Yvsa mentioned:
If the scientists are correct then the Neanderthal made and played a bone Flute.I think that should dispel some of the original thoughts about these people.
As I understand it, this is more than a bit in doubt. There was a recent <a href="http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/flute990922.html" target=new1>news story</a> about some 9,000 year-old bone flutes found in China, at least one of which was still playable.
The most relevant passage to Yvsa's comment seems to be:
The Jiahu flute is considerably more recent than a flutelike bone discovered in 1995 in an excavation of Neanderthal tools in a cave in Slovenia. That artifact was believed to be more than 43,000 years old, but musicologists question whether it is an instrument.
The Neandertals (the currently accepted spelling) were indeed fascinating, but our knowledge of them remains pretty limited and is more controversial than a lot of the reporters, or even scientists, will readily say. I see a lot of strong statements from proponents of different points of view, and while there is nothing wrong with that, we laymen have to be cautious in interpreting what we hear. I advocate being cautious of any claims either that Neandertals were "a lot like us" or that they were "wildly different from us." We still know little of their behavior. The were clearly much more like us than any non-human species currently alive, but they may have been much more different from us behaviorally and culturally than any "human" culture that we have any data on. In particular, I don't think it's safe to extrapolate from any "primitive" hunter-gatherer society of
Homo sapiens to what life may have been like among the Neandertals.
There is getting to be a huge amount of evidence for Neandertals and "modern humans" living in close proximity for thousands of years and
very limited evidence for intermarriage/genetic mixing. More evidence for that may (or may not) show up, but for now, I would tend to suspect that it is more likely that
Homo neanderthalensis and
Homo sapiens were distinct species and not just "races" or "subspecies" of "people."
As attractive as it may be to say, as Jan Simek <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/neanderthal991025.html" target=new2>does</a> that
Youre not talking about one advanced form and an animal. They were all people.
we still have to be pretty careful about defining the word "people." It's easy to see that the Neandertals were close relatives of ourselves, but there are a lot of unanswered questions about the details of the relationship. I'd like to recommend a book that I read recently, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380728818/qid=941120820/sr=1-2/002-3187040-6389016" target="new3">
The Neandertal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins</a> by James Shreeve, which presents a reasonably impartial discussion of quite a few of the problems with all of the various current theories of just how we and the Neandertals are related. I have little doubt that we will know more in a few more years, but there are a lot more questions than answers now.
Sorry I am often so long-winded. I have a lot of trouble being brief.
Yvsa's sig:
If you mix milk of magnesia with vodka and orange juice do you get a phillips screwdriver?
OUCH!! That's a good one (if you are as perverse as I am
)
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Paul Neubauer
prn@bsu.edu
Join the NSSSA (Nationial Short-Sleeve Shirt Association) -- Support the right to bare arms!
[This message has been edited by prn (edited 28 October 1999).]
