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Where are all the Neanderthals? (Pre-History)
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Oakey Dokey



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I've often wondered if the cave, valley and hill/mountain finds are nothing more than prehistoric version of 'hicks'. That the social rejects may have congregated there. After all, would a migratory people stay and move along shores primarily?

It's hard to mentally project their situation. But many finds have included substantial fish and crustacean artifacts.
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Mick Harper
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Komorikid is not as dumb as his name. He's pointing what is one of the absolute fundamental paradigm errors of pre-history.

He says:

One of the difficulties in finding enough corroborating evidence of human habitation is that Anthropologists have always been restricted in the areas they have available to explore. Most are isolated valleys and caves where the chances of finding anything significant are rare. The startling finds that do crop up are by far the exception rather than the rule.

This is not quite how I would put it. Some of you old pro's might correct me but I get the feeling with anthropologists (and archaeologists and geologists and all 'field-trip' disciplines) that there is a macho principle at work here. The tougher the terrain, the better the field trip and bugger the results.

I smiled at reports a few months ago that something or other highly significant had been discovered 'on the French Riviera'. How did they get funding for that one? Now conferences--that's a different matter.

Of course it is true that evidence will survive best (and also be found easiest) in undisturbed terrain and maybe that does mean skewing research away from the French Riviera and towards The Great Rift Valley but what gets up my nose is that nobody ever tries to make quantitative adjustments accordingly. Am I the only one who thinks Ancient Egypt gets all the attention simply because that's where the evidence survives best?

And while we're on the subject, I am really hacked off with theories about how all ancient societies were obsessed by funerary rites just because digging up graves is easy-peasy.

Humans are creatures of habit, whatever Homo genus they belong to. They tend towards social groups in area which provide adequate if not abundant food resources

Agree with the first bit, not the second. Surely human beings tend towards anywhere and everywhere they can scratch a living. Population density is decided by adequacy and abundance of food resources. (So everyone ends up with the same in the end.)

This is why most of the cities of the world are situated on rivers or by the sea, the most pre-eminent being fertile deltas

Again, I agree with the first point but fertile deltas are NOT good places for cities (flooding, mosquitos, river channels constantly changing). They tend to be given over to fedayin exploited by cities upriver or on the edge of the delta.

Most of the cities of the old world (Europe- Near East) have had an uninterrupted progression of habitation for millennia. This makes it extremely difficult to explore the most obvious prime sites for 'evidence of presence' aside from tearing up a large portion of EU real estate.

Yeah, good point. I said the same thing about villages in THOBR but I hadn't thought about cities. Though I am ALWAYS wondering about the true age of London.

Life Sciences are looking in the wrong places, and until they get unimpeded access to excavate city foundations before a building site is redeveloped the chances of finding anything of real significance is remote. And that's not the only problem.

You're right, that's not the chief problem. Which is that they'll still come up with the same old tosh even if they are allowed to run riot everywhere. But talking of inner city sites, what should really be excavated is the stuff maundering away in museum vaults. But who wants to spend the summer vacs in Kensington when you can be on Skarra Brae?

Re your last para, Kormo: the origin of the species (and why we can't find it) is the subject of a Treasure Hunt.
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DPCrisp


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NB.
Britain's only Neanderthal remains were found in a cave in north Wales; about 230,000 years old.

That's almost as old as any Neanderthal found anywhere, isn't it? And right on the western margin of the continent. Hmmm.

That's also well to the north and well before of the southernmost extent of the most recent glaciation.

So much for all human remains being inexorably erased by glaciation.
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Ray



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So much for all human remains being inexorably erased by glaciation

230,000 years is almost long enough for the remains to have survived the last two glacial periods.

I hadn't heard about this cave, so I don't know how it's aligned etc., but if it was deep enough, or high enough, and/or faced away from the advancing icesheet, the skeleton wouldn't have been caught up by it and ground to gravel.

Not all human remains were wiped out then, but how many thousands of Neanderthal bones were? Or did all the others escape to the south? Someone could write a poignant story about the One That Was Left Behind.
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Mick Harper
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So much for all human remains being inexorably erased by glaciation.

Not so. Glaciation is by no means as blanketly obvious as those nice big diagrams would have you believe. In areas at the furthest edge of glaciation, near the coast and near areas of upland (whatever that means in times of advanced glaciation but anyway applies to North Wales) there can be non-glaciated areas, just as there are today on the coasts of Antarctica and Greenland (not to mention northern Alaska and northern Siberia). Hence "North Wales" is certainly not prime facie a glaciated area.

