[HN Gopher] Evidence that the Neanderthals were the first seafar...
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Evidence that the Neanderthals were the first seafarers?
Author : dom111
Score : 70 points
Date : 2023-05-08 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thearchaeologist.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thearchaeologist.org)
| blastro wrote:
| Anyone here ever read "Critical Path" by Buckminster Fuller? In
| it, BF winds a compelling narrative of the speculative pre-
| history of humanity, and touches on the early seafarers and how
| their tools and science have affected civilization from that
| point on.
| dbcooper wrote:
| Okay, this really doesn't look like a sober scientific
| publication.
|
| Source: Another scam blog. LOL.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's an interesting theory, but as often is the case, the title
| is far more definite than the content.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye no proofs at all. The feasibility depends a lot on what they
| mean with "sailing". I guess their use includes "rowing" and
| "drifting".
| shkkmo wrote:
| "Sail" can mean any travel over water by ship. It's one of
| those weird words that can be really confusing even when used
| correctly but out of the context where that portion of its
| meaning is customarily used.
| fsckboy wrote:
| they find human-made tools (which they can assign dates to)
| on islands distant from shore.
|
| Their only explanation that they are hypothesizing is that
| humans traveled there across water. Do you have a better
| idea? They're not saying they found boats, they're saying
| there is clear evidence of human travel.
|
| Focus on the evidence there is, not evidence you would like
| to see. What do you hypothesize that fits the evidence?
| rightbyte wrote:
| > What do you hypothesize that fits the evidence?
|
| That the tools were moved to Crete way later than when they
| were made. Obviously, there are no proof of that either. I
| am not saying it is impossible Neaderthals got there by
| boat-ish means. But recycling seems like a possibility not
| moving back seatravel too far into the past.
| Finnucane wrote:
| It suggests some sort of navigable floaty thing. They saw an
| island offshore, thought, let's go there, and figured out a
| way to do it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Unfortunately, archaeologists are unable to provide additional
| evidence because any boats used by Neanderthals would have been
| made of wood, which would have long since decomposed to nothing.
|
| Why make the leap to assume they invented sails, given the lack
| of physical evidence? I mean, it seems reasonable to think they
| could have rowed or even floated 40km long before they developed
| sails, and that they would develop those techniques on the way to
| doing that.
| shkkmo wrote:
| You and others seem to be hung up on the fact that the verb
| "sail" can mean any travel on water by ship, regardless of how
| that ship is propelled.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Also seems possible that the tools might have been moved, at a
| later date? I imagine a stone age person digging through some
| Neanderthal settlement remains, would loot any tools.
| eastof wrote:
| Except those "stone age" people came around 50,000 years later.
| Not only is it unlikely they would find any evidence of the
| Neanderthals, but they would already have more sophisticated
| tools by then, don't think those (even in their time) by then
| ancient tools would be worth looting.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Did they take sea levels into account? It may not be
| realistically swimmable now, but it could have been at some point
| fairly recently when sea levels were lower.
| tomcam wrote:
| Moorage fees back then? Practically nothing.
| jeron wrote:
| And it was quite easy to get into the yacht club of
| Neanderthals
| Maursault wrote:
| > Long before modern humans existed, 100,000 years ago
|
| 100,000ya ago is not "long before modern humans existed." Modern
| humans are Homo sapiens, and the oldest known Homo sapiens
| remains (to date, that we know of) are dated to 300,000 years
| ago, which is now apparently 200,000 years before "long before"
| Homo sapiens existed. I guess the good news is we invent the time
| machine before too long.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I remember when I was a kid, textbooks would draw a distinction
| between "homo sapiens" and "homo sapiens sapiens." But it is
| odd, when I search "homo sapiens sapiens," I only see links to
| like, homework helper/yahoo question sites referencing it.
| Wikipedia and the Smithsonian seem to have dropped the second
| sapiens.
|
| Is this an update to how this stuff is understood? I vaguely
| think the extra sapiens was added on to draw a distinction
| between "behaviorally modern" humans or something like that.
| But that always seemed more like a cultural thing anyway.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This was an artifact from a long-running debate about how we
| should organize the taxonomy of genus Homo. On one hand,
| people made good arguments that archaic hominins like
| Neanderthals were distinct enough to consider them separate
| species. On the other, there were reasonable arguments that
| they were closely related enough that archaic and modern
| hominins were a single species with a number of distinct
| subspecies. Modern humans would be called H. sapiens sapiens
| in the latter scheme.
