Frightening new take on Neanderthals

Aside from everything else there is the question of how Cro Magnons wiped the Neanderthals as easily/quickly as they did.

Part of it involved superior weapons particularly atlatls and primates generally lack the sort of shoulders we have which allows us to throw things or use something like an atlatl.

But the big thing had to do with numbers. A cannibalistic creature which nonetheless buries his own dead is basically a predator which, like lions, views the living world as neatly divided into two parts i.e. his own family/clan, and meat. That says that Cro Magnon groups moving through Europe never really needed numbers beyond one and a half or two times the size of any Neanderthal family group (or pride) which they were likely to encounter.

They would have had dogs with them to negate the Neanderthal advantage in darkness, javelins and atlatls, and torches to light up any Neanderthal who got within arms reach.

Handling fire is the one thing humans do for which lacking a fur coat is an advantage and it would have conferred a huge advantage to humans fighting Neanderthals. Neanderthals themselves used fire, but only under carefully controlled circumstances, there was always a risk of frying themselves in an incident which would cause a minor burn to a human at worst.

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You just make this **** up as you go along, don't ya, Gunga Dim?

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@Setanta,

I think Gunga is probably well versed in the motivations of Neanderthals. It's in his DNA.

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@parados,

Hehehehehehehehehe . . .

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@gungasnake,

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Neanderthal Predation (NP) theory reveals that Neanderthals were 'apex' predators - who resided at the top of the food chain, and everything else - including humans - was their prey.

NP theory reveals that Eurasian Neanderthals hunted, killed and cannibalised early humans for 50,000 years in an area of the Middle East known as the Mediterranean Levant (see map, below).

Because the two species were sexually compatible, Eurasian Neanderthals also abducted and raped human females.

(http://www.themandus.org/)

If, as Vendramini claims, the Neanderthal was a fearsome nocturnal super predator, capitalising on man's need to sleep, carrying off women to rape, eating others, why was he seemingly forced out by us around 30,000 years ago, dying alone in caves in Spain and Portugal? The tools he used were also abandoned by humans 5000 years earlier. AFter the Ice Age, there's nothing "apex" about neanderthalensis. His decline in Europe seems, according to the fossil record, to go hand in hand with sapien's expansion through it.

Are you really going to trust the science of a man who calls himself "Danny"?

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Danny has had a long and very, very modest career as a director and screenwriter. He has turned those "talents" to evolutionary biology. As usual, he is dealing in fiction.

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@iamsam82,

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NP theory reveals that Eurasian Neanderthals hunted, killed and cannibalised early humans for 50,000 years in an area of the Middle East known as the Mediterranean Levant (see map, below).

Because the two species were sexually compatible, Eurasian Neanderthals also abducted and raped human females.

I said there were parts of Vendramini's thesis which I do not buy; the thing about humans and Neanderthals being sexually compatible is in the part of the thesis which I do not buy.

Consider however that Vendramini believes Cro Magnons evolved from Skhul Qafzeh hominids via a very rapid process such as Gould/Eldridge describe.

I don't buy that either; I believe the S/Q hominids died out, and then the Cro Magnons arrived (i.e. they were either created here or brought here a short time after the S/Qs vanished.

However, IF YOU BUY VENDRAMINI'S PUNC-EEK THESIS, then the rest of it makes sense as well. In other words, I have have no difficulty believing that a Neanderthal might rape some other hominid once in a while.

Human women on the other hand simply lack the things which would turn a primate on. As Vendramini himself notes, permanently protruding breasts would be a gigantic turn-off to primates since female primates only have protruding breasts while nursing.

For that matter, women have studied chimpanzees and gorillas at close quarters for the past few decades and there are no reports of one of them being raped.

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@gungasnake,

Quote:

Neanderthals themselves used fire, but only under carefully controlled circumstances, there was always a risk of frying themselves in an incident which would cause a minor burn to a human

They also fashioned large hety points and hand axes. Also they fashioned effigies and buried the dead with tributes to theiir prowess or stature.

Sound like a hominid or hominim?

