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Evidence that the Neanderthals were the first seafarers?
- robertlagrant 3y agoIt's an interesting theory, but as often is the case, the title is far more definite than the content.
- rightbyte 3y agoYe no proofs at all. The feasibility depends a lot on what they mean with "sailing". I guess their use includes "rowing" and "drifting".
- fsckboy 3y agothey find human-made tools (which they can assign dates to) on islands distant from shore. Their only explanation that they are hypothesizing is that humans traveled there across water. Do you have a better idea? They're not saying they found boats, they're saying there is clear evidence of human travel. Focus on the evidence there is, not evidence you would like to see. What do you hypothesize that fits the evidence?
- rightbyte 3y ago> What do you hypothesize that fits the evidence? That the tools were moved to Crete way later than when they were made. Obviously, there are no proof of that either. I am not saying it is impossible Neaderthals got there by boat-ish means. But recycling seems like a possibility not moving back seatravel too far into the past.
- Finnucane 3y agoIt suggests some sort of navigable floaty thing. They saw an island offshore, thought, let's go there, and figured out a way to do it.
- shkkmo 3y ago"Sail" can mean any travel over water by ship. It's one of those weird words that can be really confusing even when used correctly but out of the context where that portion of its meaning is customarily used.
- rightbyte 3y agoAlso seems possible that the tools might have been moved, at a later date? I imagine a stone age person digging through some Neanderthal settlement remains, would loot any tools.
- eastof 3y agoExcept those "stone age" people came around 50,000 years later. Not only is it unlikely they would find any evidence of the Neanderthals, but they would already have more sophisticated tools by then, don't think those (even in their time) by then ancient tools would be worth looting.
- tomcam 3y agoMoorage fees back then? Practically nothing.
- jeron 3y agoAnd it was quite easy to get into the yacht club of Neanderthals
- greatpostman 3y agoThis idea that we were only sophisticated for the last few thousand years is laughable
- koheripbal 3y agoThe correctness of this comment wildly depends on the reader's interpretation of the word "sophisticated".
- mlhpdx 3y agoIt is laughable to think that the first supported travel over water was done in “boats“ or by “sailing“. Children instinctively climb onto floating objects. It seems very likely to be that some unwary homo-something crossed an unswimmable span of water quite by accident and survived. Perhaps some other individual observed their fate and followed, perhaps from the same species or perhaps not. Perhaps alone, or perhaps with others. The evidence is merely that there are early tools on islands.
- George83728 3y agoAbout 40 million years ago, some monkeys in Africa evidently floated a few thousand kilometers across the ocean to South America, probably on driftwood. Neanderthals were a lot bigger than those monkeys, but a similar scenario might have happened here.
- bigtones 3y agoThe referenced paper on this was published more than a decade ago (2012): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440312000441?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
- AlotOfReading 3y agoWhich is weird, because the same authors published a more notable paper on exactly this subject very recently in Quaternary [0]. I don't think the argument is unreasonable, but the author of this article is terribly misinformed about many things. For example, the cyclades would have been visible from the mainland, as they still are today! [1] is the view from the western mainland, [2] is the view from the eastern side, today the island of Ikaria. Notice that Crete is also visible from both the Cyclades and the mainland under ideal conditions. [0] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2022.09.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2022.09.001 [1] https://www.peakfinder.org/?lat=37.98035&lng=24.52317&ele=254&azi=102.79&alt=-8.03&fov=104.28&cfg=s&name=37.98035%C2%B0N%2C+24.52317%C2%B0E https://www.peakfinder.org/?lat=37.98035&lng=24.52317&ele=25... [2] https://www.peakfinder.org/?lat=37.53781&lng=26.01118&ele=879&azi=210.19&alt=0.16&fov=110&cfg=s&name= https://www.peakfinder.org/?lat=37.53781&lng=26.01118&ele=87...
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI think it’s important to note that this is just showing that Neanderthal were sailing long before modern human remains of sailing were dated to - lll Modern humans and Neanderthals (and Denisovians) coexist for about 100-150k years before modern humans basically killed them all after interbreeding.
