NEWS CATEGORIES:

NEWS ARCHIVE >>
SOFTPEDIA REVIEWS >>

Home / News / Science / History

History

How Modern Were European Neanderthals? Human cognition and symbolic thinking may have appeared much earlier	By Sci/Tech News Staff, - 25th of August 2006, 12:31 GMT Adjust text size:


Neanderthals were much more like modern humans than had been previously thought, according to a re-examination of finds from one of the most famous Paleolithic sites in Europe by Bristol University archaeologist, Professor Joao Zilhao, and his French colleagues. Professor Zilhao has been able to show that sophisticated artifacts such as decorated bone points and personal ornaments found in the Ch�telperronian culture of France and Spain were genuinely associated with Neandertals around 44,000 years ago, rather than acquired from modern humans who might have been living nearby. His findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) USA. The site from which this Neanderthal culture derives its name is the Grotte de F�es at Ch�telperron in Central France, first excavated in the 1840s. It has been one of the most important and controversial places to understand how modern humans that had previously moved out of Africa replaced the Neanderthals, often portrayed as more 'primitive'. In the conventional interpretation of the rock strata of the site, the cave was thought to have evidence of both modern human and Neanderthal occupation in interleaved layers. The fact that Neanderthals came back to the site after modern humans had lived in it for quite some time would prove the long-term contemporaneity of the two groups, and validate the notion that the cultural novelties seen among the latest Neanderthals represented imitation or borrowing, not innovation. Now archaeologists can show that the Grotte des F�es stratigraphic pattern is illusory because the supposedly Neanderthal levels overlying those belonging to the modern human Aurignacian culture are in fact backdirt from nineteenth-century fossil hunting. According to Professor Zilhao and his team, this adds to the evidence from other sites in the region that the Neandertals already had the capacity for symbolic thinking before the arrival of the modern humans into Western Europe, which has been radiocarbon dated to around 40,000 years ago. Professor Zilhao said: "This discovery, along with research on the rock strata at other cave sites, has huge implications for how we view the European Neandertals and, more widely, human evolution. The differences between Neandertals and modern humans may be much less than had been previously thought, suggesting that human cognition and symbolic thinking may date back to before the two sub-species split around 400,000 years ago."

Rating:

Good (3.2/5)

4 vote(s) so far

Read by 1,094 user(s) | Add comment | Link to this article

Subscribe to news |

Print article |

Send to friend

© Copyright 2001-2008 Softpedia
Contact:

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

MORE RELATED ARTICLES:

Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals Co-existed For 1000 Years

Neanderthals Were Too Smart to Survive

The Latest Neanderthals in Europe

How to Hunt A Neanderthal

Early Human Was Prey Rather than Hunter

The Neanderthals Were Not All Alike

Human Culture Is Much Older than Previously Thought

Neanderthal Genome To Be Deciphered

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive