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Bill Offline OP
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Phys.Org has an article about a report on the extinctions of the Neanderthals. Neanderthals' failure to make parkas may have sealed their demise

The study suggests that the Neanderthals died out because they couldn't protect themselves from the cold weather of the ice age. Modern humans however could make cold weather clothing from animal skins.

The first problem I have with that is that they lived through the much worse ice age at about 100,000 years ago. This was long before they became extinct.

Bill Gill


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that is strange because they used animal skins to cover their
bone frame mobile homes
http://www.ancientcraft.co.uk/Archaeology/stone-age/mammoth-hut.png



im not saying that being able to make a parka would protect
them from an ice age however but to say that they died off
for that reason is more in line with modern science and its
logic than logic.

you know the above picture logically fits inside the rings
in the cave...

















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Are you sure that is a Neanderthal hut? The link doesn't include any of the text about it. It looks more like something I would picture for a Cro Magnon (modern human) hut, just from what I have read. It is known that modern humans in Siberia built shelters incorporating mammoth bones and tusks.

I don't say that Neanderthals couldn't make huts. They probably could. There is strong evidence of huts being built on Mediterranean beaches around (if I recall correctly) 300,000 years ago. That of course is before the age of the Neanderthals. So I don't think that there is much doubt that Neanderthals could build shelters. Finding evidence that they did is tricky. Most of our Neanderthal finds are from rock shelters just because they are protected from the weather that tends to destroy the evidence in open areas.

Bill Gill


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I cant say that Im sure , but here are are a few articles
that are on the internet that seem to say that neanderthals did
construct homes from bones.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=neanderthal+house+mammoth+bones&t=hf&ia=web


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Well, they say that it was neanderthals, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt. The main problem I have with the fact that they were attributed to Neanderthals is that "some of the bones used to build the house had decorative carvings and added pigments". Decorative carvings and pigments are very rare in Neanderthal contexts. So there may be some who question the claim. At 44,000 years ago this would be in the early days of modern human movement into Europe.

As I said, I have no doubt that Neanderthals did build structures for protection when they didn't have a convenient cave.

And thanks for the links.

Bill Gill


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there are still a few peoples in and around the ammazon
that dont normally use laptops and they are modern humans.

so given that there really is no technology that could be
found in the strata where they live wouldnt the pig headed
archeologist in the future allow people to know from birth that
these people must have been really stupid...





whenever I read where an archeologist tries to prop up the
widely taught conjecture that neanderthals were not as smart
as so called modern humans because they couldnt find anything
it really pisses me off.

I dont see any modern art or oil paintings or statues in the
houses or on the property where these peoples live so does
that mean that

all modern humans are really stupid?



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Just how smart the Neanderthals were is a big question in anthropology. They were smart enough to be around for around 200,000 to 250,000 years. During that time their culture changed very slowly, as far as can be seen from a study of the detritus around their campsites. That is both from cave sites and from a few open air sites. Archaeologists have found some indications of the use of pigments and possibly decorative cut marks on items in Neanderthal sites but they are not nearly as prevalent as in modern human sites.

Taking a different line I think I mentioned recently that the estimated peak population of Neanderthals was estimated to be around 70,000 individuals in all of Europe. I have not been able to find any estimates of modern human populations in Europe at around 30,000 years ago but my impression is that it was probably much higher than that of the Neanderthals at their peak.

All this seems to indicate that there is probably some difference in the way that Neanderthals and modern humans thought. What that difference is is difficult to figure out. Some have suggested that modern language capabilities could account for the difference.

The Neanderthals undoubtedly had some kind of language. They did cooperative hunting which requires a fairly high level of communication skills. Modern humans may have taken language to a higher level. This could have made a difference. However, this is of course purely hypothetical, there is no evidence one way or the other.

There are people who love the Neanderthals, and who are looking for evidence that they were 'just like us'. The problem being that we don't really have any strong evidence that they were. Most evidence seems to indicate that they were something like us, but also different.

And as far as people living primitive lives in remote locations, they might not leave a lot of evidence of what their life was like, but their skeletons would match the skeletons from people in developed areas where there will be lots of evidence.

