Australia were stupid, too, yet they knew to used some materials from the invading Europeans, for their own use on weapons, which strikes me, at least, as extremely smart.

Finally, in 2010, João Zilhão, found a stash of shells of some deep sea mussel in a cave in Spain. It was a Neandertal cave, and the shells had been decorated with a mixture of red hematite, ochre, and some slightly sparkly substance. The shells, in other words, were painted a kind of peachy orange, and strung through natural holes, for some probable symbolic purpose. Remnants of some shells seem to have been used as mixing cups for this purpose. Some West African people used to do things like this. Maybe they still do.

But that wasn't all. By 2010, Svante Pääbo and his team started in on sequencing the nuclear Neandertal genome. It is not yet compliete, but the results were a complete surprise: People who ended up in regions other than sub-Saharan Africa have some 1-4% "Neandertal" genes! Sub-Saharan Africans don't, but that hasn't stopped them from contributing to the gene pools of the rest of the world, one way or another, including, of course, the fact that they seem to have given us the modern "morph", which is the glue that holds all the world's populations together, IMO. We can no longer deny our kinship with Neandertals, a misunderstood prehistoric group, if there every was one. In fact, they are what I like to call a "despised group"; nobody in their right mind, supposedly, would claim kinship with them. One paleoanthropologist(whose psssible identity I won't reveal here, in order to protect the guilty), thinks Neandertals were so ugly and stupid he actually said he was glad he was different from them! But even "despised groups" are now asking for their human rights, and if Neandertals were still around, I am sure they would be, too. Unfortunately, they are a prehistoric despised group, which is not around any more, at least not as a distinct type, so they can't. That is one of the reasons, aside from the fact that they are strong presences in my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, I write about them a lot. My aim is to make them respectable.

Having said all of this, it is quite apparent that Brian Fagan has no interest whatever and checking to see if his theories are correct. He doesn't appear to care if Neandertals are respectable or not. But many people do.The views presented in Cro-Magnon now seem wildly out of date, according to the reviewer, and I tend to agree with him. Whether or not Neandertals are Homo sapiens neanderthalensis or just Homo neanderthalensis, it is increasingly obvious that they seem to have thought like us, made the same kinds of decisions(given the respective contexts) as us, and generally behaved in ways quite similar to ourselves, mich as wolves and coyotes have similar habits(coyotes even form packs, where undisturbed) --and they have been known to mate! Three-qaurters of all "wolves" around the Great Lakes area have "coyote" gene sequences, and there are "coyotes" in New England and southeastern Canada, that have "wolf" genes. What does that make them? I don't know, but I have come to the conclusion that the genus Homo, starting at least with Homo erectus, were all capable of interbreeding, as this very same reviewer seems to be suggesting.

So Brian Fagan might want to consider two possible courses of action(or maybe both of them at the same time). First, he might want to try to open his mind a bit and get over his(and a lot of other people's) fixation on the (mostly anatomical IMO differences between Neandertals and ourselves, and he might also want to consider not involving himself in a subfield about which he very obviously knows almost nothing, except "recieved wisdom" that will, most likely, turn out to be quite mistaken.
Annne G

Neandertals arrived early in the Briitish Isles?

Wel;l, at least judging by a snippet , accompanied by pictures, from the Beeb, they did. Some archaeologists found some flint tools and dated them to around 110 kyr ago. Which is a lot older than 60 kyr, by nearly half. According to this same article, since there was no English Channel, since the glaciers essentially sucked up so much moisture that what is now the English Channel and part of the North Sea, were essentially something like Beringia. In other words, if you had to hunmt reindeer/caribou, horses, mammoths, elk/red deer, etc. you could follow herds of them wherever they went. And that is what some Neandertals apparently did, at least according ot the article. I have a feeling this is going to be another possibly contentious issue, as even as the announcement was made, some people pronounced themselves skeptical. We'll see, but I have a feeling it will make some awfully interesting reading as the articles go back and forth.
Anne G

(Neander)life is imitating art!

Gentle readers:

I've been meaning to blog about tthe latest findings re Neandertals.  You see, according to Svante Pääbo and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, they have sequenced 60% of "the Neandertal genome".  This genome was extracted from three pieces of bone from Neandertals found at Vindija Cave, Slovenia. And it seems that many of us living today have a little bit of "Neandertal" in them.  People from sub-Saharan Africa don't seem to, but since people from sub-Saharan Africa seem to have been the population that gave birth and rise to "modern" humans, I can kind of see why this would be so, although, despite the barrier of the Sahara Desert, there was probably at least some interchange, at least later on in human evolutionary times.