I understand how you dont "buy" the prts of Vendramini that dot sound creationist, but puh-fuckin-leeze stop trying to sound like you have any evidence at all. Opinions from Vendramini have NEVER been published anywhere? other than self promotng and fringe news like Freep. Let him go and present t a conference or submit for publication here his stuff will be revieed by actual anthropologists. I dont think Id hold my breath

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@gungasnake,

Quote:

Neanderthals themselves used fire, but only under carefully controlled circumstances, there was always a risk of frying themselves in an incident which would cause a minor burn to a human

They also fashioned large hety points and hand axes. Also they fashioned effigies and buried the dead with tributes to theiir prowess or stature.

Sound like a hominid or hominim?

I understand how you dont "buy" the prts of Vendramini that dot sound creationist, but puh-fuckin-leeze stop trying to sound like you have any evidence at all. Opinions from Vendramini have NEVER been published anywhere? other than self promotng and fringe news like Freep. Let him go and present t a conference or submit for publication here his stuff will be revieed by actual anthropologists. I dont think Id hold my breath

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@farmerman,

Quote:

They also fashioned large hety points and hand axes. Also they fashioned effigies and buried the dead with tributes to theiir prowess or stature.

Neanderthals knew how to make spear points and fix them to strong shafts so they didn't break with the hardest use (killing mammoths etc), but they were not inventive and their use of stone technology never varied much over their entire existence on the planet. Cro Magnons by contrast were constantly inventing new uses for stone/bone/horn materials so that scholars have noted (assuming you buy their time schemes) that stone technology changed more in the first couple of thousand years of Cro Magnon history than it ever had in the previous million or two million years of hominid usage.

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@gungasnake,

ya think that we may have outechnologied them? Neanderthals were not an ape. No ape fashions technology. Monkeys use sticks to pry ants and termites from nests, so do chimps and orangs, .NO, it was Homo habilis and anticessor and heidelbergensis and then Neanderthalensis that began fashioning stone tools. habilis used broken rock and large chunks to smash bone to extract marrow. Neanderthal technology was quite a step UP from predecessors. The fact that Neanderthalensis didnt fashion flake technology or create atlatls or throwing spears like H apien, merely proves the point that Vedrimini is using selected skulls and idiotic assumptions to create a fanatsy world for a sci fi plot

what about effigies? These were also known Mousterian cultural items (using the past terminology) .

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@farmerman,

Quote:

ya think that we may have outechnologied them? Neanderthals were not an ape. No ape fashions technology. Monkeys use sticks to pry ants and termites from nests, so do chimps and orangs, .NO, it was Homo habilis and anticessor and heidelbergensis and then Neanderthalensis that began fashioning stone tools. habilis used broken rock and large chunks to smash bone to extract marrow. Neanderthal technology was quite a step UP from predecessors. The fact that Neanderthalensis didnt fashion flake technology or create atlatls or throwing spears like H apien, merely proves the point that Vedrimini is using selected skulls and idiotic assumptions to create a fanatsy world for a sci fi plot

Cro Magnon technology was certainly better but as I noted above, the biggest factor was probably the Neanderthal not being able to think his way past seeing family groups as the largest possible club to belong to. Again this behavior was similar to that of lions and dictated that Cro Magnons never had to face more than one clan's worth of Neanderthals at any one time.

Particularly in Europe the Neanderthal must have gone for ages during which the most major existential concern Neanderthal clans had was other Neanderthal clans. They were not able to figure out how to deal with the waves of Cro Magnons which invaded Europe in the amount of time they had.

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@gungasnake,

Quote:

Cro Magnon technology was certainly better but as I noted above, the biggest factor was probably the Neanderthal not being able to think his way past seeing family groups as the largest possible club to belong to. Again this behavior was similar to that of lions and dictated that Cro Magnons never had to face more than one clan's worth of Neanderthals at any one time.

But Neanderthal's are great apes and not related to felines. To speculate their social structure was like that of lions is a nonsense. Great apes are social animals. All of them. They all operate in "families". They are not lone hunters.

