Archaeologica.org

Sorry folks,
A new billing might be in order.
Homo Neanderthalensis Sapiens
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... gsQ3oVKtnZ

"McPherron and Marie Soressi at Leiden University in the Netherlands, with colleagues, have just finished excavating two sites in south-west France that are 45,000 and 51,000 years old. As such, they slightly predate the accepted first appearance of our species in Europe. >At both sites, the team found specialised tools made of polished bone, similar to those still used in some cultures today to process animal hides and make leather. Unless humans arrived in Europe earlier than we thought, the sophisticated bone tools can only have been fashioned by Neanderthal hands, says McPherron. "We've added a whole new component to Neanderthal behaviour.""

I'm still uncomfortable with referring to HNS and HSS as different species. The distinction seems arbitrary at best and ludicrous at worst.

Here's their study...

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/ ... 0.full.pdf

Over the last decade new studies and finds have consistently demonstrated that Neandertals were more like us than most of us would care to admit. Different species? We could interbreed as evidenced by non-Africans' 1-4% Neandertal genetics residing in autosomal DNA.

Neandertals were cognitive and possessed complex skills. Their different brain casing and structure makes me wonder how different their thought processes were. Scientists usually focus on what Neandertals lacked, but I wonder what that large brain may have been processing that possibly we lack? Jean Auel thought it was "genetically stored memories", an interesting concept.

thanks a lot, shawomet!
H. sapiens means viable nookie, aka viable offspring. no room for fuzzy gray. i was thinking since neanderthal had temporal primacy, then it deserves the species name, and sapiens is a subspecies. then again, maybe it's h. heidelbergensis sapiens, or maybe even h. erectus sapiens?

great paper in case anyone missed it.
doubting dmanisi, pat shipman
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues ... ng-dmanisi