ThePääbo people estimated that people outside of Africa carry about 1-4 per cent "Neandertal" genes, probably arising from fairly early gene exchanges between wandering "moderns" and wandering Neandertals, though this study is probably far from complete, and some people who have heard about it, think the "Neandertal" contribution may well have been higher. The John Hawks Weblog gives the Gentle Reader an excellent overview of the study, though it is rather long and scientifically detialed. There are also plenty of news stories about this, as the story had been all over the media over the last few days.

This is an exciting discovery in many ways, and kind of confirms some of the suspicions I had, when I first began gathering information for the book I was then writing, which was quite different from what I'm writing now, although I ended up with a bunch of spinoffs, some of which take place in "modern" times, from just this one point of entry, so to speak.

But this story takes place in medieval England, and there are three Neandertals in it: Illg, the heroine -- who looks not unlike the Neanderlady in my picture, though her hair is less messy, but it is very obviously red, just as, a few years ago, it turned out that Neandertals apparently had a version of the skin pigment gene MC1R, which can confer light hair and skin, and sometimes red hair and freckles. It isn't quite the same version of MC1R as exists in "modern" humans today, in certain parts of the world, but from a hair and skin color point of view, an average viewer wouldn't be likely to be able to tell the difference.

Curiously, or not so curiously, perhaps, neither Illg, nor her companions Ren of the Three Trees(her older cousin who is supposed to be her guardina), and Mat Fartraveled, a friend of Ren's(and there seem to have been a lot of Viking-era people called Fartraveled, which doesn't raise too many eyebrows among those people who encounter Mat, either. seem particularly "noticeable" to the medieval people they encounter, except for their "big" noses(though Illg, being female, has a somewhat "daintier" one), and in my sotry, all Neandertals have a certain sexual charisma which, if they choose to exercise it, can prove irresistable to some people, especially those with the requisite "Neandertal genes".

It just so happens that the hero, Hardwin, and the antihero, Ivo(who springs from a medieval family "from hell"), both have the requisite genes, which makes them unusually sensitive to conditions in their surroundings in various ways, though both of them are what I call "fighting men" and what later became known as "knights". But they both become attracted to Illg, and Illg is attracted to both of them, though from the beginning, she's more attracted to Hardwin. From this, spins a ver complicated tale, with a "cast of thousands", many of whom are real people.

The point here is, much of what I deduced from my early reading about Neandertals -- their behavior, probable genome, abilities, brain power, even their ability to speak -- have turned out to not be too far off what I learned and put together. It would make sense, for example, that Neandertals were probably light haired, light skinned, and light eyed, because they lived in cool, cloudy, Paleolithic Eurasia, for the most part, though some lived in the Middle East and Israel. So, like modern Western Europeans, they would not have needed a lot of protection from the sun in order to survive.

They also seem to have had all of the prerequisites for ability to speak a language, incliding physical ones like a modern-looking hyoid bone(the bone that attaches the tongue to the muscles of the throat, certain "speech genes" which are identical to "ours" and so on. And in my books, they speak perfectly intelligibly.

It's also true that Neandertals differed (somewhat) anatomically speaking, but unless they had arthritis, and a fair number of them did, they could walk upright like we don, and used their environment in similar ways to "modern" humans, given what they had available to them. Their heads were somewhat differently shaped, having lower foreheads and a kind of "bun" or "bump" at the back of the head, which has led some people to believe that their brains must have developed differently, though there appears to be no evidence of this. But the people in medieval England don't "notice" this, either, as they are careful to blend in as much as they can.

Most importantly, since the people they meet, don't "know", other than to guess(sometimes), that they have some rather um, unusual abilities(which is part of what makes this science fiction rather than a kind of "alternative history"(they even know space travel, since they are on a kind of mission from a planet where their ancestors were taken before they apparently became completely extinct, in a solar system in a nearby part of the galaxy. they are accepted as perfectly human, thank you very much. This allows Illg and her hero, Hardwin, to fall in love, but for most of the story they are kept apart, partly by circumstance, and partly by Illg's dithering, because she's pretty young when she starts out, and also is somewhat impulsive when she sees wrongs that need, in her opinion, to be righted, and these get her into various kinds of difficulties.

Of course, there's a lot more to this story than what I've suggested here, but it is, in various ways, firmly based in the scientific findings I've outlined above. There are some pretty firm archaeological and human evolutionary references as well, for those who like the scientific, even in an obviously historical setting.

And for those who like the "historical", everything in this book is as factual as I can get it, where the facts exist(and in this particular period of time, there aren't all that many "facts" to go on). To fill in gaps of various kinds, I've had to make up certain things, but I've tried to be as careful as possible. And it's been very hared work, though I have enjoyed, and am still ejoying, every minute of it. Scientific research like I've been doing is exhilarating and often exhausting. So is the writing process.

