What is the cause of existence?

So, you did say that h.s.s. "hunted h.n. to extinction." Neither statement is scientific. It has taken you seven pages to admit that this is your opinion. You stated these things as though they were incontrovertible truth. They are not. You are entitled to your own opinion--you don't get to have your own facts.

One of the more fantastic accounts of "modern humans" slaying the poor Neanderthals was the recent work of Churchill (2009) {Now somewhat discredited}. His work on the skeleton SHANIDAR 3, from the Shanidar cave complex, was reported in NATURE in 2010 and his evidence was supposed to be conclusive that this fellow was hit by a projectile that" could only " have been delivered by a flying projectile from a modern human (atlatl delivered?). Churchill and his students did a bunch of field studies by poking pig carcasses with "handheld spears" That he stated were all that was available to Neanderthals and then he delivered some stone tipped projectiles with a crossbow. He concluded that this showed that the wound was from an Hss. ALSO all the field evidence occurred in a stratigraphic horizon that was "conclusive" of some kind of interaction between Neanderthals and Hss. where the Hn was fatally wounded.
The only problems to the story were that
1SHANIDAR 3 had, upon further deciphering of contextual stratigraphy,been buried alive by members of his cohort. He was a sort of a token "religious" burial victim and the wound could have been made with a thrown spear.
2 Later, more complete analyses showed that many later Neanderthal groups had knowledge of certain techniques like pressure flaking and thrown weapons .(Some people claim that this was a result of non-violent contacts between Hn and Hss.
3. Embarrassingly though, Churchill also may have screwed up the geochronology of the site and the site actually had contained earlier time indicators, ( from C14 and O16/O18 ratios) These times were early enough that there was no other evidence that Hss was even in the neighborhood.
The conclusion now , of SHANIDAR 3 , is that this guy was somehow impaled(but not necessarily from a high velocity delivered weapon with a small Solutrean style point ) and he died of his wounds but was not quite dead enough when ceremonially buried with his possessions and mementos from his band.

So that one piece of "evidence" for an Hss "killing" an Hn was very popular with the Vendriminis and ''Creation Scientists" (who wished that Neanderthals were a separately "created" Ape with no evolutionary relationship to Hs) This was all a bit like the PAluxey River "Human footprints" of Creataceous age , or that bogus Jurassic fossil that showed a meatasaurian dinosaur with a human skeletal frame in its mouth, in a "death pose"

There are several other Neanderthal skulls, disarticulated from the rest of their skeletons, that show head trauma and skull fracturing from blunt force. Such wounds are a stretch to use as evidence that Hss had killed these individuals. Several of these skulls had shown evidence of healing of the fractures and that the individual had probably been cared for either before it died, or else the thing that killed the individual was not related to the head trauma.

I don't think that Churchill was meaning to deceive anyone. He really thought, based upon his field studies using a pig carcass, that hed proved that somehow, an Hss weapon conclusively delivered a death wound to an earlier Hominim. This cemented a hypotheis for interspecific "warfare" and the killing off of Hn by Hss. His data, much of it probably collected by grad students who were possibly unschooled in field "Chains of custody" and field packaging of chemical samples . This is some of the same thing that happened to Schweitzer when she collected the first T rex samples with "soft tissue'
The only thing I find a bit funny is that both guys are from Universities in North Carolina (UNC and Duke).

No, I stated them as if it was my opinion.

I always try to state my opinion rather than that of other people... So in the future, even if my posts don't say explicitly "in my opinion", you can safely assume that I speak my mind, and mine only.

It just so happens that this opinion of mine reflects a scientific theory that has traction, that is not discarded nor disproven. It's the best explanation available, in my opinion. Other ideas have been put forth but they don't hold much water. I've reviewed the climate of the period and it doesn't give Sapiens, the newcomer to the North, any advantage. Sapiens the African is on Neanderthal's terrain, and the climate is only growing colder during the period.

So shat's your opinion again? Not enough vitamins, right?

You bother to much mon cher...the truth is nor you nor I nor Setanta or Farmerman know for sure and there are several good hypothesis on the table, how hard can it be people admit to that I wonder. Disengage...

