Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ashtagon" data-source="post: 5989374" data-attributes="member: 72335">Well, it was shared among every branch of H. sapiens except for those in Australia and remote islands. That seems pretty shared to me.I suspect H. neanderthalensis never used bows (or spear-throwers), as they are a level more complex in operation than simple thrown rocks and spears (for one, they require an understanding of spring mechanisms).I don't recall ever saying early man hunted as individuals. The staked V-traps sound right though.That'd be a neat trick. The earliest estimate of humanity in the Americas is 50,000 years ago. The more conservative estimates say 15-20 thousand years ago.I'd say being able to produce more food to ensure you have a safety buffer, being able to produce food more reliably, being able to produce food more with less physical danger... these were all very real motivators for innovation that were continuously acting on early man. The written word helped people produce food more efficiently by enabling the passing on of knowledge.That's quite aside from the cultural benefits of writing.We know neanderthal man had language, used stone tools, built dwellings using stone and bone (probably also used wood and grass roofing). They had fire, and cooked (gathered, not farmed) vegetables. We also know they would nurse sick and injured members of their community. They buried their dead.Current theories suggest they had some kind of language. It is very improbable that they had a single unified language across the entire species; there isn't even a theoretical basis for this. They lived in communities of 5-10 individuals.And H. sapiens did all of the above too, except for living in bigger communities. And we have zero reliable evidence that H. sapiens is in any way psychic.Given that they could talk and had language, I'm not sure the above paragraph has any meaning.Neanderthals did have language and were able to speak. Their  language was probably a vast array of hyper-local dialects, mutually  intelligible across short distances, but unintelligible if you tried to  get two individuals from a few hundred miles apart to talk.We know that wild chimpanzees from opposite sides of Africa use gesture-based communication. We also know that different tribes of chimpanzees have different gesture "languages". Why should Neanderthals be unique in having a unified set of gestures across their entire species when every other species on the planet that has some kind of communication system has regional dialects?I'd be interested in a cite that conclusively showed that neanderthals did not also practice war, fratricide, and cannibalism. I've personally witnessed fratricide in apes in the wild in Africa, so it isn't unique to humanity. Yeah, apes are pretty inhumane <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" /></blockquote>

Verification