Now that I've mentioned the names and relationships of the most important characters in my book, I'll probably be writing more about them(and others, as well), at least from time to time. I'll certainly be blogging a lot more about the latest Neandernews and what it all means,

Stay tuned,
Anne G

More nice Neanderpics

Just to let anyone interested know, I have just stumbled on some rather nice pictures of Neandertal reconstructions.  They all look, very, very human. One of them is eerily reminiscent of that famous early 16th century painting of Jesus.  Another one looks like lots of athletic young men I have met(sans the beard, and in modern clothes). His nose sticks out, but he' really doesn't look remarkably different.  The little girl looks like a little girl, etc.  The only one I don't really "cotton to" is the picture of "Wilma".  Were Neandertals really all that messy?  The link, BTW, is on Mathilda's Anthropology Blog.
Anne G

Another Neandertal reconstruction

Well, actually, it’s a whole series of human evolutionary reconstructions, all of them quite good.  I have a lot of respect for John Gurche, the reconstructor. In this particular instance, he’s done a spectacularly good job of reconstruction.  And I stumbled across this piece via Julien Riel-Salvatore's "A Very Remote Period Indeed" So thanks, Julien Riel-Salvatore, for sharing this with us.

For those interested in the Neandertal, you can see the picture here:

Is there some archaeological evidence, somewhere, that Neanderguys wore ponytails?  Just wondering.  I should have thought they didn’t have messy hair.

Anne G

I'm trying again

Drat! The attempt at putting up the link didn't work. Don't ask why.

http://sfwriter.com/2010/02/neanderthal-parallax-began-10-years-ago.html

But now I've got it, so you can read all about the Neanderthal Parallax 10th anniversary if you like.
Anne G

Oh dear!

Sorry. For some reason, there wasn't a link to the "10th anniversary" post. I'm fixing that now.

10th anniversary of the Neanderthal Parallax

If you click on the link, you will find that Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy began today, with Hominids, the first in the series. It's one of Saywer's most popular books. And, after reading it, I can see why.
Anne G

To clone or not to clone? Neandertals, that is

This past week has seen a bunch of articles, in various venues, about the possibility of cloning Neandertals back into existence.  You, gentle reader, can get an idea of what this is all about in Archaeology Magazine, and also here, and here, and  here. If you read through all the links, you will find varying degrees of enthusiasm or caution about the idea.

 

I must, for the record, admit that I would naturally be very interested if Neandertals were to somehow show up again.  But then, I would love to see a few woolly mammoths, too.  Trouble is, woolly mammoths though just as extinct as the Neandertal population, are not and never were, human beings.  When you get into the idea of cloning a human being -- and I definitely consider Neandertals to have been human beings, however they may or may not have been related to "us" -- gets into territory that definitely makes me a bit queasy. Even Svante Pääbo, the geneticist who sequenced the first Neandertal genome back in 1997, thinks it would be unethical to do this. From the Max Planck Institute, he has said on a number of occasions, that he thinks it would be unethical to do this. If you read the articles, apparently a number of people agree with this.

 

Though the idea of having Neandertals around, to compare and contrast, excites my fantasies to some degree, I tend to agree with those who think it would be an unethical idea.  On the other hand, if you read the article, it's obvious that there are people who are "behind" the idea.  And in any case, regardless of whether or not people think it's a good idea to clone Neandertals back into existence, it's probably reality to say that once enough knowledge about the cloning process becomes available(as applied to humans, at least), someone is bound to try to clone a Neandertal. 

 

So the questions become manifold.  First of all, why would anybody want to do this?  To study what the differences between "them" and "us" really are, the enthusiasts reply. Some enthusiasts might also claim it would help us understand how certain diseases work in human populations.  Others might be more interested in presumed differences in brain function, or language capabilities. The list of reasons for cloning Neandertals is potentially endless.  Which raise a lot of questions right there. 

 

First, would this Neandertal simply be considered an "experiment"?  If so, that should raise a lot of red flags.  It's all too easy, even with "modern" humans, to consider certain groups "other" or "not us".  And this has happened in recent history -- if one googles  the "Tuskegee study", they will find a good example of the sort of thing that makes me queasy, and should make any person with half a brain queasy too.  This raises further questions of how a Neandertal under such circumstances would even be regarded.  Because if he or she was regarded as "human", it seems to me he or she would have to be given the kind of basic human rights everyone is now thought to be entitled to.  If people started thinking of Neandertals as basically "subhuman" -- and some people, even scientists, still sort of do -- then it would be only a short step to the kind of thinking that put Jews and other people some Germans didn't like, into Auschwitz and other such horrors.  There is no guarantee that such thinking has been entirely wiped out, even in the 21st century. 