I don't think so. The competiton with Sapiens IS,in my always humble opinion, the reason for Neandrthal's downfall. We can discuss the detail of how this competition unfolded, but to pretend Hn just had a bad diet is baloney.

...most probably was an ensemble of multiple factors, but I don't know...I just dislike one reason causation arguments...I am not taking sides here either, just finding funny ppl are so eager to piss on the highest tree. Is amusing from afar ! That's why I advise you to disengage...I sometimes could take the same advise of course...

Your killer ape thesis has been rejected by the great majority of paleoanthropologists. At no time did i mention "vitamins"," you snotty son of a bitch. It is your sneering, hateful tone as much as your gross ignorance which makes your entire performance here pathetic.

I suspect a continuing desire to portray h.s.s. as killer apes, a sort of christian hold over of original sin translated into a scientific context. It is almost impossible for anyone who knows what the energy equations were for people living in the last ice age, even if it were in an interstadial period, to imagine any h.s.s. band having the time and the leisure to hunt down other hominids. When you add the likely reaction of h.n. to being attacked, the entire proposition is farcical. No one living 40,000 ybp had the time nor the energy resources to hunt anything other than lunch.

Killer ape yourself.

My hypothesis has NOT been disproven, and is NOT rejected by many paleontologists.

So give us your theory then, if it's not vitamins. Come on, don't be shy...

Glad we're entertaining...

You KNOW the "energy equations for people living in the last ice age", of course, since you were already born back then.

If humans had the time to hunt mammoths and other megafauna to extinction, they had the time to hunt other species to extinction...

Its not an unreasonable assertion that Hss "could have" killed off some or even a large part of Hn populations. However, there should be evidence available. When Churchill published his work, it would have made available some initial evidence that this hypothesis had some legs and , like the "soft tissue" in a T rex, it would have sent anthropologists back to their collections to look at some , possibly, overlooked data.
However, it wasn't to work out and Chuchill's report has not been helpful to the killer ape story.

We can say anything about killer apes (or dragons), but then, we must realize that people will doubt any story that is evidence-free to this time.

Herbert Wendt in his classic "In search of Adam" goes on and on about how Hss, in developing more and more "Stand off" weapons, would have exterminated the Hn populations just as we destroyed several other indigenous populations in historic time. The only problem with Wendt is that, he too, had a good story(even a plausible one) but no way to evidence it.
What he did underpin however, was that Hn was quite brutal in his intraspecies sacrifice of his own kind. There are several skulls in Guittari and Cape Circeo in Italy that showed that Hn was removing members of its own tribes by several sacrificial ceremonies involving what later looked like trepanning of skulls of the living.

One of the big problems with the whole fairy tale is the logistical aspect. Organized warfare requires huge surpluses, both to feed the fighters, and to account for the loss of those fighters as producers. The musket wars in New Zealand are a stark example, when tribes were lead to the brink of starvation by trading potatoes and flax (their only tradable commodities) for muskets, powder and shot. Increasingly, would-be Maori conquerors had to enslave those they conquered to produce food to continue the wars, and to continue to trade with the Europeans.

So, in a periglacial climate, even one as relatively "mild" as the interstadial periods, the contention that any band of h.s.s. had the leisure and the resources to carry out a campaign of extermination is an absurdity.

Another strawman, as nobody talked of organised warfare.

Strawmen are the only type of hominid you can measure up to?

The cause of existence is a meaningless question. Existence exists; so to ask the question of what was prior to existence lands oneself in a contradiction.

You are right but you ought to do a better work explaining it...

Recent archeological work in the Qingshui River Valley of Northern China, has revealed that, in the maximum of the last glacial stage prior to the Holocene (equiv to our Wisconsin Sheet or the European Wurm stage), humans were already undertaking large scale (pre-ag) exploitation of seed grasses and beans. In the area , has been evidence of large scale storage and "milling" of grains an beans using similar technology as manos and metatte stones. This time was approximately 19000 to 23000 Ybp. (proceedings Nat Acad Sci)

Finally someone whoe gets my point about the OP:
Of course; but that was not the focus of the OP.

I don't think anyone responded to "What is the cause..." any more than "Why is there air?" I think I had more fun hearing about how we wiped out the NEanderthals.
The cause of existence is the mighty covalent bond , adsorption kinetics,and peptide linkage