Archaeologica.org

Gentlemen, "cogition" (and its variants) seems to be the new buzz word but it has many many meanings depending on the discipline of the presenter. According to some definitions, certain computer programs demonstrate cognition.

Beagle, why not post the article. Its only a link and if people get bored they can close their browser window.

Cognition seems to be the topic for the present. I'll find a "balanced" paper. But first, a 4 page paper written by Bednarik. It's somewhat dated, but he is a favorite with many of us.

http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/cognit/sh ... nition.pdf

A discussion of the evidence
Neurological research suggests an intimate relationship between speech and vision, and there appears
to be a nexus between the level of visual taxonomising ability and linguistic ability (Marshack 1988).
This is supported by different types of evidence, such as the means by which the human infant acquires
language (Lock 1980), or the effects of neurological impairments (Vellutino 1987). A crucial contributing
factor in creating the conditions for cognitive development must be the feedback relationship between a
hominid and his environment: as he changes it and perceives the results of his actions, his awareness
contributes to creating the basis of consciousness, establishing the potential for dialectic. The most
obvious potential was in the area of visual stimuli. Having acquired a high degree of tactile proficiency
during eons of tool making and tool use, the production of simple marks—possibly ‘discovered’ through
the rhythmic manipulation of tools—would have resulted in a permanent, visually perceptible pattern
which could be duplicated, examined and contemplated. Such marking behaviour would have a potential
for expanding conceptualisation and the attendant proliferation of mental constructs, and the
establishment of new mental structures

One thing for sure, Bednarik is not a member of the "club" -

If we combine this evidence with the knowledge that hominids of between 840 000 and a million years ago undertook seafaring expeditions to colonise unoccupied land masses (Bednarik 1999) we begin to realise that all the indications of complex behaviour, including the use of symbolism and language, commence at about that time. This has remained entirely unknown to archaeology until now and is quite incompatible with consensus models of currency. Some of this evidence has been available for up to 150 years, but archaeology has simply ignored it in favour of a dogma stipulating that all early hominids were too primitive to have language, culture and cognition. This was a fundamental error because these faculties have been available to countless animal species, so archaeology appears to have been engaged in an unscientific pursuit of trying to maintain the traditional religious separation of the human from the natural.
So far only one set of hypotheses based on these finds has been advanced, my own.

Someday, we may find a well preserved paleolithic boat and the scientific universe will change forever. Its a stimulating thought.

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/humo ... _dart.html

From p. 48 of P. V. Tobias, Dart, Taung, and the Missing Link, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg:

All fossil hominid discoveries up to 1925 had bearings on the evolution of established and unequivocal hominids; they had illustrated teh changes that had occurred along the way from incontrovertible earlier hominids (like Homo erectus of Java) to later hominids (like Neandertal and Cro-Magnon men). Australopithecus imported an entirely new dimension into the picture: it opened a window, not on to the evolution of established hominids, but on to human emergence -- the very roots of the family of hominids from non-hominid predecessors. It posed such questions as these: What are the features that distinguish hominids from other primate families? Which of the hallmarks of mankind were the first to appear and when did they arise? How were the different traits that characterize the human family related to one another? -- such traits as uprightness and bipedal locomotion, reduced canines, brain enlargement and structural re-arrangement, the human grasping and manipulating hand, human communication, human material culture including tool-making activities?
These were the kinds of questions which Dart's discovery and what he made of it compelled upon the world of science. Countless new areas of investigation were opened up -- even if the motivation was the felt need to repudiate Dart's claims! Dart's plunge into ancestral waters took the twentieth century to the very fountainhead where one could plumb the depths of human genesis.

Posted at 12:20 on 10/11/2007 | permanent link

Just out on John Hawks weblog. Another favorite guy.

Beagle wrote:John, most scientists agree that HNS cognitive skills were on a par with modern man, but think he must have come up short in long range planning and a few other areas. If you're interested I can post a big scientific article for you. I usually don't do that because they can be a very long and tedious read.

Beagle -

Please do. Reading is seldom tedious for me.


John

This is not bad. I stayed away from Trinkaus, Wolpoff, and Hawkes deliberately. As I did with conservative hardliners. This is pretty moderate in it's assessment of Neanderthal.

http://web.uccs.edu/twynn/Chatelperronian.htm

And this is not from a Google Scholar search. It was quite handy.

And another. But I agree with Bednarik that these efforts to understand HNS mind have their fruitless side.

http://web.uccs.edu/twynn/Expert.htm

So we have the experts defining the finer nuances of Neanderthal cognition. I think it's important to notice how often conjecture and speculation are at work, and often derived from what the case "surely has to be".

But as I said, these papers are moderate in their nature.

