During my lifetime, Neanderthal man has gotten progressively smarter. Well, not personally smarter because he now survives only in our genomes.
But before we knew very much about him — including the fact that he does survive in our genomes — it was easy to co-opt him for the role of the subhuman, which human evolution theory badly needs. Without a subhuman, the human mind has no history. That is a serious blow to any Darwinian materialist project.
Now, as a recent piece in The Atlantic by Ross Andersen tells us, excavation of Neanderthal and other sites is leveling even further the fabled Ascent of Man (though Andersen never quite puts it that way):
Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue. On sandstone cave walls, they etched wavy lines, dots, and other geometric designs.
After first contact, under social circumstances that we cannot possibly imagine, modern humans and Neanderthals had children together; around the same time, in Asia, our species also procreated with another species, the Denisovans. Scientists know this because they have sequenced DNA from Neanderthal and Denisovan remains, and they can see fragments of their code in our genomes to this day. Now we are learning that still more of these fusions of blood and culture may have shaped our lineage. Last week, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University published new evidence in Science suggesting that two “ghost” ancestors haunt our family tree—not Neanderthals or Denisovans, but some other hominin populations.
So now, instead of “We extinguished them! Shame on us!”, the message seems to be “Them is us.”
That Changes a Lot of Perceptions…
Absent an obvious subhuman, evolutionary psychology remains, like astrobiology, a discipline without a subject. But astrobiology has an advantage:. Space is unthinkably vast; past time, however, is strictly constrained. Evo psych is surviving on the fumes of Darwinism.
This last year has been unusually fruitful for archeology in general, Anderson tells us:
All year, scientists from different fields have been making revisions to the human-origin story. In January, one team announced that they’d found handheld wooden tools along an ancient lakeshore in present-day Greece — a refuge between glaciers where hominins of some kind butchered elephants about 430,000 years ago. These are surely not the first wooden tools ever to be made, but they are the most ancient that we’ve managed to find—and they were used during the Stone Age. That name — “Stone Age” — is misleading. It reveals more about the limits of archeology than about the material culture of the people who lived through the period, who may not have thought of themselves as being defined by stone tools at all. We perceive them that way only because their knapped axes of flint and obsidian are likelier to have survived to the present day than the digging sticks that our forebears smoothed and sharpened.
Beyond stone and wood, these lakeside elephant butchers likely put all kinds of natural materials to clever use. They may have employed woven twine to sew animal hides together, but we wouldn’t know it, because twine unravels into thin, disintegrating filaments, and bacteria rapidly remove hides from the world. Wood tends to rot away too. In this location, the tools had the good geological fortune to be buried quickly under mud.
Another recent discovery to which he points is upending our view as well:
New Technology Reveals Old Wonders
- The Amazon was home to a much bigger civilization than we once knew. At Gizmodo, Matthew Phelan reports,
Researchers led by archaeologist Martti Pärssinen at the University of Helsinki in Finland have uncovered more than 400 well-preserved earthwork monuments, ceremonial sites, and roads hidden beneath the dense overgrowth of the Brazilian rainforest. Incredibly, the researchers extrapolate the approximately 400 confirmed sites to an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 earthwworks across the region. Pärssinen and his colleagues believe these structures are evidence of an interconnected, multicultural civilization that thrived deep within the Amazon between 600 BCE and 850 CE — a population of millions who dramatically altered the rainforest’s ecosystem.
Up in Smoke
The bigger picture could, of course, turn out to be rather smaller than these suggested numbers. But think of all the theses about why the Amazon area was never developed that have now gone up in smoke.
- Meanwhile, some stunning (and baffling) new finds from ancient China are in the news. From Jonathan Cheng at the Wall Street Journal:
Even the basics about the ancient civilization at Sanxingdui, located in the modern-day province of Sichuan in southwestern China, are fuzzy. It appears to have flourished roughly 3,000 years ago, boasting splendors even more exquisite than those of China’s heralded ancient dynasties.
The striking features of Sanxingdui’s humanoid figures — so “un-Chinese” in their appearance — have prompted a wholesale rethinking of what historians thought they knew about the origins of Chinese civilization. Perhaps it didn’t emerge solely from its traditional cradle in the Yellow River Basin. And could other advanced, independent civilizations have also flourished within China’s current borders before their subjugation?
Part of the mystery is that, while there is lots of gold and ivory, there is no evidence of writing and no human remains, tombs or weapons. Was it a ceremonial center? Only 1/600th of the site has been excavated so there is plenty of time for doctoral theses to rise and fall.
Never bet against the ingenuity of the human mind, past or present.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters.