Stephen wrote:
>>>Glenn writes:
GM>If the Neanderthal burials do not mean that they are fully human,
>then what does this say about the Eskimos who appear to have the same
>practice as a caribou? Surely the Neanderthal burials were more
>significant than what the Eskimos did!>>
JB>This can be cleared up by simple logic. Under this reasoning,
>Neanderthals are more human than Eskimos. I don't think so. It may
>just be that "evidence" of burials is not the indicator we would like
>it to be.
Agreed. I think that the best indicator is language:<<
As I have mentioned before, the earliest evidence of a being with the brain
mechanism for language was Homo habilis who lived between 2.4 and 1.8 million
years ago. I agree with you that language is the best indicator of humanity.
They apparently had it.
Stephen quotes Gould,
>> By evidence now
available, Neanderthal knew nothing of representational art." (Gould
S.J., "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History",
Penguin: London, 1991, p320)<<
This is no longer true Stephen. By evidence now available, Neanderthal or an
even earlier being, archaic homo sapiens knew about and produced
representational art. Stephen, I have mentioned this before but you keep
ignoring it. (I think you ignore it because it doesn't fit your view). And
if you are going to quote people intellectual integrity should require that
you quote the latest data available(notice the dates of my quotes vs. yours).
Desmond Morris wrote:
"The newly found sculptural object - the most ancient man-made image in
the world - is a small stone figurine of a woman, unearthed at an
archaeological site on the Golan Heights. It is extremely crude, but the
head is clearrly separated from the body by an incised neck, and the arms are
indicated by two vertical grooves, apparently cut by a sharp flint tool. It
is a find that establishes the even greater antiquity of the human
fascination with symbolic images."~Desmond Morris, The Human Animal, (New
York: Crown Publishing, 1994), p. 186-188.
Marshack, the world's leading authority on Paleolithic art and symboling,
wrote:
"Peltz reported that it was clear that 'human hands had worked a
fragment of pyroclastic rock, namely an indurated tuff.' The illustrations
and arguments presented by Pelcin therefore do not apply. To complement my
microscopic analysis, Peltz and N. Goren-Inbar are preparing an analytical
paper on the geology of the site and the pyroclastic nature of the figurine.
Until publication of these analyses, the debate on possible pre-Upper
Paleolithic symboling may perhaps best be addressed not by suppositions at a
distance but through the microscopic analysis of a late Middle Paleolithic
incised composition from the site of Quneitra, Israel. I pointed to the
Quneitra analysis in my recent criticism of the Eurocentric presumption that
there was a punctuated, apparently genetic 'species' shift in symboling
capacity at the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition."~Alexander Marshack, "On
the "Geological' Explanation of the Berekhat Ram Figurine," Current
Anthropology, 36:3, June, 1995, p. 495.
Stephen wrote:
>>Yes. Glenn seems out of step even with modern evolutionary thinking:<<
That should make ICR like me a lot. Thanks for the recommendation. :-)
glenn