 

So, in order to be protected, a Neandertal would have to be given full human rights, assuming it would be possible to clone one at all in some relatively near future. If he or she were given full human rights, then they would have to be allowed to consent to any experiments performed on them for scientific purposes, with full understanding(assuming, as I tend to, that a reasonably intelligent Neandertal would be able to fully appreciate the implications) of the possible consequences.  Otherwise, it might end up being very much like people who claim aliens from outer space abducted them, and performed experiments on them.  Most of us consider that people who make such claims are slightly crazy, but can anybody imagine how a Neandertal might feel, if these things weren't fully explained to them, or if, for whatever reason, they couldn't fully understand the reason?  I'm not entirely sure some of the enthusiasts for cloning Neandertals back into existence, have fully consider this.

 

If, however, any such project decided to clone a small population of Neandertals, there might be less opposition, provided, of course, that all of them were given full human rights and responsibilities.  After all, there doesn't seem to have been any indication that their brains were anything much different from "ours", though their skulls were slightly larger.  But corrected for overall size, the amount of brain inside a Neandertal skull would have been roughly the same as a "modern" human's. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any archaeological indication that they were unable to do anything contemporary "modern" humans could do.  They certainly seem to have had at least the potential for such capacities.  My guess is, that if they didn't exhibit some of these capacities, this was probably due to (a) what was available in their environment and (b) restrictions partially imposed by population size.  Neandertal populations, as I've said elsewhere, seem to have been quite small and scattered, which at times and in places, may have hindered the kind of  communication that fosters the adoption of new ideas. Nevertheless, they seem to have been perfectly capable of "upgrading" their toolkit, and doing things like painting and decorating themselves, as finds from places like El Sidrón and Arcy-sur-Cure seem to show. And these things, in addition to the burials I've mentioned elsewhere, and the find, in Bruniquel Cave, of a rectangle or oval, deep in its interior, with a burned cave bear bone inside this oval or rectangle suggest that they were perfectly capable of symbolic thinking and language.

 

So what are we left with? Well, the anatomical differences are fairly obvious, but even here, most people probably wouldn't "recognize" Neandertals if they were walking around dressed in modern clothes(this, by the way, forms part of the premise of my Invaders trilogy; medieval people never heard of Neandertals, and though some of them recognize "something" about them, in some situations, they have no idea what it is). So unless these differences were pointed out to them, people mostly wouldn't "have a clue".  And if they did  "have a clue", how would they react?  I don't know, but this is another reason, which again the cloning enthusiasts seem not to have considered, why they would need to be protected by legal, basic human rights, and treated as any other human being.  I doubt eve everyone would be equally enthusiastic about Neandertals, once they started walking around the Earth again, and formed their own social groupings, which might or might not include "modern" humans in some circumstances. 

 

So for now, I remain queasy about the idea of cloning "a" Neandertal.  I would be a bit less queasy it if it was going to be a bunch of them, but I would still be somewhat queasy. Fortunately, it seems that at the present time, even cloning woolly mammoths(some scientists are actually working on this) seems not to be feasible.  At the present time, cloning Neandertals seems even less so.  So I remain queasy at the idea of cloning "a" Neandertal, or even some Neandertals, into existence.  But I'm not going to actually try to "do" anything about it till the day comes that it might be possible.

Anne G

Robert Sawyer's "Neandertal problem"

In addition to having a "publishing problem", Robert Sawyer has, IMO a "Neandertal problem" as well.  Again, it's not because he exactly negatively portrays Neandertals in his books Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids.  His Neandertal characters are very engaging, and he writes very well of them.  Still, he has a problem.

 

Maybe I should call it a "religion problem", because it became very obvious, when I was reading Hominids, that he honestly believes "religion" is bad.  So he wrote his Neandertals in such a way that they were very, very "rational" , and never developed spiritual beliefs.  Which prompted person of the cloth to write him and ask if "Is it a copout that Neandertals never had religion?"   Sawyer gave a very "rational" answer, which reflects his beliefs, far more than it reflects any beliefs about the unknown, Neandertals might or might not have had.  And that shows very strongly in his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy as well. 

 

For example, in the very first book, Hominids, Sawyer goes to great pains to deny that Neandertals ever buried their dead.  To do this, he apparently has read the now-discredited theories of Robert Gargett, who claimed, in effect, that Neandertal burials weren't "really" burials.  Gargett did a useful service in pointing out that, in some cases, what looked like Neandertal burial sites, may have been the result of something else.  Gargett was especially hard on the Shanidar "flower burial", which he claimed, in essence, was "just accidental", as was the evidence of flower pollen.  Some people still believe this about the flower pollen, however it is odd that five of the six pollens found at the Shanidar site are used as traditional herbal medicinals to this day, and also that these flowers bloom in the spring, whereas the excavation of Shanidar Cave took place in August. 

 

Furthermore, if you know how to look evidence for deliberate Neandertal burial is reasonably easy to determine.  Most, if not all, Neandertals that are known to have been buried, are buried in a "flexed" position.  People who just "drop dead", or even fall in a faint, never, as far as I know, fall or drop dead in a "flexed" position.  The Kebara burial, for instance, is shown buried flexed, minus the skull, but whoever buried Mr. Kebara, thoughtfully left his jaw and his hyoid bone(the bone that attaches your tongue to the rest of your throat so you can talk), for future humans to ponder.

 

Then there's the famous(or infamous) La Chapelle Aux Saintes fossil.  The excavators(two brothers who also happened to be Catholic priests), took a photograph of the fossil.  Click the link and look closely at the fossil and see how it lies.  All of these practices suggest deliberate burial, which suggests some kind of rituals were involved.  If rituals were involved, this practice also suggests, at least intuitively, some kind of spiritual beliefs.  We have no idea what these spiritual beliefs, if any, might have been, but rituals of this kind do, at least, suggest some form of symbolism or symbolic thinking.  And I don't care who they are, nobody is completely rational when they lose some important or well-loved member of their family or band, or tribe, or whatever. 

 

So the real question here isn't whether it's a "copout" to create Neandertals who never "had religion".  The real question here is, how much of our own beliefs or nonbeliefs  about Neandertals(or anybody else, for that matter), are we simply "imposing" on poor Neandertals, who aren't here to defend themselves?  Of course, one can argue that the same could be said of people who claim they had a "religion", and they would be right.  We have no way of actually knowing, absent a time machine.  But there is enough archaeological evidence, which, for his own purposes, Sawyer seems to have conveniently ignored, to suggest that they did have some sort of ritual or spiritual beliefs -- about something.  We just don't know what.

 

Finally, we should keep in mind that all of us have "spiritual beliefs" of one kind or another.  Heck, even many atheists have "spiritual beliefs".  They just don't rest on believing that a deity exists.  So, my final question to Mr. Sawyer and other "rationalists" of this type is, why can't we accept the idea that Neandertals had them, too?

Anne G

A plethora of goodies on various subjects

There is an absolute plethora of bloggable subjects cluttering up various parts of my computer today, and I didn't even realize it!  I've been busy the past few days, mostly with more writing(have completed or revised two more chapters in the second book of my Great Medieval Science Fiction Trilogy With Neandertals), and haven't, lately, had much time to do any serious blogging. 

 

But never fear, there's plenty to blog about.  First, two stories from Julien Riel-Salvatore's fine blog, A Very Remote Period Indeed,  both on the presence of Neandertals in Poland north of the Carpathians, some 80,000 years ago.  Then there's an equally fascinating piece on preserving an 11th century bridge in England, with sugar, on Got Medieval.  And let us not forget My Beloved Wolves!  There are stories and updates on the Wolves of the High Arctic(in this case, Ellesmere Island -- if you don't exactly know where that is, you might want to search through Google Earth or an atlas).  Their travels are interesting.  All wolves' travels are interesting, for a variety of reasons.

 

Last but not least, I have my own thoughts about why only certain people are interested in medieval history and society, and why few readers of historical and other genres deal with "medieval" except as fantasy.  I will also have something to say about how this impacts my own history, and my writing. 

 

In any case, stay tuned.  I'll be blogging about some of this stuff, a little each day or so.  I'm not deserting anybody, though I haven't started 2010 with a huge number of blogs.  But that's another story to tell -- later.  Much later.

Anne G

A nice picture

I found a rather nice sketch of the controversial Neandertal fossil La Chapelle aux Saintes.  You know, the one who was all crippled up with arthritis, had almost no teeth, and the earliest photos of the fossil(taken at the time it was discovered) show an obviously buried person. 

 

Here is the sketch:

 

As you can see, he doesn't look all that different from people you and I have known.  Or the differences, such as they are, are decidedly subtle.  But you can all judge for yourselves, I think.  Reconstructions of early humans often follows the conceptions or preconceptions of the reconstructors.

I

would really like to Dr. John Hawks and his blog for this.  Dr. Hawks is obviously rather multitalented.

 

Thanks again,

Anne G

Assassination and ambush, caveman style

There's been a fair amount of news about Neandertals floating around lately.  There is even one about "Neandertal artists", which I'll get to later in another blog.  However anthropology.net has an interesting comment about a paper published -- I think -- last fall or so, about the famous Shanidar III fossil.  This was the fossil that, among other things, gave Jean Auel her portrait of the shaman Creb in Clan of the Cave Bear.  I won't go into all the inaccuracies Auel perpetrated in this work, but for those who may have read Clan of the Cave Bear, you may remember that Creb was suffering from arthritis, couldn't move one arm, and limped around, apparently just like Shanidar III. 

