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Where are all the Neanderthals? (Pre-History)
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Dan, I can't help thinking your overall reasoning is a bit woolly. It's true that the northern Rockies were covered by polar glaciation; it is also true that the southern Rockies would have been more effected by Alpine glaciation if the northen part were subject to an Ice Age. So, yes, all the Rockies were effected by ice. But what time this all was is a matter that glaciologists haven't entirely figured out.

Scandinavia was entirely glaciated. However there is here also some confusion about which glaciation since one side (our side) ends same as us, 12,000 BP but the other side (the current Finno-Russian border) ends c .35,000 BP. Siberia has never been glaciated. Ever! Ho-tiddly-ho. End of orthodox Ice Age Theory.

But you haven't said what the cave situation is in any of these so I don't think that carries us much further forward.

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.

This is all completely immaterial. It is the weight of ice that MUST destroy caves. A thousand feet of ice pressing down on a cave....I just can't see it surviving no matter how thick the rock-roof, carpenter. (Thank you, JD Sallinger...I haven't seen him around lately....is he dead?.)
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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But you haven't said what the cave situation is in any of these so I don't think that carries us much further forward

That's coz I was asking about the cave situation in Scandinavia and Siberia.

It is the weight of ice that MUST destroy caves. A thousand feet of ice pressing down on a cave....I just can't see it surviving no matter how thick the rock-roof

That's just as woolly as my "I can't see why it wouldn't"!
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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One of us being soppy. A thousand of feet of ice weighs an enormous amount. By definition a cave roof can withstand the rock over the top of it. But we know that ice sheets compress/lower the entire land surface. What chance a cave surviving such awesome forces when we know that caves cave in all the time just in natural day-to-day conditions. You're a woolly mammoth!
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Then it shouldn't be hard to find a correlation between ice sheet extents and cave systems. Get to it!
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Are you kidding? First of all we don't know the precise extent of the ice-sheets (and as you have noted, the caves so far mentioned have been somewhat problematical). Second, we don't know precisely what ice sheet ended when (which gives caves that are definitely within the ice-sheet a longish period to form post-glaciation). Third, we don't how long caves take to form anyway. And fourth, we cannot necessarily tell the difference between natural caves and humanly constructed caves.

But apart from that, I 'll get on to it right away. In the meantime I'll stick with the notion (since it seems to me unarguable) that an ice sheet will flatten any cave any time, anywhere. That's Martini.
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Xerxes


In: The Forest of Dean
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The link:
http://www.offshore-sea.org.uk/site/scripts/downloads.php?categoryID=37
is typical of the many stories about ancient human life on the bed of what we call the North Sea. No one has looked very hard for evidence, but trawlers and oil prospectors seem to find things without even trying. Never mind poking about in caves, glaciated or not, perhaps most people were living down in the lush lowlands!

There are a couple of problems though:

-- The accepted stories are all about the glaciers coming and going over the NS floor. Fair enough, but the mean depth of the NS is about 100 metres and at least one human artefact has been found at 150m below current sea level. At present we are agonising over catastrophic climate change that could result in a change in global sea level of between 3 and 10m. So -- to get to the point -- when sea levels were over 100m lower than present levels, it must have been pretty cold? So cold, in fact, that the NS would have been part of the very glaciations that were locking up all the water.

-- The story goes that the people living on the floor of the NS were mammoth hunters, and many mammoth remains have been found there. So at the height of the ice ages mammoths were roaming about on the NS floor. Fair enough, and I, like many of my age, recall the schoolbook artist's impressions of mammoths in bleak snow-covered tundra being hunted by Neanderthal-like humans. OK, I can believe that, but WHAT DID THE MAMMOTHS EAT? All large mammals in Polar Regions are either major predators (Polar Bear eats seals eat large fish eat small fish eat plankton) or nimble enough to undertake amazingly long seasonal migrations and subsist on moss dug out from under the snow. Herbivorous mammals the size of mammoths in sub-zero temperatures would require tons of food a day to survive. Where would they find that quantity of food on the NS floor in the middle of an ice age?

