PREHISTORIC LOVE

Love is blind.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Two old sayings, and very true, and probably as old as humanity. What would our ancestors have said when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnans crossed paths. "Owowoh Baby, I love your protruding brow ridges." "Wooo fella, your flat face just makes me want to jump up and down!" Evidently some couple got the hots for each other around 30,000 years ago. Food for thought. Enjoy the read.

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Chance and isolation gave humans elegant skulls

• 24 July 2007
• NewScientist.com news service

Only chance kept us from looking like our crag-browed Neanderthal cousins. A statistical analysis suggests that the skull differences between the two species stems not from positive natural selection but from genetic drift, in which physical features change randomly, without an environmental driving force.

Some anthropologists had put the cranial differences down to natural selection arising from Neanderthals' use of their teeth as tools, for instance, or from modern humans' speech. To test if genetic drift could have been responsible instead, Timothy Weaver of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues compared 37 measurements of the skulls of various modern human populations with those of Neanderthals. After a comparison of the mean divergence between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and the mean divergence among groups of modern humans, they conclude that genetic drift is responsible (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.03.001).

The development of culture weakened the influence of the environment upon both Neanderthals and modern humans, says Weaver. But ultimately the two species drifted apart genetically when they became isolated from each other.

From issue 2613 of New Scientist magazine, 24 July 2007, page 19

Neanderthal Reconstruction

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Cro-Magnon Man Reconstruction

Neandertal-Cro-Magnon Hybrid?	April 29, 1999
by Spencer P.M. Harrington

Analysis of the skeletal remains of this four-year-old boy has revealed that he may be a Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrid. (Courtesy João Zilhão) [LARGER IMAGE]

Analysis of the skeletal remains of a four-year-old child buried in a Portuguese rock-shelter 25,000 to 24,500 years ago has yielded startling evidence that early modern humans and Neandertals may have interbred. While the boy's prominent chin, tooth size, and pelvic measurements marked him as a Cro-Magnon, or fully modern human, his stocky body and short legs indicate Neandertal heritage, says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Interbreeding could answer the vexed question of the fate of the Neandertals, the last of whom disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula 28,000 years ago.

NeanderthalCro-Magnon

Trinkaus was summoned to Portugal after archaeologists searching for rock art in the Lapedo Valley, 85 miles north of Lisbon, found the burial this past December. João Zilhão of the University of Lisbon, the excavation's director, described the skeleton's preservation as "miraculous"--only the skull and right arm were badly broken. The boy is the first Palaeolithic burial ever excavated on the Iberian Peninsula, and among the oldest modern humans ever scientifically excavated.

Trinkaus, who compared the boy's limb proportions with those of Neandertal skeletons, including some children, says that the body is the first definite evidence of a mixture between Neandertal and early humans. While full Neandertals are thought to have been extinct for 4,000 years before the boy was born, he appears to be a descendant of generations of Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrids. Neandertals belong to our species and contributed their genes to European ancestry, he says.

© 1999 by the Archaeological Institute of America www.archaeology.org/online/news/neanderkid.html

CAVES FOR RENT OR LEASE

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities. Eric Hoffer

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Somethings never change, we still look for roomy abodes, running water, views, morning sun, patios, hmmmmm wonder how much input the Cavewoman was given? Most realtors I know says it is the woman who really makes the decision even if she LETS the husband think it was his!

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Cavemen Chose Caves on Five Criteria

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

April 9, 2007 — House buyers today usually peruse properties with a checklist of desired features in mind. This aspect of human behavior has apparently not changed much over the millennia, according to a new study that found prehistoric cave dwellers in Britain did exactly the same thing when choosing their homes.

The recently released three-year-long survey of approximately 230 caves in the Yorkshire Dales and 190 caves in the northern England Peak District determined that people there from 4,000 to 2,000 B.C. selected caves based on at least five criteria.

Andrew Chamberlain

Location, Location, Location
The Sevenways Cave is shown, located in the Peak District National Park. A new survey of British caves concluded that prehistoric dwellers preferred caves with larger entrances, deep passages, ones perched higher up, facing east or west and with flat areas out front.

There was a higher frequency of prehistoric usage of those caves with larger entrances and deeper passages, also of caves that were higher in altitude and caves with entrances that faced towards the east or to the west," co-author Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology told Discovery News.

He added that most of the caves linked to human activities tended to have level areas outside of the entrances.

Funded by the English Heritage’s Historic Environment Enabling Program, Chamberlain and his colleagues focused on caves in the two chosen English districts because recreational spelunkers often visit these areas and concern about cave conservation there is high. They excluded artificial caves, mines, tunnels, grottoes and passages revealed by mining, quarrying or hydrologically, as for sink holes.

The archaeologists discovered that the Peak District attracted more prehistoric cave users than the Yorkshire Dales, suggesting that today’s "location, location, location" real estate mantra might have also been true 6,000 years ago.

"The (Peak District) region is a more productive area for agriculture today," said Chamberlain, "and the same may have been true in prehistoric times and thus there may have been more people in the Peak District."

He said it is also a possibility people there simply utilized caves more. Chamberlain explained that caves served a multitude of purposes aside from housing the ancients. Early people also conducted ritual activities and performed burials in them.

Andrew Chamberlain

Cave With a View
Thor's Cave is shown, located in the Peak District National Park. The cave was one among approximately 230 caves in the Yorkshire Dales and 190 caves in the northern England Peak District surveyed for a new study that analyzed what kinds of caves drew the most prehistoric traffic.

Sometimes caves were even like roadside motels, where both human and animal travelers would stop in for a night or two of rest before hitting the road again.

The team believes their compiled data can help other researchers in the future to predict what sorts of caves might contain archaelogical artifacts.

Carol Ramsey is a noted anthropologist and cave scientist based in British Columbia, Canada. She described the new cave survey as "an absolutely wonderful project — a great multi-faceted approach and a very useful exercise in terms of managing and conserving an important finite resource."

To Ramsey's knowledge, no comparable survey of caves, especially one directed towards caves with archaeological potential, has ever taken place in British Columbia.

"I’d dearly love to see aspects of it adapted for use in B.C. — especially the landscape archaeology/predictive modeling," she said.

As for Chamberlain and his team, they identified many unexplored caves throughout Britain, particularly in the Yorkshire Dales, during their research. They hope to investigate these caves soon.