Re: Did the Neanderthals have nets?


"A." <atalanta.brilliante@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1164128235.409582.14000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Jois wrote:
"A." <atalanta.brilliante@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1164068150.097574.104170@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[snip]
Does anyone know whether hemp is truly domesticated or merely a
cultigen?
How many alleles, in other words, difference between the wild and
domesticated
strains? Any good new definitions of "domesticated" out there?

Check with goggle!

Well - I will, when I get to the point of researching your view that
wild vs. domestic hemp makes a difference - which would be when I have
a clear idea what plants were used in early string production, and some
sense of where you're getting your data that string appears as early as
100,000 or 60,000 - or earlier, if you're claiming A.H.S. brought it
out of Africa. If it was A.H.S. - then of course, you're arguing that
string was made before, say, 100,000 - right? What's the evidence on
that, I'm not challenging you personally - I'd just like to know. I'm
writing something that refers to the String Revolution and if there's
substantial disagreement over when it happened - I'd like to see what
the arguments are.

A.

Unfortunately it isn't easy to find "good" arguments about the subjects you
or I might find interesting.

Dr. C.L. Brace answered a question about reductions in robusticity occurred
in Africa (I think he ties reductions in robusticity with changes in our
tools and foods.)a few years ago in another (no defunct) group:

Brace: "We really have no evidence that this happened. Just last year I had
a
doctoral dissertation done for me which showed that skeletal robustness
was maintained in Africa for just as long as it was maintained anywhere
else. All those claims for the "modern" form of Qafza and Skhul and
their African counterparts just do not hold up to simple quantitative
analysis.

"It is true that the evidence for the first use of string technology goes
back to 50,000 years ago in Africa which is older than anywhere else in
the world and should be followed by the beginnings of gracilization,
but it appears outside of Africa by at least 40,000 years ago, and, in an
instance such as that, a 10,000 year difference in the beginning of
that presumption of selective force relaxation just is not enough time to
have produced any discernible results short of the analysis of a great deal
of evidence which we simply do not have. 10,000 years of pottery use has
resulted in a 10% reduction in tooth size, but that is the equivalent
of measurement error and is statistically significant only because of the
fact that the sign of the change is always in the same direction. And
we have teeth by the thousands in that time range. The handful of
skeletons we have between 50 and 40,000 years ago is way too small to say
anything about possible trends of change."

So Brace says string technology should be followed by the beginnings of
gracilization.

Ambrose goes by artifacts. (Science 20 November 1998: Vol. 282. no. 5393, p.
1451 DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5393.1451)


"And, gratifyingly for Klein, Africa is where some of the earliest
indisputable body ornaments are turning up. In last April's Journal of
Archaeological Science, Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), describes his excavations at a rock-shelter in the
Rift Valley of Kenya, at a site called Enkapune Ya Muto. There he found a
cache of beads made of ostrich eggshell, blanks, and shell fragments. Some
of the beads, says Ambrose, "are shiny, obviously worn, as if someone was
wearing them as part of some ornament." They must have served as symbolic
markings, he says, "expressing an awareness of the self and how to enhance
it."
It's the same phenomenon seen in Europe 38,000 years ago--but it may be
several thousand years earlier at Enkapune Ya Muto, says Ambrose, who has
carbon-dated the shells and come up with an age of at least 40,000 years.
"These early ostrich eggshell beads are perhaps the earliest indicator" of
symbolic behavior anywhere, says Klein. "And it's very important that they
first appeared in Africa," just as expected if the crucial biological
innovation had occurred there."

This article says: " . . . new Europeans decorated their bodies with beads
and pierced animal teeth . . ." beads and pierced animal teeth have to be
held together by something.

What seems logical or possible to us (hemp string?) might not have been
available where the people who first made string lived, for example, and
what American Indians did or didn't do is a world and tens of thousands of
years away from the first use of string and first nets. Did Neanderthals
have nets? Check Brace, Ambrose, Klein and the references they used.

Jois


.

Relevant Pages

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