New Scientist has a short story synthesizing all the accumulating data that Neandertals weren't that primitive, and that the inflection point of cultural creativity 40-50 K BP was the culmination of a gradual process.
More like this
SteelyKid was born in a small local hospital specializing in maternity care, with maybe 40-50 beds in the whole place.
I have great post titles and topics in my head, but much less time to blog!
Tikistitch, PZ Myers and
Bryan Caplan notes & argues:
Thank you for the link to the story. Follow my link to find out why... Look for the J-Dog post.
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=46705232…
well, i did some research....
You say neandertal.
They say neanderthal.
Who is correct ?
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/neandertal_or_neanderthal.html
This period is commonly thought to be characterised by long periods of little change in technological and perhaps also cognitive development....
Archeology is always about finished events from long ago, but our knowledge is sketchy and we draw curves through a very few points. In the absence of data the tendency is to make the curves smooth, but this is risky. Anyway, the distant past can change enormously in the course of a modern year.
It would seem possible to write an archeology-prehistory textbook outlining all of the plausible scenarios, and if the book were well-written it would be very informative and not terribly confusing. The other two options, presenting the consensus or presenting the facts with as little inerpretation as possible, seem much worse.
the façonnage and the débitage techniques. In the former a stone core is shaped by chipping off flakes of flint, the latter involves producing sharp-edged flakes from a core. In the Lower Palaeolithic, more than 300,000 years ago, the two techniques were practised separately, but Hopkinson argues that during the Middle Palaeolithic they were fused into a single method, the Levallois reduction technique
This gives new meaning to the word "gradual".
I've read a lot more impressive arguments for Neathertal smarts than this piece.