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@iamsam82,

Quote:

But Neanderthal's are great apes and not related to felines. To speculate their social structure was like that of lions is a nonsense. Great apes are social animals. All of them. They all operate in "families". They are not lone hunters.

Hominids should not be thought of as apes, their DNA was roughly halfway between ours and that of an ape.

Aside from that, there is a lot of evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism and that has to indicate that they viewed other Neanderthals outside of their own clan as meat; they would have been highly unlikely to present any sort of a continental united front against Cro Magnons, which is what they needed to have a chance of survival.

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@gungasnake,

But genetically we are 97% the same as chimps. Chimps are apes. Neanderthals were up to 99% genetically similar to us. You are talking about infintessimally small genetic differences. We are clearly all apes. You'd have to go back more than 65 million years to a time when we were this closely related to cats (small rodent-like mammals). Neanderthals were not like lions. They were like the apes.

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@gungasnake,

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Aside from that, there is a lot of evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism

please post it. I know of one site, l Sidron where a possible cannibalistic event occured. You do know that H sapiens idaltu were "facultative" cannibals

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Hominids should not be thought of as apes, their DNA was roughly halfway between ours and that of an ape

and the cumulative difference is less than 1%. Please dont play with stats of whichyou know nothing

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indicate that they viewed other Neanderthals outside of their own clan as meat;

post evidence please.

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@farmerman,

Quote:

:

Quote:
indicate that they viewed other Neanderthals outside of their own clan as meat;

post evidence please.

This one's an interesting question. Again as I noted it would be one thing if every Neanderthal on the planet had always viewed every other Neanderthal as a potential meal but the other piece of the picture is that they buried their own dead, that is, the dead within their own family/clan.

That says they had gone for many ages in which the most major concern they had was dealing with every clan in the world outside of their own, and were not able to make the mental adjustment needed to deal with a general invasion of the entire continents on which they lived.

A google search on 'neanderthal cannibalism turns up no shortage of hits:

http://tinyurl.com/ce8xvc4

and a cursory reading should indicate that cannibalism amongst Neanderthals was not rare. Bones are found with obvious butchering marks made from stone knives and cutters. Jawbones thus marked indicate that Neanderthals viewed the tongues of other Neanderthals as a sort of a delicacy.

Claims of humans having eaten Neanderthals, even if accurate, cannot be called cannibalism in light of Vendramini's reconstructions.

One good starting point which avoids any possibility of confusing Neanderthal and Human activities is this:

http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/neanderthal-cannibalism/

Quote:

The 78 Neanderthal bones at Moula Guercy come from at least six individuals: two adults, two 15 or 16 year-olds, and two six or seven year-olds. All the skulls and limb bones were broken apart; only the hand and foot bones remained intact. Cuts across the foot, ankle, and elbow joints show that in at least one individual each, the Achilles tendon, toe-flexor tendons, and the tendon of the biceps muscle were cut. In two of the younger individuals, the temporalis muscle (used to clench the jaw) was cut from the skull. Other cuts show that the thigh muscles were removed, and in at least one case the tongue was cut out.

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@iamsam82,

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But genetically we are 97% the same as chimps.

Apparently, we share something like 90% of dna with cats, 80% with cows, and 50% with bananas...

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@gungasnake,

If you look at that list you will see that the "cannibalism" seemed to be associated with burial and ritual (hardly an animalistic trait is ritual, no?)

The same site in SPain keeps coming up

There a a bazillion examples of cannibalism in H sapiens, all the way from Melanesian ritual, through Tierra del Fuegans practics , all the way to the Donner Party.
So your attempt at anything "brutish by refernce with associated cannibalism seems to be uncompelling as a typical gungasmoke Creationist "fully formed" dodge.

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@gungasnake,

Quote:

Claims of humans having eaten Neanderthals, even if accurate, cannot be called cannibalism in light of Vendramini's reconstructions.

Vendramini os a clown who is trying to develop a story line and is getting gullible folks like you to buy into baseless conjectue. Why are you so easy to accept that which is baseless yet you try to dimiss that which is heavily videnced.
? COULD IT BE that Gungasmoke is a Snake handler?

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Frightening new take on Neanderthals

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