 

One of the authors of the recent paper referred to in Anthropology.net, Steven Churchill, apparently became convinced that "modern" humans  succeeded Neandertals because they had projectile weapons, e.g., javelins or long spears, that they could throw over long distances.  He seems to think that an injury to Shanidar III's rib is consistent with a thrown "javelin", which, supposedly, Neandertals didn't have.  They supposedly "only" had thrusting spears. This may be true.  However, there are javelin-like implements, found at the German site of Schöningen, which are dated to approximately 400,000 years!  These also appear to have been used on an ancient species of wild horse, as horse-type bones were found with the javelins or spears.  So these ancient people, whoever they were, were not necessarily getting "up close and personal" with the prey they hunted.  Whether Neandertals possessed such weapons or not is perhaps debatable.  The point is, that these Schöningen spears were not dissimilar to -- and this sort of ties into my own work, in a way -- medieval weapons of a certain type.  I will show an illustration here:

 

Note that at least some of the fighters are holding the spears above their heads and presumably throwing(or perhaps thrusting them; this would, even in 'moderns" on horses, not be all that different from Neandertals and their "thrusting" spears.  Unfortunately, I can't lay hands on any pictures of the Schöningen spears, but they apparently were held and thrown similarly; the people who found them ran "throwing tests" on them.

 

I can't say whether Neandertals had such weapons for chasing down prey, but the archaeological record seems to indicate that they had a lot of things that were similar to the range of equipment contemporary "modern" humans had. 

 

So Anthropology.net raises some interesting questions about possible interactions between Neandertals and "moderns".  Steven Churchill, on the other hand, presumes that such interactions as Neandertals and "moderns" may have had, were always what I call "high conflict".  He, and people like him, base this idea on the ecologically-based notion of "competitive exclusion", in which creatures which have similar habits tend to "exclude" each other out of their territories, or else kill each other. Problem with this is, humans, while following some of these ecological rules, some of the time, are more complicated organisms.  Since Neandertals and "moderns" increasingly appear to have had the same range of behaviors and reactions, and probably each had some sort of language, now lost, it's quite likely that, while all between Neandertals and "moderns" wasn't exactly "lovey-dovey" all the time, it wasn't always, and inevitably "high conflict", either.  Besides, as Anthropology.net points out, why would someone suffering from arthritis and maybe not able to use one of their arms, be considered a threat to anybody?  It kind of boggles belief. 

 

To conclude, I don't know how Neandertals and "moderns" living around Shanidar Cave or anywhere else, might have regarded one another.  But I think Dr. Churchill, while he's done some excellent research about prehistoric humans, has just gone off on a sort of personal tangent here.  And an increasing body of research seems to suggest that whatever "happened" to Neandertals, it probably wasn't due to anything as simplistic as his ideas of "competitive exclusion", or some other notions(here implied, rather than explicit) of some Neandertal "lack" or "inferiority".

 

 

More about this and similar subjects later,

Anne G

Early "moderns" and their teeth

PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, has published a paper concerning the teeth of a fossil known as Lagar Velho I or the LV 1 in scientific parlance.  It seems, from a superficial glance at the paper, which was written by several experts who did the study, and who have long had ties with the ongoing research on the Lagar Velho fossil, that there were things about the child's teeth that seem more like that of some Neandertals, than of "modern" humans. 

 

To give anyone reading this a background, the Lagar Vellho fossil was discovered in, IIRC, 1995. It was thought at first that the child, who was apparently about four or five years old when it died, was an example of early "modern" burial culture, and that was about it.  Then Erik Trinkaus, a Neandertal expert and one of the authors of the present paper, took a closer look.  He said he found that the child's skeletal proportions suggested a mixture of early "modern" and Neandertal traits.  João Zilhão, one of the original discoverers, and also an author of the paper, declared at the time, and has been declaring ever since, that Neandertals "took their last stand" so to speak, on the Iberian Peninsula, and the early "modern" population was a "mixed" one.  Needless to say, these assertions have been disputed, just as almost everything concerning Neandertals has been. 

 

Whether or not one believes these claims, it is certainly true that early "modern" humans, e.g. Homo(sapiens)sapiens were more "robust", and in some ways, more like Neandertals, than later ones.  This, as Razib of Gene Expression points out, is probably due in part, at least, to the introduction of agriculture in the so-called Neolithic period.  You just don't need as much muscle and bone bulk to grow crops, as you do to go out and hunt or gather your own meals, so it's no wonder people switched to agriculture!  By that time, of course, there weren't any Neandertals, and, when people started switching to agriculture, there probably weren't that many "modern" foragers(e.g., what have previously been called "hunter-gatherers").  Agriculturalist populations were larger, and probably "swamped" the hunter-gatherers. 