|
| This debate was mostly ended in favor of the separate species
| perspective by the early 2000s, but not everyone was
| reconciled and archaeogenetics forced us to rewrite the human
| taxonomy anyway. People will understand what you mean if you
| continue using H. sapiens sapiens, it's when you use "H.
| sapiens" to include Neanderthals and Denisovans that people
| will be confused. Sometimes that terminology is also also
| used it to exclude transitional subspecies like idaltu, which
| I think is why wiki uses it.
| tmtvl wrote:
| The "Human taxonomy" page on Wikipedia still adds the second
| sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy
|
| This may be because Homo sapiens sapiens is the Homo sapiens
| type species, but I'm not sure.
| themgt wrote:
| imo the correct answer is this stuff is incredibly
| complicated and in incredible flux due to revolutionary
| advances in genetic research on our prehistoric ancestors and
| present day people. There's a lot of different perspectives
| but anyone with some humility would admit a new finding could
| be announced tomorrow that would upend quite a lot of what we
| think we know. Already e.g. Naledi, Denisovans, Floresiensis,
| Longi, Oase, etc are pretty mind-blowing to the consensus
| views 20 years ago. I would pay less attention to the labels
| used and more on the broader research.
| erisinger wrote:
| Came here to see if anyone else had a problem with that
| timeline.
| Maursault wrote:
| What's so hard to believe is humans once roamed the Earth.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| There's a distinction between biologically modern and
| behaviorally modern humans. Biologically modern humans have
| been dated to at least as early as 300k years ago. However
| behavioral modernity, is more recent. There's debate about how
| exactly to define things and draw a line, but it's generally
| around 70k years ago.
|
| The article isn't particularly well written but that's probably
| what they're referring to.
| greatpostman wrote:
| This idea that we were only sophisticated for the last few
| thousand years is laughable
| koheripbal wrote:
| The correctness of this comment wildly depends on the reader's
| interpretation of the word "sophisticated".
| mlhpdx wrote:
| It is laughable to think that the first supported travel over
| water was done in "boats" or by "sailing". Children
| instinctively climb onto floating objects. It seems very
| likely to be that some unwary homo-something crossed an
| unswimmable span of water quite by accident and survived.
| Perhaps some other individual observed their fate and
| followed, perhaps from the same species or perhaps not.
| Perhaps alone, or perhaps with others.
|
| The evidence is merely that there are early tools on islands.
| George83728 wrote:
| About 40 million years ago, some monkeys in Africa
| evidently floated a few thousand kilometers across the
| ocean to South America, probably on driftwood. Neanderthals
| were a lot bigger than those monkeys, but a similar
| scenario might have happened here.
| bigtones wrote:
| The referenced paper on this was published more than a decade ago
| (2012):
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Which is weird, because the same authors published a more
| notable paper on exactly this subject very recently in
| Quaternary [0]. I don't think the argument is unreasonable, but
| the author of this article is terribly misinformed about many
| things. For example, the cyclades would have been visible from
| the mainland, as they still are today! [1] is the view from the
| western mainland, [2] is the view from the eastern side, today
| the island of Ikaria. Notice that Crete is also visible from
| both the Cyclades and the mainland under ideal conditions.
|
| [0] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2022.09.001
|
| [1]
| https://www.peakfinder.org/?lat=37.98035&lng=24.52317&ele=25...
|
| [2]
| https://www.peakfinder.org/?lat=37.53781&lng=26.01118&ele=87...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I think it's important to note that this is just showing that
| Neanderthal were sailing long before modern human remains of
| sailing were dated to - lll
|
| Modern humans and Neanderthals (and Denisovians) coexist for
| about 100-150k years before modern humans basically killed them
| all after interbreeding.
| btilly wrote:
| Interspecies violence is one of a ton of proposed theories, and
| not a lot of evidence exists to suggest favoring one over the
| other.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction for
| some of the other theories.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I thought there was some decent evidence including butcher
| marks on bones and widespread genetic immunity to human
| specific prions
| usrusr wrote:
| Given our recent performance in extinction level interspecies
| violence and our considerable capability of intraspecies
| violence I find your characterization of violence as only one
| of many competing theories surprisingly ... endearing. But
| you are not wrong, given the low populations involved on both
| sides it's not impossible at all that violence wasn't the
| decisive factor.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| killed?
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