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I've been poking through some literature on Neanderthals recently, and a
couple of things struck me as being important to their demise or survival as
compared with Homo Sapiens. One is the distinction between foragers and
collectors. In "The Last Neanderthal" (Macmillan, 1999) Ian
Tattersall suggests that Hn were foragers having to move around a
lot in order to find food.
"This is largely a matter for speculation, but in general, Neanderthal
sites do not suggest that social groups were big. Particularly if they were
practicing radial mobility, groups could not have been very large, for forays
from a central base in search of sustenance for an extended group would
quickly have become impossibly long. Perhaps ten or a dozen adults at most,
plus children of various ages, would have been a likely size for Neanderthal
social groups."
In any such small group, the disabling of one or more significant
foragers through illness or death could have been quite disastrous.
In contrast, Hss was a collector, tending to live in one place and
knowing quite precisely where to get various types of food and probably devising
means of keeping competing species such as Hn away from important sources.
Living in one place, knowing where to find food and how to get it, would likely
have meant larger and more specialized communities, and therefore a far better
chance of survival.
Ed Weick
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 2:37
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Novelty-seeking Man
(was: Simplified economics (was: Trust and suspicion)
At 20:21 03/06/2003 -0700, you wrote:
As usual after the weekend, I'm
grinding slowly through catchup...
On Sun, 01 Jun 2003, Keith Hudson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> In particular, the fourfold description distinguishes us
from Homo
>Neanderthalensis who lived very happily and stably for
about 500,000
>years with one innovation -- a slightly sharpened
piece of stone that he
>could use as a weapon or a hammer (and which
was just one step up from
>the chimp's use of any handy piece of
stone). The point is that Homo
>Sapiens not only produced a far
better stone tool than Homo N -- the
>so-called 'axehead' -- but he
kept on producing innovations from then
>onwards!
This is a
pretty muddled account: the species with one tool was
Homo erectus, which
seems to have managed for almost two million
years with only the
"Acheulian hand axe", a tool shaped rather
like a flattened tear drop.
The only older tools are called
"Oldowan choppers", and are basically
stones with six or eight
flakes broken off one side to make a ragged
edge. The Acheulian
tools show a slight improvement in quality of
manufacture over
the period of their existence, but with the advent of
the Neandertal
"Mousterian" tool culture in europe, and other lineages
elsewhere,
over the last half million years, tool variety and quality
greatly
increased. The Neandertals had a rich variety of stone and
bone
implements, and no doubt had much more in wood, of which
only
some "javelins" of uncertain ownership have been found.
They
certainly hafted points on spears, and used awls to bore
into
wood and bone. Which is not to say that the subsequent
Aurignacian
toolkit of the european Hs was not substantially more
elaborate
yet, but you slander the poor Neandertals, who never seem
to
be able to get good
press.
-Pete Vincent
Yes, I *was* rather traducing
Neantherthal man. If the wiped-out-by-disease hypothesis is correct, then Hn
could possibly be living today, perhaps even to be seen wearing a tie and
carrying a briefcase. But I was generalising (but not overmuch) in order to
make the point that Neanderthal and other previous Homo species had limited
creativity and were confined to restricted habitats. Creativity was certainly
going on for a million years or more before we came along. But after we
mutated then invention was explosive. The novelty-seeking parts of our brain
(the frontal lobes) were considerably larger than those of Neanderthal (with
his low, sloping forehead) and this, I suggest, is what instituted consumer
demand, drove trade between adjacent tribes and then encouraged migration into
all parts of the world, even into habitats which, without trade, would have
been totally inhospitable.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper
Camden Place, Bath, England
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