It's only very recently that I learned about or even heard of Ludovic Slimak. He's a paleoanthropologist who studies Neanderthals, a perennial interest of mine, so I have to pay him at least some attention.
Scientists have gone to extremes on the Neanderthal. Some have dismissed them as incapable of symbolic thought, inherently incapable of art or language. Others have posited them as an enlightened race with a deeper understanding of nature than our own. Both of these seem unlikely to me. But they were different from us. But different in what way?
Slimak has a lot to say. One of his ideas is that modern humans, Homo sapiens, are standardized and efficient. His vision of the Neanderthals, by contrast, were creative, making things that are irreproducible. For him this is why we survived and they didn't.
To some extent it's always going to be up for debate. We know where they lived, for the most part. We know that they had much thicker bodies, more nose-heavy faces, etc. But alas, we can't speak with them. Even if it's possible to clone them from moribund DNA that would just be our creation. So we have to interpret and make educated guesses.
2 comments:
As I've been interested in reading about other races of humans as well, this article has some of the most insightful theories I've seen expressed. One point that struck me as soon as I read it was the fact that although we sapiens have Neanderthal DNA there has been no sapiens genetic material found in any specimen of the old northern race. That's definitely something to think about.
That we as sapient humans are more like colonies of ants than we'd prefer to think ourselves does make sense too. We think we're so clever, and to a large extent we actually are, but to hear for the first time that art as we know it now wasn't invented until the Impressionists made their appearance in 1863 and that all prior art was academic was a bit difficult for me to process. Then I remembered art as it was before was very much like photography is today - a main subject or subjects and a filled-in background (like selfies but better).
The other extinct human race was only discovered recently in a cave in Eastern Siberia where the Denisovans had left some bone fragments and teeth as proof of their existence. They also left some very interesting examples of jewelry - namely, a partial stone bracelet* and a marble ring. Of course, as you say, a lot of what we know is educated guesswork and we're not nearly learned enough. Thank goodness we're not able to clone a Neanderthal or a Denisovan - hopefully, we never will be.
* If you're interested in seeing the bracelet:
http://www.archeolog-home.com/pages/content/denisova-cave-russie-stone-bracelet-is-oldest-ever-found-in-the-world.html
It's an interesting absence. Clearly Neanderthals did interbreed with modern humans, since it takes two to tango. The question is under what conditions they did and did not. Was this a decision made at the point of extinction, so that something of them might survive into the future. In truth it would be surprising to find either species thinking in such abstract terms at that time. Anyway, there's much to still learn.
The idea that art only started in 1863 is provocative, to say the least. How can you exclude, say, Michelangelo from your roster of artists? But it is true that the idea of art as personal expression is a relatively new one. Even in the Renaissance the understanding was that all educated men basically knew what a picture of a given subject should look like, and that the artist was just the man with the skills to make it happen. And of course our tendency toward organization does have its downsides.
The bracelet and ring are both quite well preserved when you consider how many thousands of years they basically sat around on the ground--or in it. It does seem to put the kibosh on the theory that other human species were incapable of abstract thought or imagination.
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