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January 9, 2006
Neanderthals: Thoughtful, Well Trained and Perhaps Unable to Speak
The University of Leiden has an interesting post on interdisciplinary research being done at their university on Neanderthal communication and thought process. The research title is Thoughtful Hunters? The Archaeology of Neanderthal Communication and Cognition.
In the picture emerging from this research sophisticated knowledge of animal behaviours as a prerequisite for hunting success seems to loom large. According to Kaplan et al. 2000 (p.170-172), hunting “is the most learning-intensive foraging strategy practiced by humans (…). Unlike most animals, which either sit and wait to ambush prey or use stealth and pursuit techniques, human hunters use a wealth of information to make context-specific decisions, both during the search phase of hunting and after prey is encountered. Specifically, information on ecology, seasonality, current weather, expected animal behaviour and fresh animal signs are all integrated to form multivariate mental modules of encounter probabilities that guide the search and are continually updated as conditions change.This information is collected, memorized and processed over large spaces. The skill-intensive nature of human hunting and the long learning process involved are illustrated dramatically by recently reported data on hunting return rates by age. Hunting the variety of sometimes very dangerous species we now know to have been hunted by Neanderthals in Pleistocene Europe must have required considerable experience, quality education, and years of intensive practice. Hence there was a strong evolutionary stimulus on cooperation and sharing information between older and younger members of a group. But to what extent was language involved? Recent work on skills and their acquisition stresses creative mimetic/imitative routines and suggest the possibility of highly complex behaviours - such as seen in connection with megafauna hunting - without much need of linguistic representations.
The question the researchers hope to answer is,
. . . whether the 'quality education' needed to become an expert hunter was possible without the transcendence of the here and now and a release from proximity by symbolic and syntactical language?
The question is fascinating. I hope the answer is both clear and well documented but I'll bet that it will only be well documented.
Posted by Duane Smith at January 9, 2006 3:59 PM | Read more on Paleoanthropology |
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Comments
I'm skeptical that the neanderthals were not capable of language.
Posted by: afarensis at January 11, 2006 6:11 PM
And I am skeptical that they were able to speak. But perhaps there will someday there will be stronger evidence than there is now. In fact, I wonder if H. sapiens could speak before about 70K AP
Posted by: Duane at January 11, 2006 6:39 PM
On a note unrelated to Neanderthal vocal abilities...If ants can teach each other without words, to respond to the last quote, why couldn't hominins? Granted ants are different from Neanderthals, but I found the last two paragraphs of the article interesting.
Posted by: afarensis at January 12, 2006 3:44 PM
There is also a write up of the ant thing here
Posted by: afarensis at January 12, 2006 5:44 PM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
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