 

Which is food for thought.  At the time they existed, Neandertal populations were even smaller than later "forager" populations, and little groups of them apparently hung on is relative semi-isolation on the Iberian Peninsula rather late.  "Modern" populations eventually filtered their way into the peninsula, but there may not have been very many of them, either, at the time.  Which may account for the "mixed" population, if there was a "mixed" population(people have disagreed about this, too).  In any case, assuming "moderns" and Neandertals "mixed" in the Iberian Peninsula or anywhere else(and they might have, in some places, at various times), there weren't very many of the "mixed" populations, either.  Which would make them easy to "swamp" genetically, even if more "gracile" people didn't originally have some genetic advantage.  In any case, as the PNAS article seems to be suggesting, the "modern European origins" story is rather more complex than some people like to believe.

Anne G

A little bit for the Neanderphiles

For the Neanderphiles among my Gentle Blog Readers,this article makes some nice, though relatively "light" end-of-the-year reading.  As the John Hawks blog say, there's nothing really new in it, unfortunately.

 

But why did the article have to  be accompanied by such an ugly picture?

Anne G

Did we love Neandertals? Did they love us?

 

Sometime late last week, a story started circulating  around various science news feeds, that went something like this:  "Neandertals had sex with humans".  The source of these headlines(and news stories with lots of speculation) was Svante Pääbo, a paleogenetics specialist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany  He has done a lot of work on woolly mammoth genomes(he was one of the first to extract and sequence the woolly mammoth genome), and, more germane to this discussion, Neandertals.  It seems that Pääbo is kind of hinting around that he's going to publish some bombshell about Neandertal(and "modern" human) mating habits in the paleolithic era. 

 

In the meanwhile, however, several news outlets have glommed onto this story, with various, shall we say, viewpoints.  One of the (slightly) more "sober" of these -- at least it does quote Pääbo and some others at some length -- come from the Times Online, and is, I think, fairly sensible, in view of the fact that the actual scientific paper hasn't come out yet.  No doubt Svante Pääbo will speak to the press at length, when he is finished sequencing the Neandertal genome.  To be fair, his team has sequenced Neandertal mitochondrial DNA, and has come up with a bunch of differences in sequence, though the vast majority of "our" and "their" genome is identical!  And, to Pääbo's credit, what he says, in the above mentioned video, and in print, is, perhaps deliberately, inconclusive. 

 

However, this hasn't stopped some people from "getting wild".  Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who has long studied Neandertals, seems to think that "if" they "had sex", they must have been like horses and donkeys, that classic example from Biology 101 showing that species are defined as separate(more or less), when they cannot mate and produce fertile offspring.  Or at least that's what the above-mentioned Times Online article seems to imply. It should be noted here that I have a lot of respect for Dr. Stringer.  He has worked on Neandertals for a long time, and has garnered a good deal of respect in many quarters for this work, which is careful, but which, in my opinion, may be influenced by whatever biases he has acquired over a lifetime of work.  And when it comes to Neandertals, there are plenty of biases at work, and always have been, practically from the minute of the first "official" discovery back in 1856.  Just to remind everybody, this was three years before Charles Darwin announced his theory of evolution.  People then had no idea what human evolution might have been like, and Neandertals were fortunate or unfortunate, to be the first "nonmodern" human type ever discovered.  About all I can say to Dr. Stringer is, I would love to show him around various bodies of water in the Seattle area, give him a bird identification field guide, and then ask him what kind of gull he sees walking around the shores of Green Lake or Lake Washington, or the Ballard Locks, or. . . .  What he might not realize is, the gull population around here is a "hybrid" one:  they are a mixture of "Western" gulls(Larus occidentalis) and "Glaucous winged" gulls(Larus glaucescens).  The Puget Sound area is the southern end of the "glaucous winged" gull range, and "Western" gulls have been flying, and settling, north for some time.  They meet here.  And mate.  And produce apparently fertile offspring.  The gulls obviously don't care about such minor details as what species they are supposed to belong to.  Their only criterion for being a suitable mate is (a) is the potential mate of the opposite sex and (b) do they have pink feet?   Both "glaucous winged" and "Western" gulls have pink feet.  To complicate things even further, in western Alaska, "glaucous winged" gulls mate with "herring" gulls(Larus argentatus), and yes, they, too, produce fertile offspring.  And they both have pink feet.  I can imagine the gull gene pool .  It kind of boggles the mind.  The reason this is possible is, that these gull populations were separated in various places during the last glacial advance, and because of the separations, these gull populations all diverged, genetically speaking -- somewhat.  But not enough, apparently, to create anything like a reproductive barrier.  Among "generalistic" species, and gulls are pretty darn generalistic, if you've ever seen one in action(they'll eat just about anything), this is not as  uncommon an occurrence as one might think.  And so, the gulls around here are called "Puget Sound hybrids", because they may look like "glaucous winged" or "Western" gulls, but they have cheerfully been exchanging genes for an apparently not inconsiderable time.  After all, there are no glaciers to impede their attempts to mate, at least not at the moment.  Besides, evolution is a decidedly messy and complicated business.  That includes the human variety.