I believe Neanderthal was nothing more than a clever animal i also believe there enough evidence to suggest he may have died out do to being a specialised hunter.
There is despite Beagles claims not enough evidence to suggest either art ,speech or deep cognitave abilities Beagle i never use internet sites for research as i already told you the universities i work with rarely accept such work.
To use web sites as you are Beagle is the same as doing science using tabloid magazine headlines makes good copy but that all.
My inability to post links stems mainly from the fact i rarely use them i see no meaningfull research here merely speculation based on the latest headlines seems a sad fate for what could have been a useful site good luck with your 'research' lol.

Sykes, "The Seven Daughters of Eve" reports that there are only 7 indigeous European mtDNA lines. why so few?

Because the hybridization process with the HNS wiped out their females.

Sykes, "The Seven Daughters of Eve" reports that there are only 7 indigeous European mtDNA lines. why so few?

Because the hybridization process with the HNS wiped out their females.

Actually, the Neanderthal population of Europe was very low (I have seen estimates in the 20-30,000 range) and the introduction of increasing numbers of HS would have washed out the HN genome quickly if they were interbreeding. The odds of HN/HS hybrid women carrying forward genes becomes less and less with each generation due to the disparity.

Selection for males would have favored the tall Cro Magnon male, averaging 6' at the time of cohabitation, versus the short HN male who averaged a robust, but diminutive 5'4".

The invading Cro Magnon were not so numerous either. The other thing to remember, is that this began during the ice age, when both races were driven to the Mediterranean by the glaciers. Nor is Neanderthal the only example. I've read reports of East Asians with H. Erectus DNA.

The following website is irrefutable evidence:http://hometown.aol.com/canovanogram/index.html Only, note the teeth. That is the effect of chronic brawling, one of the social effects of a culture under stress, in this case the aborigine in the 19th century. If the skull were fossilzed, nobody would identify it as anything but Erectus. But it is a recent skull made of bone.

There are many posted reports of the hominids being reduced to a bottle neck of 10,000 individuals. As may be. I dont claim to know. but if that be the case, then even if part of that population expands to the millions, it is so inbred that the effects of the introduction of new haplotypes would be unusual, with dominance playing a much larger role.

In "The Cave Painters" by Curtis, he notes the dismissiveness of 19th century academics to the idea that this was prehistoric art. Curtis also noted that this art emerged in the very region and time when both Cro Magnon and Neanderthal were meeting in the richest hunting grounds, southern France and the Pyrenees. Well, this is what we'd expect when two cultures meet; innovation.

Because of the consistency of Neanderthal stone tools over the course of uncounted millennia, it looks like that craft was *instinctive*. But when exposed to the new Cro Magnon technologies, we now know the Neanderthals adopted them. Which displaced their instinctive brain patterns making room for new ways of thinking.

The other reason to consider hybridization is that the whole idea was immediately dismissed out of hand in an era when there was no scientific way to test the question at all. Of course we can see religious sensibilities are the reason, which still are a factor in the way ideas are presented. It also has an obvious racist element. trying to get past the habitual group think on this is not easy, and for many impossible because of the trouble it would cause them in other relationships if they challenged the conventional lack of wisdom.

But horses and donkeys are much more different than the hominids; yet the hybrid does on occasion produce a fertile jack, but hardly ever a jenny because the reproductive system is so much more complex in females.

Sykes reports that the original European mtDNA lines lived in europe from 50,000 BP for the first, with the rest arriving 20k to 10kya. Well, he dont say anything, but 50kya, the only females in Europe were Neanderthal. So out of all the thousands of females you refer to, just one made it. And from Skyes we see only 6 Cro Magon. Something killed off the females, an effect that is *TOTALLY* unique in all history and prehistory.

Is there any other possible explanation? Warriors steal pussy, they dont murder it.

DB, bear in mind that I am not challenging what you wrote. I have just a couple of comments/additions:

The invading Cro Magnon were not so numerous either. The other thing to remember, is that this began during the ice age, when both races were driven to the Mediterranean by the glaciers. Nor is Neanderthal the only example. I've read reports of East Asians with H. Erectus DNA.

The period of overlap between HS and HN was primarily from 40,000bp to 30,000bp. The European climate at that time was experiencing relatively mild and consistent transitions from cold to warm and back again. The ice age migration south to refugia was not begun until after 25,000bp when the LGM began: http://www.roperld.com/HomoSapienEvents.htm#climate

By that time Neanderthals were essentially "gone" with a few potential survivors in Portugal and Spain who would be "gone" real soon. Your Austrailian link for reference and easier access is: http://hometown.aol.com/canovanogram/index.html

For additional fun reading, look up Kow Swamp: http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~pbrown3/KowS.html

Warriors steal pussy, they dont murder it.

As a corollary: those same warriors kill all the men and young boys. I didn't want to state that since we have no proof of any violence between HS and HN during the transition. However, HN men wouldn't have much value to the HS tribe whereas the women could always be made slaves. Maybe the cannabalism and violence we attribute to HN was actually perpetrated by HS as they were extinguishing their competition?

Polite discourse is appreciated Cognito. Archeology has always suffered from group think, which was to a large extent controlled by the academic chairs who had staked out intellectual turf. Now, with links such as you showed us, we have much more access to the original materials on which to base judgments without fear of what those will do to a future career.