What you should be asking yourself is why, if Neanderthal Man is a quarter of a million years old, and therefore lived through several interglacials, NOT A SINGLE SPECIMEN has EVER been found in an area that definitely was glaciated. Either I am correct that glaciation destroys all palaeoanthropological evidence or Neanderthal Man knew every place that was subsequently going to be glaciated and carefully omitted leaving his bones there. You choose.
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DPCrisp


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Fair comment, I expect: it's just that the diagrams always show the whole place well and truly covered (the coast being substantially farther west). But that could just be crass diagramming.
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Mick Harper
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And of course drawing glaciation diagrams making assumptions as to where the pole happens to be. But we won't go down that road now.
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Mick Harper
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Britain's only Neanderthal remains were found in a cave in north Wales; about 230,000 years old.

One of the thoughts that occurred to me in the recent Time Team imbroglio is that finding something in a cave must be proof positive of no glaciation since, whatever we may suppose about fossils surviving under a thousand feet of ice, you certainly can't envisage a cave doing so.
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DPCrisp


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whatever we may suppose about fossils surviving under a thousand feet of ice, you certainly can't envisage a cave doing so.

I don't follow.
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Mick Harper
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Doof? Let's take a thousand feet of ice. What can it do? Well it lowers the land surface, it carves out geomorphological features, it...is a stupendous force of nature the like of which nature rarely comes up with.

It ought to make mincemat of a recently fossilised bone but (my grasp of physics is hazy) maybe it doesn't. On the other hand I do know that caves are pretty temporary features that cave in (is that a pun...I can't decide) at the slightest provocation so (my grasp of physics being secure) a thousand feet of ice passing over the top of it (and then, as it were, receding back over it) will not leave it in situ for palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists to come along later and say, "Ah-ha, a caveman in a cave!"

In other words every time anybody anywhere says, "Ah-ha, a caveman in a cave" we can be sure that glaciation did not pass this way since either caveman or cave came into existence. I suppose this is at least as useful as all those maps showing the extent of the various Ice Age epochs.

Or as Applied Epistemologists would say, "Isn't it a pity that glaciation is dealt with by the Earth Sciences, palaeanthropology is technically part of the Life Sciences and archaeology belongs in the Humanities." To which a rather wiser Applied Epistemologist would no doubt say, "'Tis not a pity at all, it means yet another fecund field for us."
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DPCrisp


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Umm. This map

http://www.showcaves.com/maps/Britain.gif

claims to be a "clickable map of Britain showing the British limestone regions and their caves." The 'clickable' part didn't work for me, but in the absence of any specifics, I can only imagine they're saying the caves are scattered pretty uniformly -- as they ought to be since the rain is scattered pretty uniformly.

Would you like to say that all of these caves must post-date the last glaciation? Or that limestone caves are not habitable? Cresswell Crags has paintings/carvings, dating from shortly after the ice, I guess, but that doesn't leave much time for the cave to form...

Half Dome Mountain is a funny one: half is supposed to have been cut or fallen away, but the whole of Yosemite is also reckoned to have been under a mile of ice at one time, so why didn't it do for the other half?

Glaciers can certainly scour all before them... Then again, they flow down valleys... I dunno what to expect. Depends on their dimensions with respect to the glacier? Depends what counts as "before them"?

[I don't expect the retreat of the glacier to be like backing a lorry up: the retreat is just melting.]

'Course, I haven't heard of anyone coming across a collapsed cave: but neither archaeologists nor geologists actually excavate through rock.

---

Still, the Welsh Neanderthal certainly counts as unglaciated for these purposes.
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Mick Harper
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Would you like to say that all of these caves must post-date the last glaciation?

I think I probably would. The work of water on the sea-shore or rain on permeable-and-fissionable rock is incredibly quick. Ten thousand years is plenty...er...isn't it?
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DPCrisp


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Ten thousand years is plenty...er...isn't it?

Dunno... but that would mean the Cresswell Crags carvings were done yesterday.

And it would mean the cave systems south of the Chilterns are far more extensive than those to the north because they were never squashed flat.

---

They reckon the Appalacians are much older than the Rockies: and the Appalachians are riddled with caves while the Rockies are not. (Dunno what they're made of though.)
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Mick Harper
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The Appalachians were never covered by ice sheets so the question doesn't arise. In fact it rather proves it....
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DPCrisp


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But the Rockies weren't all covered by ice either.

And another thing... glaciers themselves have deep fissures and 'caves'... they flow a lot faster than rocks... and ice is weaker than rock... so if they can have voids in them, I would think voids in the rock under them should be expected to survive, too.

How about caves in Scandinavia? Or Siberia?
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