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I cant see a real difference in the skeletal makeup
between a so called modern human and a so called neanderthal
skeleton.

the neanderthal skeleton does look stronger than the modern
human skeleton but that occurs today.

the skulls are different in brain cavity size which is due
to environment modern humans have much smaller brains than
neanderthals.

and science seems to claim that brain size determines how
smart an animal is.

which makes sense because it would take really smart people
to survive through the ice ages.

something that modern humans most likely will not be capable
of due to their shere stupidity.



think about it ...

what do you need to survive an ice age?

can you think of anything that you currently have and
use today that will be available in an ice age?

concrete is only good for apx 200 years.

most metals will not last through an ice age.

stone will...

its hard to find any product that will last 2 years
so it will be dust after the first few hundred years of
the 90 thousand years of the next ice age.

seriously can you think of way that your family could
survive the 90 thousand years and these guys survived several
hundred thousand years.

thats probably why they used the longer lasting bones
to build with , they most likely knew that nothing that
they built would survive longer than a few decades so why bother
because these guys had to focus on long term survival.

we may have killed off the only humans that could
survive the next ice age.

now thats extremely smart of us ... isnt it?

you can pretty much forget about any product that uses
electricity because in order to use electricity you would
need generators that would last the 90 thousand years or
the replacement parts to repair them with.

you would probably need to repair the generator every 2 - 3 years
or less so your family would need to start off with at least 30,000 spare parts for the generator alone.

think about it.

every product that you would need to survive would be the same
you would either need replacement products or replacement parts for every single product that you need.

all the books and computers and acquired knowlege would be
gone after the first few years and from that point forward
all knowlege would need to be passed down orally or written
in stone.











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First things. Look at those 2 skeletons again. Notice the funnel shaped chest cavity on the Neanderthal compared to the barrel shaped chest cavity on the modern human. On the Neanderthal the hips are wider, to match the bottom of the chest cavity. Look at the thighs. The Neanderthal thighs slope inward to the knee at a much sharper angle than the modern humans. This is required by the broad hips to keep the feet under the center of the body. Look at the forehead. The Neanderthal forehead slopes back sharply from the brow ridge while the modern human forehead is almost vertical. The Neanderthal features are far outside the normal range of modern humans.

The Neanderthals do appear to have been much stronger than the average modern human. This appears (according to people who have studied skeletal development) to be partly the result of the fact that Neanderthals, on average, worked much harder than modern humans. Hard work develops very strong bones. This is probably a cultural trait. The Neanderthals apparently did not develop cultural responses to the environment that enabled the modern humans to live without working as hard.

The Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans. Unfortunately the relation between brain size and intelligence is still not clear. Intelligence does seem to increase when the brain/body ratio increases. I don't have any good numbers right at hand, but let's just say that we have 2 animals that are the same size. One of them has a brain that is 5% of the body size. The other has a brain that is 2 1/2% of the body size. That's just picking some numbers out of the air. In any case we could expect the 5% animal to be smarter than the 2 1/2% animal. However, this is an average thing. Within our own species some people who are definitely highly intelligent have smaller brains than some people who are definitely not very intelligent. So we can't really say how intelligent the Neanderthals were based on brain size. We can say that they probably weren't particularly dumb. It may just be that their talents went in a different direction.

What does it take to survive an ice age? Well, for one thing it takes enough smarts to come in out of the cold. In order for the Neanderthals to have survived the ice ages they must have had shelter, fire and clothing. Then they needed a way to get food. Those are probably the main things they needed. And of course there is the possibility of going to Florida for the winter. The Neanderthals did apparently move at least to Southern Europe. They didn't actually live with the glaciers. But it did get cold. At the same time this meant that there were large mammals in the colder areas where they lived. So there was plenty of meat to be had, by hunting and scavenging. In a very cold climate scavenging of animals that died a natural death could work quite well, because the cold would preserve the meat for some time. The jury is still out on how much they hunted and how much they scavenged. They probably did both.

