Neanderthal News

[War Arrow]

A number of points here, one reason for buring their dead in caves, assuming that they were living in the cave at that time of course, would be to keep your family with you. It is not unknown.
As regards the chest of HSN, assuming that the size of the chest cavity meant a large pair of lungs and a diaphram to match, HSN would have loud and a Tenor.

Just a hypothesis to add to your point, bringing belief systems into the mix as I do - Mesoamericans equated caves with symbolic wombs of the earth and whatever may be the practical reasons for burial, there may be the added theological dimension of death being a return to the place from which one came. I don't know how many other cultures had parallel beliefs but I'm willing to bet there may have been a few. Not that this necessarily adds anything to the debate but there you go.

[Forum Monk]

Intentionally burying the dead is a complex and contoversial subject and while it seems to be generally accepted that HN did so, it should be accepted cautiously. It is possible to determine, based on the layers of impacted soils and fill material whether the 'grave' is the result of natural or artificial internment.

If your download speed can bear it, I highly recommend looking at the following PDF file.

http://www.waspress.co.uk/journals/befo ... 1_04_s.pdf

18 Before Farming 2002/1 (4)
True, we may not agree with broad-brush attempts to deny Neanderthal burial, but likewise we must not make simple conclusions that Neanderthals buried their dead. Given the large amounts of space and time one is sampling here, it is wholly possible that Neanderthal burials were a brief epiphenomenon in their behavioural repertoires of dealing with the living and the dead.
If there was any general means of disposal of the dead in Neanderthal society we shall never recapture it as it is obviously archaeologically invisible. Almost all of the Neanderthals that ever lived are now dust, and it is to them that this article is dedicated.

The paper is very interesting.

[Beagle]

The paper is very interesting.

It is. I get the impression that you find it more interesting than I did. I just finished all 19 pages. What did you like/not like about it?

[john]

Ayuh.

There are an indefinite, but large, number of ways of "processing" the dead.

To include: Leaving out in the open until scavengers clean the bones, then collecting same. Depositing in a river, with or without flotation. Wrapping in hides and mounting on a scaffold of wooden poles. Keeping skulls (only) of anscestors. Cremation of many varieties. Taking the old "to the ice", to die (Artic). Depositing in a cedar canoe mounted on a specialized framework. And so forth.

Which brings up my second point. Why presume any cultural likeness between Homo n. and Homo e., let alone Homo sap?

Does the fixation on proof of burial practices of the Neandertal somehow "validate" the species as culturally capable?

Got a strong hunch here that we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope to prove a "scientific" connectivity which never did have a basis.

i.e., the reverse engineering of Neandertal culture to fit the presumed social morphology of a much later species, at a much later time.

Pop quiz.

Does the Sun go 'round the Earth,

or the Earth go 'round the Sun?


john

[Manystones]

I agree John,

I am always slightly amused/bemused at the idea that burying the dead signifies some sort of "civilised" intelligence. After all, there is no evidence to believe that there is life after death.

Perhaps rather HE was incredibly astute and grounded in reality.

[War Arrow]

For what it's worth, I saw the words 'cave burial' on the page (or similar) and my previous post was simply the first thing that came to mind. However, I strongly agree that the anthropomorphic principle (and I think that may be applicable here) is something of which we would be very wary whether applied to assumptions of there being life on other planets or that earlier hominids were 'a bit like us' - NOT that I'm ruling out any possibility that they may have been.

Hmmm. This fence is a lot more comfy since I had it reupholstered.

[Beagle]

Does the fixation on proof of burial practices of the Neandertal somehow "validate" the species as culturally capable?

Something like that John. And why do we go on and on about Neanderthal minutae? Ad infinitum I should add. One easy answer is that we are in an archaeological forum.

The earlier article that Monk posted was done by an Archaeologist at Oxford. It went into detail about many Neanderthal burials. What was the final conclusion? I don't imagine that many people will read the whole 19 pages, so this is for those few.

What did the author not say? What agenda, if any, did he have? Finally, why do scientists disagree so much about an old extinct caveman? (that's a bigee).