The flooding of the NS must one day find a more rational explanation than the stories of multiple glaciations. Perhaps that explanation will discover the importance of northwest Europe in the development of humanity. Why do the people of northwest Europe appear to be the most genetically diverse group of humanity? Perhaps because they are the most ancient? But that's another story.
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Xerxes wrote:
OK, I can believe that, but WHAT DID THE MAMMOTHS EAT?

This is one of the fallacies of palaeontology.
Geography DOESN'T Lie.
Where do we find the descendants of Mammoths and why?
We find them in tropical and semi-tropical environments.
Why?
Because these are the only geographical environments that can support the AMOUNT of vegetation needed for their species to survive and propagate.

There are only two scenarios I can see that fit the facts. Either the Temperate and Tundra environments where their remains are found were once lush semi-tropical landscapes. Or the remains were put there by catastrophic means.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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The flooding of the NS must one day find a more rational explanation than the stories of multiple glaciations.

And that day has arrived! However, it is currently subject to Treasure Hunt rules so I can say no more on the subject. But here's the Good News: all is revealed in the fifth DVD of our AEL series, the first two of which are the Solar System and the Bimini Road. The bad news is that our first two DVD's have been so resoundingly ignored by the meedja that it is looking doubtful whether there will ever be a third DVD (based on The History of Britain Revealed), never mind a fourth, fifth...
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Xerxes


In: The Forest of Dean
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OK, OK! So I may have to wait a day or two for the DVD that reveals all, and being new to AE and its ways I am not quite prepared for Treasure Hunting, and being of a slightly impatient nature I will just have get on with the debate that I have joined concerning Neanderthals.

So far, it appears that Neanderthals weren't quite human and, being as how they lived in frozen wastes, they had to grow a bit dumpy with huge noses to warm the air before it hit their unfortunate lungs. (Funny how this brilliant bit of natural selection didn't occur to mother nature in the case of the only humans who actually live in the arctic. The Inuit have some of the smallest noses found in human races -- might just have something to do with the doubtful advantage of having a long appendage sticking out of the only exposed flesh on one's body. Frostbite, you know.)

Anyway, to cut to the chase, I suggest our agonising over Neanderthals should focus on the fact that human beings who, when clothed, would pass unnoticed on the London Tube have been occupying Britain for at least half a million years. I'm talking about Boxgrove Man and his descendants. Now, BM must not be Homo sapiens of course, must be H heidelbergensis or H ergaster or something, because everybody knows H sapiens came out of Eden (sorry! Africa about 100,000 years ago). But a rose by any other name...

Let's start the ball rolling again by thinking about northwest Europe being the cradle of mankind. Let's propose that by half a million years ago, humans were happily getting on with their lives here and being of long lineage they were genetically quite varied: tall or short; built like an ox or light as a feather; pale skinned or dark skinned, straight hair, curly hair: blue eyed or brown eyed -- all a bit like today really. Some might have looked like trolls, some like gnomes or giants. Let's go on to say that like today's northwestern Europeans, many of them were obsessed with seeing the world and, before Terminal 5 at Heathrow, the best way to travel around the world would be to walk around latitude 50 north (So much shorter than the equatorial route).

The next steps will be to think about how the new environments exerted selection pressures on these travellers. Remember, white Polar Bears didn't 'evolve' to take advantage of white landscape; instead, a naturally diverse population of bears were weeded out in the snow because the black and brown ones starved to death when their prey saw them (and the white ones didn't get on at all well in the northern forests). By this token, perhaps the most 'evolved' humans are those who finally got to colonising Tierra del Fuego, The Kalahari or Easter Island!

Sorry! Is this too long? I'm new to AE and you all seem to be so terse, pithy and CLEVER!
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Mick Harper
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What I wanna know is how this Boxgrove bloke, who lived several hundred thousand years ago, managed to evolve by only a teensy bit to become Neanderthal Man in all that time (fair enough) and then quite suddenly became us (not fair enough).