As far as building long term shelters, they probably didn't bother. They were hunter/gatherers, they didn't stay in one place very long. You only need long term shelters if you are going to be in one place for a long time. That can only happen if you have a convenient long term food source. If you are living on nomadic animals your food source is going to be coming and going and you will have to follow them. You can use the same camp site every year, but that doesn't need to be permanent. It's easier to use portable structures, or replace them every time you come back to the camp site.

One question about how the Neanderthals lived is whether they did any long term planning. There are some people who think they did a lot of rather aimless wandering looking for needed supplies as they went, without any particular plan. What I am trying to say is that they didn't plan ahead to the extent that they would realize that every year their prey animals would be in location A at time T, so that they could plan to be back at location A when the prey would be there. This is what modern human hunter/gatherers do, but it is still a question as to whether the Neanderthals would do it. Some people say they didn't.

Bill Gill


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well , I cant quote you anymore theres no text selection so I will
just reply to your first paragraph in the below.

1) I suppose the funnel shaped chest cavity is due to the
lower oxygen levels during the ice ages that they lived through.
they would have developed larger lungs.

2) this image is missleading when it depicts the thigh bones
sloping inwards , the neanderthal thighs would be really
large and this is a clear sign of desired effect for a purpose
other than true science.
notice the straight line that can be drawn from the ankle
to the knee to the hip and then to the rib cage of the so called
modern human.

this is the stance that they would have most likely
assumed while standing.



strong and proud.

not with their thigh muscles rubing against each other.


they had to walk for long distances and if their legs were
as crooked as is sugested in the image the crook in the legs
would have become larger and larger... I highly doubt that
this person had crooked legs.


3) the neanderthal had a much larger brain cavity and a much
larger brain that fit inside the brain cavity , the modern
human didnt so its skull had to grow larger in order for its
brain to have a place to grow into.

also the neanderthal skull is tilted backwards in the photo
in order to show a larger slope for false science purposes.

lets look to see if modern humans have the same type of
sloped forehead.










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Originally Posted By: paul


1) I suppose the funnel shaped chest cavity is due to the
lower oxygen levels during the ice ages that they lived through.
they would have developed larger lungs.

Actually the funnel shaped chest cavity was the common configuration for all hominids prior to modern humans. And modern humans lived through the past 100,000 years at the same times as the Neanderthals, so if the Neanderthals had developed larger lungs due to "lower oxygen levels" then so would modern humans. In fact the oxygen levels weren't noticeably lower during the glaciations.

Originally Posted By: Paul
2) this image is missleading when it depicts the thigh bones
sloping inwards , the neanderthal thighs would be really
large and this is a clear sign of desired effect for a purpose
other than true science.
notice the straight line that can be drawn from the ankle
to the knee to the hip and then to the rib cage of the so called
modern human.


No the thighs had to be angled in because if they hadn't been then when walking the Neanderthals would have had to swing their body around the foot on the ground when walking, the way chimpanzees do. Modern human thighs also taper in to the knees, just not as much as the Neanderthals, because the hips are not as wide.

Originally Posted By: Paul
3) the neanderthal had a much larger brain cavity and a much
larger brain that fit inside the brain cavity , the modern
human didnt so its skull had to grow larger in order for its
brain to have a place to grow into.


Actually the Neanderthal brain wasn't "much" larger. There is a considerable overlap in the brain sizes, although on average the Neanderthal brain was larger. There is considerable discussion as to just what this means.

Here is a comparison of the skulls of the Neanderthal and modern humans. Note the significant difference between the shapes of the 2 skulls.

The pictures you included are at the far end of the normal development of human skulls. The second one is a picture of Andre the Giant, who was subject to unusual growth of his skeleton, so it is at the far edge of the normal distribution of skull shapes. I'm not sure about the other, but I suspect it is a similar situation. Notice that the 2 skulls shown in the pictures I have linked are typical of the 2 species, that is most individuals of either species would have skulls shaped much like those in the pictures.

Bill Gill
[/quote]


C is not the speed of light in a vacuum.
C is the universal speed limit.

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