
Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean - okket
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/neandertals-stone-age-people-may-have-voyaged-mediterranean
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80386
I think there's a trend in archaeology of us realizing we've been
underestimating the past.

The Polynesians were capable of voyaging across the Pacific to South America,
and another Austronesian group made it all the way to Madagascar. This was
pretty controversial until Kon-Tiki; even now, Polynesian-South American
contact isn't fully accepted.

(IIRC, we weren't sure how the Polynesians even found so many islands, until
an archaeologist asked a few of them and discovered that there's a simple
algorithm for it: follow the birds.)

Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once,
possibly intentionally.

Stone tools can be pretty good, especially obsidian. There are surgeons today
who use obsidian knives.

Roger Blench has a paper on Greco-Roman lamps turning up as far afield as
Palau, which implies more complex trade networks at an earlier stage than most
people would think:
[http://www.academia.edu/9237516/The_Romans_in_Palau_how_did_...](http://www.academia.edu/9237516/The_Romans_in_Palau_how_did_early_Mediterranean_ceramics_reach_Micronesia)

And now, Neanderthals with boats. This isn't really new -- Homo floresiensis
(the ebu gogo, maybe) had to have gotten there somehow. But it's part of an
important trend.

~~~
gerbilly
Kontiki didn't prove much about the Polynesian navigation or the types of
crafts they used.

Linguistic and other evidence strongly suggests that the Polynesian islands
were settled from west to east (probably originating from Taiwan) and Kontiki
drifted with the currents from east to west.

What's interesting is that the Polynesians settled the outlying islands by
sailing _into_ the prevailing winds (making it easier to return home if the
failed to find land).

They used efficient outrigger canoes which could be tacked or, sometimes even
better, shunted, into the wind.

They also did a lot more than follow birds, they relied on keen observation of
the ocean (interference patterns in the swells caused by an unseen island),
the colour of the clouds (clouds are darker underneath when there is land
beneath them) and relied on a sophisticated 'star compass' for latitude
navigation.

If their home island was at latitude -18deg for example, they knew which
zenith stars passed above their island, and which stars set at what point on
the horizon at that latitude.

So after an eastward exploration run, when they wanted to find their way home,
they just kept their islands's zenith star at the zenith and sailed west with
the wind till they made landfall.

Polynesian non-instrument navigation is undergoing a revival. See:

[http://www.hokulea.com/](http://www.hokulea.com/)

[http://archive.hokulea.com/holokai/1976/ben_finney.html](http://archive.hokulea.com/holokai/1976/ben_finney.html)

~~~
vram22
>They also did a lot more than follow birds, they relied on keen observation
of the ocean (interference patterns in the swells caused by an unseen island),
the colour of the clouds (clouds are darker underneath when there is land
beneath them) and relied on a sophisticated 'star compass' for latitude
navigation.

Yes, the National Geographic article / series I mentioned nearby in this
thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16922701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16922701)

says those sorts of things. So does the Morris West book, IIRC (some of them).
In fact, some of the photos in the NG article show a device that may be the
same as the "star compass" you mention.

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andyjohnson0
I wonder what it was like for them to live in a world that was so big and
unpopulated and _unknown_. Someone must have been the first to cross the
Bering land bridge into North America, or walk the Nile delta out of Africa
into the Levant. Pre-history is deep and wide.

~~~
saalweachter
One question I suspect the archaeological evidence is insufficient to answer
is how far from the last village/roving band of hunter-gatherers the next band
into the wilderness would settle. When you broke off would you stay within a
day of your old village or would you walk hundreds, thousands of miles before
stopping, completely alone?

As far as the _mindset_ goes, I’d say keep in mind that when Europeans landed
in the Americas and Australia, they considered those continents to be “empty”,
free for the taking. Their world may not have been so different from the first
human to walk out of Africa.

~~~
InitialLastName
1491 by Charles Mann goes into this a bit. Some estimates put the die-off of
aboriginal North Americans at 90% from the arrival of Europeans (in ~1500) and
the early permanent settlements (Jamestown was in 1607).