 

But if Dr. Stringer still wasn't convinced that such things are possible, I would love to see the expression on his face when, on my theoretical journey, we stopped off at Isle Royale, Michigan.  As many people are aware, Isle Royale National Park is world-famous, and its wolves have been studied intensively and extensively for some 50 years now.  Except there's one thing about them:  These wolves aren't entirely wolf.  They have mitochondrial DNA sequences characteristic of coyote populations.  And there certainly are coyote populations nearby, though not on Isle Royale itself.  But then, the "wolves" of Isle Royale trotted themselves across Lake Superior and onto Isle Royale during an especially cold winter, when that part of Lake Superior froze over,it is thought, in about 1948.  And they've been there ever since.  They came from nearby Ontario, Canada, where there are also numerous coyotes. . . .and at the time, people thought nothing of trying to shoot every wolf they could shoot.  The wolves were probably safer on Isle Royale at the time; there certainly weren't very many of them, and coyotes seem to be somewhat more adept at not getting themselves shot.  But that's another story.  I should add that, to someone just looking at them, the wolves of Isle Royale look like wolves; they're big, furry, mostly gray, and they regularly hunt moose, when the hunting is good.  They don't exactly look like coyotes, other than the general resemblance all members of the genus Canis(dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, "red wolves") have to one another.  But they still have these "coyote genes".

 

And if Dr. Strnger still wasn't convinced, I'd take him somewhere in New England, to pay a visit to the "coyotes" there.  The New England coyotes now appear to have some "wolf" genes -- they are somewhat larger, darker, and furrier than their western counterparts.  This is partly due to the fact that it generally gets colder in the winter in, say Massachusetts, than it does in the Puget Sound region; coyotes around here don't need to grow a lot of fur in the wintertime, though they do grow some. 

 

The thing here is, at least from what I've gleaned in my readings(and I* keep on reading this stuff as it comes out), the members of the genus Homo, which include both Neandertals and "moderns", had, long before there were any Neandertals, evolved to be "generalistic".  That is, they were, and are, capable of, and not too fussy about, eating just about anything, and adjusting t6o whatever environment they found, and find themselves in.  True, the origin of both "ancient" and "modern" humans is somewhere in Africa, but people wander, and adapt.  And, 300, 200, 04 50,000 years ago, there were small populations scattered all over the Old World.  Their numbers generally weren't very big, and in many cases, their populations tended to be local and somewhat scattered.  But they were there, and they would follow game, in cold climates and in warm ones.  They would sometimes meet each other(as Neandertals and "moderns" may have in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East, but this has always been true for that region).  And, I suspect, some of these little groups may have exchanged genes. 

 

It's another question entirely, whether these small populations of whatever kind, were able to pass their "paleolithic" genes to later populations that began to take up farming, and because they had more "reliable" sources of food, were probably more numerous.  As it was, Neandertal populations appear to have been quite small and scattered; more so than "modern" ones, who kept coming from Africa anyway.  And later Paleolithic "modern" humans(whether or not they had any "Neandertal" genes), were smaller than later "Neolithic"(farming) ones; their genes may well have simply gotten swamped out of existence, just as (in my opinion)Neandertal genes likely were.

 

Which brings me back to Svante Pääbo and his possible "bombshell".   He is probably right that Neandertals and "modern" humans "mixed it up" on occasion when their populations met, in any number of ways and for any number of reasons.  And I'm guessing, since both Neandertals and "moderns" had evolved to be "generalistic", that, like the gulls, and coyotes x wolves, were perfectly capable of producing fertile offspring.  Whether they had much opportunity to do this is no doubt another story. And, absent a time machine, there is no way of telling if this was the case.  But I think the capability was there, if for no other reason than both groups seem to have had broadly similar strategies for accomplishing tasks like hunting or making tools or setting up dwelling places. 

 

This is difficult, nowadays, for a lot of people to believe, because most of them have been told, over and over and over again(if they pay any attention to these things) that Neandertals were fundamentally "different" in some basic way.  Well, as far as I, and a  number of other people can tell, they just weren't -- at least not in a behavioral sense. Just like wolves and coyotes, or the "hybrid gulls" of Puget Sound. And that belief, based on what evidence I've read in learned papers, gentle reader, is partly why I ended up writing a Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals.

Anne G

My eyes just fell out of my head when I saw this!

Things are getting really interesting around here! I don't know exactly how this happened, or who picked it up, but the Redheaded Neanderlady is now on this YouTube video about Neandertals. Given that my Great Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals takes place in medieval England, the music is appropriate, too, I guess. Anne G