The thing you've gotta conjure with, Xerxes, is getting rid of all this soppy stuff that the palaeoanthrolopogists have been feeding us all these years. It's completely obvious that hominids are NOT related to us at all (except insofar as all higher primates are). By all means chat about their lineage but don't get it mixed up with ours.

But since we don't appear to have a lineage, and since palaeoanthropology couldn't exist without a lineage to study, it is not surprising that the two lineages have been carefully interwoven. And dear old Homo Sapiens, who hates the idea of not having a lineage, is prepared to pay plenty to keep the illusion alive.

As usual, it's only the Applied Epistemologists who refuse to do the popular thing. Try telling people we know less than we thought we did! You won't get many takers.
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Xerxes


In: The Forest of Dean
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Thanks for that. See, I had already worked out that palaeoanthropologists spent most of their time digging up bits of fossil apes in Africa and Asia, and calling them hominids. At the same time, hominid remains (often complete with worryingly human artefacts) keep popping up in the wrong places, i.e. Ice Age ravaged Europe. It just made me wonder.

The palaeoanthropologists really need all those ice ages and peculiar hominids coming and going, evolving and becoming extinct in Europe. Not so much 'the three card trick', more like the 'thirty card trick'.

My suspicions were aroused when the experts announced with obvious relief and absolute certainty, that we have no Neanderthal genes in us. Phew! Let's scotch that one, once and for all, even if we've done only one very doubtful piece of research!
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Mick Harper
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At the same time, hominid remains (often complete with worryingly human artefacts) keep popping up in the wrong places, i.e. Ice Age ravaged Europe. It just made me wonder.

Ah, but what is 'worryingly human'? This is another area in which the Academics have been wrong from Day One. They keep assuming that a tool denotes human-ness. That was because in dem early days it was thought that only humans used tools. We now know that lots of animal species use tools (chimps, finches etc).

So they retreated to a different definition. Wrought tools. But then it was shown that chimps wrought tools -- they stripped bark off their sticks etc. So the anthropo's retreated once again and said, cleverly wrought tools (all that chipping away at hand axes). But of course lots of animals do clever things eg beavers building dams.

Only Applied Epistemologists came up with the correct definition: animals can do lots of clever things but can only manage one per species and/or only one invention per aeon. Human beings come up with multiple inventions and all the time. So the fact that Neanderthal/ homo habilis/ homo whoever could only make a hand axe over seven hundred thousand years or control fire in a coupla million years proves they're animal species. Slightly more intelligent than chimps, but still clearly animals.

Cro-Magnon is the first species to go the human route. As soon as we find him, the tool kit rockets.
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Mick Harper
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My suspicions were aroused when the experts announced with obvious relief and absolute certainty, that we have no Neanderthal genes in us.

How can this be? I thought we had ninety-odd per cent of chimp genes in us. And sixty-odd per cent of pot plant genes (more in the Forest of Dean). I think what you mean is that the experts now concede that Neanderthal is not ancestral to us. This is only the last in a long line of concessions, beginning with the acknowledgement that Australopithecenes are not ancestral to us either. In fact I think it's only Homo Erectus that's keeping the whole hominid line connected ancestrally to us at all.

And this is hellishly important because of course 'being ancestral to us' is the definition of the whole Industry. Palaeoanthropologists don't study chimps and gibbons because no matter how related they are, they are not ancestral. So these guys have to be handed over to zoology. As soon as hominids are acknowledged to be just apes, the whole of palaeoanthropology will have to be closed down. They will have no bones to study and the artefacts will have to be turned over to either archaeology or primatology.
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Xerxes


In: The Forest of Dean
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Sorry! I don't get it (must be all those plant pot genes). How can anyone, after digging out a few scraps of 30,000 year old DNA 'concede' that Neanderthals are not ancestral to us? What sort of science lies behind that judgement?

And - wait a moment - what if we were ancestral to Neanderthals? Come to that, who can say that we are not ancestral to chimps?

And how does an Applied Epistemologist know when to believe these DNA 'experts'? Is it only when they make the 'concessions' we like?
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Xerxes


In: The Forest of Dean
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So were the naked Tierra del Fuegans and the fireless Tasmanians Cro-Magnons?
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