We see the same kind of thing in all fields, archeology is no worse, but it is not, by any means exempt. Much of "The Cave Painters" by Curtis is not about the art or the artists, but the unwarranted dismissiveness aimed at those who'd actually done the field work that challenged the conventional lack of wisdom.

Now, if we were to look at the distribution of hominids for signs of some remnant earlier varieties, Europe and Australia, at opposite, and extreme ends of the Old World would be the place we'd expect to find them.

Dr. Freud noted how neurotics will jump to conclusions, and then when presented with contrary facts, exhibit remarkable innovation in trying to explain to themselves why they think as they do, rather than admit to themselves that an original judgment was wrong.

Thus, the idea in a link above that the Erectus like shape of these skulls was due to some kind of deliberate deformation; ie, a head binding. Which notion utterly ignores the other Erectus characteristic, the robusticity of the skull. One poster from the Australian outback also commented on how an Aborigini could take a smashing blow to the back of the skull, and still pop up fighting, cause it was the whisky bottle that smashed.

This too was dismissed for obvious political correct reasons. That an outback barkeep could offer an opinion from direct experience goes right over the heads of academic desk jockies.

The Greenland Ice core shows temperature fluctuations that go way beyond anything seen in the last 10,000 years. I dont think you can find a single span of time over 300 years when any given area had the same conditions one way or the other. The chart also shows the changes happen in a few score of years, sometimes as little as a single decade.

There's a good case to be made that this reduced the populations of the megafauna to the point where their numbers never rebounded because of too much inbreeding. This was no doubt a problem hominids were instinctively aware of also, and is still with us. which is why monogamy is so good in theory, but so bad in practice.

But from the standpoint of survival, the group which had both, Neanderthal hunters who were familiar with the habits of the game and the territorial use prey animals made of it... as well as the Cro Magnon with the new weapons which were more lethal at longer ranges, had an obvious advantage over either hominid line alone. And after the kill, the Neanderthals had the brute strength to haul the meat back to the camp.

The *problem* lie in the fertility and birthing survival of the females. With two lines that were so different, we'd expect some females to be infertile, and from what little we know of both groups, they were not very fertile to start with. There were never very many of any kind of hominid in the temperate zones until the agrarian revolution.

The shape of the pelvis presented problems. The HNS female pelvis was much more simian, and the cross section of the skull was smaller because of its long oval shape. The Cro Magnon female pelvis is not only proportionally wider for a given frame size, but it literally cracks apart during birthing. Given how much more robust the HNS skeleton was, that seems to have been a problem. I have surfed for info on this, but have yet to find any opinions posted by a midwife.

I only found out about this by listening to an Ozark midwife. But like a welder or a barkeep, academics are not habituated to listening to what these people have to say. She went on to tell me that during birthing, there is a shape in the pelvis which causes the neonate to rotate before crowning, which she thot was not present in the HNS female pelvis.

The upshot is that while an HNS female rarely survived birthing a hybrid Cro Magon, which had a rounder skull with a larger cross section, the Cro Magnon female would have far less trouble with an HNS hybrid that had a smaller, but longer skull than her pelvis expected. Thus, out of all the thousands of HNS female lines, only one mtDNA line, from 50,000 BP stayed in the European Gene pool, and only 6 Cro Magnon lines made it.

This had a powerful effect on the psychology of the males with so few females who were fecund, which we see in the numerous goddess images from the Paleolithic. Nobody else on the planet had the problem, so the warrior class dominated. But in Europe, even to this day, there are, and were, vast tracts of *empty* forest that a young women could run off into with her selected mate. And it then didnt matter how big and strong and aggressive the warriors were. They are out of the gene pool.

http://www.greenwych.ca/fl-compl.htm

An ancient bone flute segment, estimated at about 43,ooo up to 82,ooo years old, was found recently at a Neanderthal campsite by Dr. Ivan Turk, a paleontologist at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences in Ljubljana. It's the first flute ever to be associated with Neanderthals and its confirmed age makes it the oldest known musical instrument.
The find is also important for its implications regarding the evolution of musical scales. It's to this latter issue my analysis in this article is addressed.

Regarding the famed "Neanderthal Flute". I agree with the conclusions of this author.

Thanx Beagle. That's great. Gotta love it when someone posts some real data. since http://www.greenwych.ca/fl-compl.htm seems to be interested in all kinds of early music, I thot I'd ask them about the Goddess temple on Malta.

All around the periphery of the temple, set into the walls, are little resonant chambers, like shower stalls, that I believe are each set to a given pitch. I'd like to know what the 5000 year old scale is. Greenwych has an 'email' button on the page where people could ask questions like this, and they seem to have enuf sources that maybe they could get someone to go to the temple with the recording equipment to find out.

But the button dont work.I've been asking about this for a few years now, but I cant ever find anyone with email access to anyone who could actually do anything.