Moderators: MichelleH, Minimalist, JPeters
Since HS wasn't in Europe much more than 40,000 years ago I wonder why the comment about HN vs. HS as the owner. Neanderthals were too dumb to make nice hand axes?the people who worked them by chipping away flakes of stone to leave a blade as sharp as a modern kitchen knife were probably Neanderthal, not Homo sapiens
Big news from a conference in Barcelona. D'Errico even takes a shot at the Out of Africa theory.Neanderthals had language comparable to that of Homo sapiens, Bordeaux-based archaeologist Francisco D’Errico told participants in the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Saturday, March 15, 2008). This claim totally discards the older Big Bang theory that said language arose only very recently (40 to 75 thousand years ago), and also challenges the Out-of-Africa theory that proposes Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 200 thousand years ago and spread over the rest of the world, carrying language and culture with them, beginning about 60 thousand years ago. A new history will have to be written.
Beagle -Beagle wrote:No doubt Digit. John Hawks has comments on D'Errico.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/nea ... -2008.html
I think this year is going to be a big one for Neanderthals.
Francesco d'Errico, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux, France, has found crafted lumps of pigment – essentially crayons – left behind by Neanderthals across Europe.
He says that Neanderthals, who most likely had pale skin, used these dark pigments to mark their own as well as animal skins. And, since body art is a form of communication, this implies that the Neanderthals could speak, d'Errico says.
This is a good article. D'Errico has effectively made his case for Neanderthal speech. Although already accepted in most circles, some linguists have held out against the notion. So finally this linguist accepts the obvious but adds a bitter comment.Body painting, argues d'Errico, is a "material proxy" for symbolic communication. What's more, he says, the techniques for making the symbols, and the meaning they carry, would have to be transmitted through language.
And body painting isn't the only proxy associated with Neanderthal remains. Neanderthals adorned their bodies with ornamentation, such as necklaces made from shell beads.
How would he know?"The archaeological record does not show that they ever attained the cultural level of the humans who could talk as we do," says Phillip Lieberman, a linguist at Brown University, Rhode Island, US.
"Neanderthals possessed language, but their linguistic and cognitive ability was inferior to the humans who replaced them," he says.
but their linguistic and cognitive ability was inferior to the humans who replaced them
Goddamit Min -Minimalist wrote:but their linguistic and cognitive ability was inferior to the humans who replaced them
I wonder if he ever met Bush?
Now you are insulting the Neandertals.
I'm sure there will be more on this. Hawks, who is quoted in this article, will no doubt blog on it within a couple of days.Talk about a long silence – no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up – or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf.
Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human's speech lacked the "quantal vowel" sounds that underlie modern speech.
Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.