The first descriptions of what's now the US east coast from explorers describe
coastlines lined with fires as far as the eye could see, and suggested a
fairly densely populated continent.

The descriptions from the early settlers (as you've noted) describe a loosely
populated land of "savages".

I've always considered the 16th century a time of essentially apocalypse for
North America. Imagine what would happen to our society if we had a 90% die-
off over 100 years; even in the modern era we would probably find ourselves
regressing to "savagery".

~~~
saalweachter
Oh, I'm not talking about the "loosely populated" part. I'm referring to the
way that they by and large didn't really consider the inhabitants to be
"people". Into the 20th century they were largely denied agency by the
colonists, and in the 21st century we still displace Native Americans with
roughly the same sort of discussion we have about disturbing turtle
populations.

I don't think 16th century Europeans considered the Americas any more
inhabited than the Moon. Native populations were just another natural resource
the New World was teeming with, not "people".

~~~
InitialLastName
If you look at it, that kind of humanism (where the distinction between
"humans" and "not humans" is more important than the distinction between, say,
"Christians" and "not Christians" wasn't in vogue in the 16th century. 16th
century Europeans sent enormous numbers of missionaries to the Americas with
the aim of converting the natives; they wouldn't have done that if orangutans
were the prevailing primate on the continent.

------
mirimir
> But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a
> convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable
> possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern
> humans.

Weren't they more like parents than cousins? Except for Africans, modern
humans have apparently inherited genes from Neandertals and their non-European
contemporaries.

~~~
gadders
I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens
descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from
inter-breeding.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, inter-breeding.

But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them.

There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents,
grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include
Neanderthals. No?

~~~
itsameta4
No, both Neanderthals and humans are generally believed to have each evolved
from Homo habilis separately, and then later interbred to varying degrees in
various locales.

~~~
toasterlovin
Right, the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians include Neanderthals.

~~~
mirimir
Yes. And while "ancestors" is technically correct, I'm honoring my Neanderthal
ancestors by calling them great^N grandparents. In other places, they had
different names, but they were closely related.

~~~
toasterlovin
Exactly. Though it's more complicated because if you go back even more
generations, they're extremely distant cousins as well. The thing we're
discovering about human ancestry is that it's not really a tree. Instead, it's
more of a directed acyclic graph, where things branch off only to re-merge
downstream.

For instance, the Denisovans are another archaic human population who split
off from a common ancestor and then interbred with humans later on. And there
was a recent paper which detected archaic DNA from an unknown source in West
Africans. Given that species can typically interbreed for at least a million
years after splitting from a common ancestor, combined with the fact that
Africa had tons of hominids who coexisted with anatomically modern humans,
we're probably going to discover that the story of human ancestry is highly
convoluted.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_modern_humans)

~~~
mirimir
Yes, it was highly convoluted. I mean, in some unregulated bordellos, non-
human primates (and other species) are available. Some of which are also food
animals.

Off topic, I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar
Galactica. Yes?

~~~
toasterlovin
> I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar Galactica. Yes?

No, just kind of a silly joke between me and my wife. Sorry to disappoint!

~~~
mirimir
Oh. Did get me thinking about Six, though ;)

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singularity2001
>> The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off
accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says.

A two-off accidental stranding would be another explanation

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nukeop
Neanderthals had advanced jewelry drills, could make their own clay dishes,
could treat diseases with herbs and simple surgeries, and they even had some
knowledge of dentistry. They were able to construct furnaces, had advanced (at
the time) weapons, social structures, and created underground settlements and
tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers.

The popculture image of grunting, snorting primitive cavemen is more fitting
for Homo Sapiens than Homo Neanderthalensis.

~~~
amorphid
>> tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers

Do you mean tunnels that are hundreds of kilometers long? Sounds interesting.
Can you point us to some reading on that?

~~~
nukeop
Here's an article on one such underground site:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291)

The tunnels themselves were not that long or linked up, but apparently all
those that were found under Europe add up to hundreds of kilometers.

~~~
amvalo
What do you mean by the word "tunnel" here? They seem to be talking about an
arrangement of stones on a cave floor.