Now, what can we hope to learn from a Neanderthal skeleton found in a cave?
Whether or not it was an actual burial.
His age and state of health at death.
What position he was buried in.
If there is evidence of abstract thinking. (even though his brain was bigger than the scientist studying him)
Are there grave goods and what do they mean.
How he treated his women.
Whether or not he cannabalized his dead.
If there is evidence of Neanderthal evolution, both physically and culturally.
His cultural relationship with infants.
What rituals he had and what they might mean, if he had any.
If members of his group were cared for, and nursed to health.
As suggested, a knowledge of herbal medicine.
.....and so very much more.

With Neanderthal, this is where the rubber meets the road. We have more to study about him than we do about early HS at this time. HS evidence is very sparse compared to HN. In fact, we have been able to learn much about our own species from a slight bit of evidence when we can compare it with a truckload of similar evidence from HN.

There are scientists who do not believe that HN had the requisite intelligence to have abstract thought and be able to speak in order to carry forward ritual and history for as much as 1,000 years. The dead tell us whether or not this is true.

Grave goods would indicate a belief in an afterlife. If it were accepted that they were present, then game over. That is why we study gentlemen.

[kbs2244]

Well said, Beagle.
And just let me add that it can be fun.

MS:
The idea that there is not life after death seems to be much newer than the idea that there is.
Assuming some kind of ideas of sanitation, some cultures may bury their dead for only that reason. Maybe with a few simple pices of jewerlry for sentimantal reasons.
But we have a much greater history of "memorial tombs" proclaiming "remember me when I am gone" being built by and cared for by people who seem to be saying "remember us when you are gone."

[Forum Monk]

Having also read the 19 pages of Prof. Pettitt's paper prior to posting it, I confess having given little regard previously to a) how are we certain the burials were deliberate and b) if intentional, why?

The interpretation of the evidence for intentional burial is not as straight forward as it seems when so many on the web are making erroneous claims such as "neaderthal was the first to bury their dead" and "they did so which reverence and ceremony". And yet none of the respectable scholars investigating these sites are making such matter-of-fact claims. While some seem to suggest the evidence may be hinting some intentional burials took place, none are saying, "Yep they did it routinely". Even more controverisal is the idea that grave goods were present.

Did Prof. Pettitt have an agenda? I don't know. But he did get me thinking in some new directions and that's why I thought the article was very interesting.

[Beagle]

But he did get me thinking in some new directions and that's why I thought the article was very interesting.

That's good news. I'm glad you're interested in this big debate. I'm glad to hear that you may read other papers and articles. It gets more confusing before things start to make sense. I've been at this for 30 years. Some stuff boggles the mind.

I had a few problems with the paper. The middle paleolithic period covers 270,000 years. That's a lot more time than HSS has been around. As one might expect, there were changes over time in morphology and behavior. This author gave no dates to the examples that he used. Did he "cherry pick" his examples?

The author didn't tell us whether the skeleton was a male or female. Neandertal (in my opinion) left grave goods for the males only. These are a couple of examples of things I found myself asking as I read the paper.
There were more but I won't belabor the point.

Good luck in your reading, and post anything you find interesting.

[john]

Does the fixation on proof of burial practices of the Neandertal somehow "validate" the species as culturally capable?

Something like that John. And why do we go on and on about Neanderthal minutae? Ad infinitum I should add. One easy answer is that we are in an archaeological forum.

The earlier article that Monk posted was done by an Archaeologist at Oxford. It went into detail about many Neanderthal burials. What was the final conclusion? I don't imagine that many people will read the whole 19 pages, so this is for those few.

What did the author not say? What agenda, if any, did he have? Finally, why do scientists disagree so much about an old extinct caveman? (that's a bigee).

Now, what can we hope to learn from a Neanderthal skeleton found in a cave?
Whether or not it was an actual burial.
His age and state of health at death.
What position he was buried in.
If there is evidence of abstract thinking. (even though his brain was bigger than the scientist studying him)
Are there grave goods and what do they mean.
How he treated his women.
Whether or not he cannabalized his dead.
If there is evidence of Neanderthal evolution, both physically and culturally.
His cultural relationship with infants.
What rituals he had and what they might mean, if he had any.
If members of his group were cared for, and nursed to health.
As suggested, a knowledge of herbal medicine.
.....and so very much more.

With Neanderthal, this is where the rubber meets the road. We have more to study about him than we do about early HS at this time. HS evidence is very sparse compared to HN. In fact, we have been able to learn much about our own species from a slight bit of evidence when we can compare it with a truckload of similar evidence from HN.

