FwThe Guardian view on Neanderthals: we were not alone

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 5:10 PM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Guardian view on Neanderthals: we were not alone
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


The Guardian view on Neanderthals: we were not alone
By Editorial
Feb 25 2018
<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/25/the-guardian-view-on-neanderthals-we-were-not-alone
>

The three human subspecies known to have hybridised to produce the present
human population of the planet, Neanderthals, Homo sapiens and Denisovans,
last had a common ancestor more than half a million years ago. Until now it
has been assumed that the only branch of her descendants to think
symbolically was us, Homo sapiens. In fact, until the development of
sequencing techniques sensitive enough to work on ancient DNA, it was
thought that the other two species had died out entirely, rather than
leaving portions of their genome in European and Melanesian populations
respectively. But the discovery, reported last week, of palaeolithic art at
four sites in Spain that dates from the time when the peninsula was
occupied only by Neanderthals, shows that they worked with symbols of stone
and paint.

We have no idea what these markings mean. That is in the nature of
symbolism, and indeed of language: the meaning of a sound, or a marking on
the wall, is given by the community that uses it; it can’t be read by
outsiders. We already know that Neanderthals were anatomically equipped for
speech; their use of painted symbols suggests that they could make audible
symbols and not just visible ones.

One of the effects of the discovery reported last week has been to push one
of the standard tropes of science fiction 40,000 years into our past. That
was when Homo sapiens met Homo neanderthalensis, another symbolically
intelligent species, and our ancestors realised that they were not alone in
the universe. We can deduce that these encounters must have been reasonably
peaceable, because Europeans and all other populations outside Africa carry
some Neanderthal DNA.

Pushing the emergence of language so far back is exciting enough. But the
implications are dizzying. If Neanderthals and Homo sapiens developed the
capacity for symbolic thought and language independently, the ground for it
must have been very well prepared more than half a million years ago, when
the ancestors of the Neanderthals first left Africa. If they did not
develop it independently, then those ancestors, Homo erectus, must have had
a capacity for symbolic thought far earlier than most scientists would
think likely.

[snip]

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