Fishing Expedition

If I’ve been quite, it’s for lack of desire to keep beating around the bush, but the coincidence of these two articles from Discovery.com were too good to pass up for a littoralist such as myself. Bolstering the argument that humans evolved on the shoreline, this from “Neanderthal Greek Paradise Found” (May 22, 2013) by Jennifer Viegas:

“The Neanderthals seemed to have a particular fondness for tortoise meat. The shells -- from shellfish too -- mostly were all recycled into tools, such as implements for scraping.…

“Dental wear suggests that the Neanderthals enjoyed a varied diet consisting of seafood, meat, and plants.”

and this from "Prehistoric Dog Lovers Liked Seafood, Jewelry, Spirituality" by the same author (May 22, 2013):"

“‘Dog burials appear to be more common in areas where diets were rich in aquatic foods because these same areas also appear to have had the densest human populations and the most cemeteries,’ lead author Robert Losey, a University of Alberta anthropologist, told Discovery News.

“‘If the practice of burying dogs was solely related to their importance in procuring terrestrial game, we would expect to see them in the Early Holocene (around 9,000 years ago), when human subsistence practices were focused on these animals,’ Losey continued. ‘Further, we would expect to see them in later periods in areas where fish were never really major components of the diet and deer were the primary focus, but they are rare or absent in these regions.’”

Dead Neanderthals

The demise of the Neanderthals makes for very constant speculation. Two recent theories suggest: 

1) Their eye sockets were too big.

2) They didn't eat rabbits.

Another recent finding also suggests they liked to walk long distances. Possibly to avoid eating rabbits.

Sail on

"Ancient Mariners: Did Neanderthals Sail to Mediterranean?"
Yahoo News 11/17/12

“For instance, stone artifacts on the southern Ionian Islands hint at human sites there as early as 110,000 years ago. Investigators have also recovered quartz hand-axs, three-sided picks and stone cleavers from Crete that may date back about 170,000 years ago. The distance of Crete about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the mainland would have made such a sea voyage no small feat.

“The exceedingly old age of these artifacts suggests the seafarers who made them might not even been modern humans, who originated between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Instead, they might have been Neanderthals or perhaps even Homo erectus.”

I’m throwing this in as a reminder of my hypothesis—of which you need no reminder—that we descended from the trees to the water’s edge some millions of years ago, where we still live. I regularly toss in the most recent archeological finds, which—surprise, surprise—never contradict that theory; au contraire, they always line up in support. As if they had a choice.

Needless-to-say, living by the water doesn’t mean making boats, but it sure makes making them easier. I would imagine that rafts came shortly after the knot. I would suspect that they came into being long before modern humans. Evidence from Flores and Australia support the findings from Crete, that people were mariners prior to modern humans.

I’m just saying…

Red Deer Cave People

Photo: BBC, Darth Vader Revealed

From The BBC reporting on a release from PLoS One journal:

“The remains of what may be a previously unknown human species have been identified in southern China.

“The bones, which represent at least five individuals, have been dated to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago.

“But scientists are calling them simply the Red Deer Cave people, after one of the sites where they were unearthed.”

Take note of those dates. That’s just prior to the beginning of farming, and there’s nothing saying where in the lifespan of this species these remains are from. It could have survived for thousands of years after these individuals and have been around for tens or hundreds of thousands years prior.

A quick count gives us: us, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the Hobbits, and now the Red Deer folk roaming around together. My original prediction was for between sixteen and twenty humanoids walking around at the same time. We’ll probably never find them all, but we’re a quarter of the way to twenty with no reason to suspect we’re at the end of the trail yet.

It’s time to revisit cultural memory. Not the conscious cultural memory of history books and monuments and museums but the hidden memory of culture shared through vehicles such as language, folk traditions, myths, and religion; especially the tales of other peoples in the woods, other creatures like, but not like, us. To be sure, we’ve always had tales of bad or dangerous or merely different people, as well, but stories about others not quite human have persisted worldwide since forever. How big were those Hobbits? How tough were those Neanderthals? Think any of them could have lived under the bridge and eaten Billy Goat Gruff?