There are scientists who do not believe that HN had the requisite intelligence to have abstract thought and be able to speak in order to carry forward ritual and history for as much as 1,000 years. The dead tell us whether or not this is true.

Grave goods would indicate a belief in an afterlife. If it were accepted that they were present, then game over. That is why we study gentlemen.

Beagle -

Am not disagreeing with you in any way at all.

The "bone I have to pick" - so to speak - is intellectual preconditioning.

Grave goods would indicate a belief in an afterlife. If it were accepted that they were present, then game over. That is why we study gentlemen.[/quote]

If I operate under an intellectual precondition that flowers and hematite are gravegoods, THEREFORE indicating awareness of an afterlife,

I am making an assumption.

I can also make the argument that using parent dirt and stones and stray bones to cover a body symbolically represented a cosmology in which the concept of an afterlife was rejected in favor of an "singular life, once only". By a people who had an equal command of communication and the intellectual process.

Also an assumption.

At this point - and yeah I read the 19 pages - which was actually a pretty good, though brief precis, there is nothing to indicate which way the argument might tip.

I know I'm being a little bit of a devil's advocate here.

However, the history of science is littered with the intellectual corpses of those who used the assumptions of the present to serve as an interlinear for past physical evidence.

"On that path lies danger."


john

[Forum Monk]

The presence of grave goods, in my opinion, does not indicate belief in an after-life. Egyptians believed in an after-life and grave goods had the purpose of serving the reanimated individual in the next-life. Christians believe in an after-life but do not believe that grave-goods serve any purpose in the after-life. They are merely memorials.

Conversely it seems reasonable to assume grave goods could still be memorials of no practical purpose for those who do not believe in an after-life. So the presence of these artifacts support either point of view or better to say, DO NOT support either point of view.

[Beagle]

It would be much better if I had said that grave goods represent symbolic thinking. It is that level of thinking that is currently the focus of a lot of attention.

A new Neanderthal article comes out and gets posted here several times a month. For every paper that gets into a magazine or news article, many more have been written.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

Something as benign and neutral as Wikipedia is a good place to start. This discussion began with Fossil Trader stating that HN did not bury his dead. I should have just posted Wiki.

[john]

It would be much better if I had said that grave goods represent symbolic thinking. It is that level of thinking that is currently the focus of a lot of attention.

A new Neanderthal article comes out and gets posted here several times a month. For every paper that gets into a magazine or news article, many more have been written.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

Something as benign and neutral as Wikipedia is a good place to start. This discussion began with Fossil Trader stating that HN did not bury his dead. I should have just posted Wiki.

Beagle -

The fun begins........


Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Julian Jaynes

Back in 1976 when he was a professor of psychology at Princeton, Julian Jaynes published a very controversial theory about the emergence of the human mind. Indeed, even today his theory of the "bicameral mind" remains a controversy.

Rather than just harkening to behavioral psychology or brain biology, Jaynes presents his theory from the perspective of psycho-cultural history.

Going back to the the earliest writings and studying particularly the many early civilizations of the Near East, Jaynes came to the conclusion that most of the people in these archaic cultures were *not* subjectively conscious as we understand it today.

Jaynes provides extensive illustrations--ranging from Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Egyptian, Early Mycenean, Hebrew, and even Mayan and Asian cultures--that support his theory of the bicameral mind. But he mainly focuses on Mycenean (Greek) material--and it is this material which we will examine mostly in this post.

Jaynes bluntly declares "There is in general no consciousness in the ILIAD." Analyzing Homer's great epic, Jaynes came to the conclusion that the characters of the Trojan siege did not have conscious minds, no introspection, as we know it in the modern human. [Julian Jaynes, THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976, p. 69]

Whether Achilles or Agamemnon, there was no sense of subjectivity. Rather they were men whom the gods pushed about like robots. The gods sang epics through their lips. Jayne declares that these Iliadic heroes heard "voices," real speech and directions from the gods--as clearly as those diagnosed epileptic or schizophrenic today.

Jaynes stresses that the Iliadic man did not possess subjectivity as we do--rather "he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon." This mentality of the Myceneans, Jaynes calls the bicameral mind. [Ibid, p. 75]

Now what was this bicameral mind? Jaynes briefly discusses brain biology--in that there are three speech areas, for most located in the left hemisphere. They are: (1) the supplemental motor cortex; (2) Broca's area; and (3) Wernicke's area. Jaynes focuses on Wernicke's area, which is chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal lobe. It is Wernicke's area that is crucial for human speech.