- jjtheblunt 3y agokilled?
- btilly 3y agoInterspecies violence is one of a ton of proposed theories, and not a lot of evidence exists to suggest favoring one over the other. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction for some of the other theories.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI thought there was some decent evidence including butcher marks on bones and widespread genetic immunity to human specific prions
- btilly 3y agoThat's evidence that the Neanderthals engaged in cannibalism. That's not evidence that homo sapiens ate the Neanderthals as food.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI think the genetic evidence is adaptive mutations that are present in all humans
- btilly 3y agoOur species also engaged in cannibalism. That isn't evidence that we killed the Neanderthals for food. Rather than, say, having added some ecosystem stress through competition that left them less able to handle a major volcano 40,000 years ago.
- Maursault 3y ago> Long before modern humans existed, 100,000 years ago 100,000ya ago is not "long before modern humans existed." Modern humans are Homo sapiens, and the oldest known Homo sapiens remains (to date, that we know of) are dated to 300,000 years ago, which is now apparently 200,000 years before "long before" Homo sapiens existed. I guess the good news is we invent the time machine before too long.
- bee_rider 3y agoI remember when I was a kid, textbooks would draw a distinction between “homo sapiens” and “homo sapiens sapiens.” But it is odd, when I search “homo sapiens sapiens,” I only see links to like, homework helper/yahoo question sites referencing it. Wikipedia and the Smithsonian seem to have dropped the second sapiens. Is this an update to how this stuff is understood? I vaguely think the extra sapiens was added on to draw a distinction between “behaviorally modern” humans or something like that. But that always seemed more like a cultural thing anyway.
- tmtvl 3y agoThe "Human taxonomy" page on Wikipedia still adds the second sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy This may be because Homo sapiens sapiens is the Homo sapiens type species, but I'm not sure.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoThis was an artifact from a long-running debate about how we should organize the taxonomy of genus Homo. On one hand, people made good arguments that archaic hominins like Neanderthals were distinct enough to consider them separate species. On the other, there were reasonable arguments that they were closely related enough that archaic and modern hominins were a single species with a number of distinct subspecies. Modern humans would be called H. sapiens sapiens in the latter scheme. This debate was mostly ended in favor of the separate species perspective by the early 2000s, but not everyone was reconciled and archaeogenetics forced us to rewrite the human taxonomy anyway. People will understand what you mean if you continue using H. sapiens sapiens, it's when you use "H. sapiens" to include Neanderthals and Denisovans that people will be confused. Sometimes that terminology is also also used it to exclude transitional subspecies like idaltu, which I think is why wiki uses it.
- blastro 3y agoAnyone here ever read "Critical Path" by Buckminster Fuller? In it, BF winds a compelling narrative of the speculative pre-history of humanity, and touches on the early seafarers and how their tools and science have affected civilization from that point on.
- dbcooper 3y agoOkay, this really doesn't look like a sober scientific publication. Source: Another scam blog. LOL.
- karaterobot 3y ago> Unfortunately, archaeologists are unable to provide additional evidence because any boats used by Neanderthals would have been made of wood, which would have long since decomposed to nothing. Why make the leap to assume they invented sails, given the lack of physical evidence? I mean, it seems reasonable to think they could have rowed or even floated 40km long before they developed sails, and that they would develop those techniques on the way to doing that.
- shkkmo 3y agoYou and others seem to be hung up on the fact that the verb "sail" can mean any travel on water by ship, regardless of how that ship is propelled.
- karaterobot 3y agoYep, that's definitely the rub. And to be sure, you're right that that verb doesn't necessarily imply a sail is involved. However, in fairness, the original article talks about how neanderthals "went sailing", which isn't typically what people say when they go rafting or rowing. At any rate, it's a pretty ambiguous word to use when there are less suggestive ones out there!
- D13Fd 3y agoDid they take sea levels into account? It may not be realistically swimmable now, but it could have been at some point fairly recently when sea levels were lower.