Pursuing the bicameral mind, Jaynes focuses on the corpus callosum, the major inter-connector between the brain's hemispheres. In human brains the corpus callosum can be likened to a small bridge, a band of transverse fibers, only slightly more than one-eighth of an inch in diameter. This bridge "collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke's area." And it was this bridge that served as the means by which the "gods" who dwelled in one hemisphere of the human brain were able to give "directions" to the other hemisphere. It is like thinking of the "two hemispheres of the brain almost as two individuals." Hence the bicameral mind! [Ibid, p. 117]

Archaic humans were ordered and moved by the gods through both auditory hallucinations and visual hallucinations. The gods mainly "talked" to them--but sometimes "appeared," such as Athene appeared to Achilles. And "when visual hallucinations occur with voices, they are merely shining light or cloudy fog, as Thetis came to Achilles or Yahwey to Moses." [Ibid, p. 93]

Jaynes believes in the mentality of the early Mycenean that volition, planning and initiative were literally organized with no consciousness whatsoever. Rather such volition was "told" to the individual--"sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or 'god,' or sometimes as a voice alone." [Ibid, p. 75]

Now Jaynes thinks the great agricultural civilizations that spread over much of the Near East by 5000 b.c.e. reflected the bicameral mind. These civilizations were rigid theocracies! They were reminiscent of the Queen Bee and the bee-hive. These bicameral societies reflected "hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or works, inventory of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler, and particular to gods." [Ibid, p. 80]

Jaynes contests that such theocracies were the only means for a bicameral civilization to survive. Circumventing chaos, these rigid hierarchies allowed for "lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so" to kings and gods. [Ibid, p. 79]

According to Julian Jaynes, "the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones." [Ibid, p. 144]

In these ancient bicameral societies the idol or the statue was literally the god, so says Jaynes. The god/goddess had its own house. It was usually the center of a temple complex. The size varied according to the importance of the god and, of course, the wealth of the city.

In these theocracies the owner of the land was the divine idol--and the people were the tenants. The steward-king served the god by administrating the god's estates. According to cuneiform texts, the gods also enjoyed eating, drinking, music and dancing. They required beds for sleeping and connubial visits from other gods. They (the statues) were washed and dressed, driven around on special occasions. Ceremony and ritual evolved around these idols.

The collapse of the bicameral mind came slowly, it was a slow erosive breakdown. But Jaynes spotted the first serious indications of collapse by the time of Egypt's Middle Kingdom, around 1700 b.c.e. Authority had started to crumble--and due to this Egypt had to re-unify itself, hence the Middle Kingdom.

Jaynes considers that this slow collapse was caused by natural disasters, such as the Santorini volcanic explosion that devastated many Greek islands. Migration of different peoples into new areas disrupted the bicameral societies already in place. Conquest over peoples by others resulted in further collapse. And writing gradually eroded the "auditory authority of the bicameral mind." [Ibid, pp. 208, 212-213, 220]

Jaynes felt a real tipoff of this bicameral breakdown could be discerned in the Babylonian lines: "My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance... [To Marduk]

It was with this, according to Jaynes, that one could detect for the first time the mighty themes of the world religions: "Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god." [Ibid, p. 226]

For Jaynes this ruin, this bitter bicameral breakdown led to the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece. Moving from the ILIAD, Jaynes declares that Homer's ODYSSEY is unlike its predecessor. Here we have wily Odysseus, the hero of many devices, a man of a "new mentality." The ODYSSEY was about a man who was learning how to get along in a "ruined and god-weakened world." [Ibid, 272-273]

With the Golden Age of Greece, in the starstruck sixth century b.c.e., with Solon, with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras, Jaynes claims we are now with human minds with whom we can feel mentally at home!



I am not pushing this argument. However, it is interesting within the context of this thread.

i.e., what was/is the length and breadth and depth of Homo n's horizon of communication?


john

[Forum Monk]

KBS2244 - here's a link to a short article that may be of particular interest to you...and any one else interested the concept of ancient trade between HSS groups vs. HN/HSN. I took this one from the list of primary sources on the wiki-neanderthal article.

I think one can read between the lines here and if there is any validity to the conclusions, it implies HSS could communicate between separated groups and at a level that HN/HSN seemed incapable of doing.