Re: Neanderthals wore make-up and liked to chat

Jack Linthicum wrote:
This is for anyone who thinks that archaeology deals only in facts, as
opposed to fiction.




Neanderthals wore make-up and liked to chat

* 09:24 27 March 2008
* NewScientist.com news service
* Dan Jones

Could Neanderthals speak? The answer may depend on whether they used
make-up.

Francesco d'Errico, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux,
France, has found crafted lumps of pigment - essentially crayons -
left behind by Neanderthals across Europe.

He says that Neanderthals, who most likely had pale skin, used these
dark pigments to mark their own as well as animal skins. And, since
body art is a form of communication, this implies that the
Neanderthals could speak, d'Errico says.

Working with Marie Soressi of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, d'Errico has recovered
hundreds of blocks of black manganese pigment from two neighbouring
sites at Pech de l'Azé in France, which were occupied by Neanderthals.
These add to evidence of pigment among Neanderthal from some 39 other
sites.

The pigments were not just smeared onto the body like camouflage,
d'Errico says, but fashioned into drawing tools.

"The flat, elongated surfaces on the archaeological specimens are
consistent, as confirmed experimentally, with producing clearly
visible straight black lines, perhaps arranged to produce abstract
designs," says d'Errico, who presented his work on 15 March at the
Seventh Evolution of Language Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Essential words

Body painting, argues d'Errico, is a "material proxy" for symbolic
communication. What's more, he says, the techniques for making the
symbols, and the meaning they carry, would have to be transmitted
through language.

This appears to be taken from d'Errico's plenary talk at the Barcelona conference. Unfortunately, it looks like the plenary talks from the conference aren't part of the conference proceedings*, so I'm not sure whether Dan Jones was working from his notes from the talk, from a printed version of the talk, or from his notes from an interview with d'Errico.

While there are direct quotations from d'Errico in the article, I wouldn't take them as indicative of d'Errico's scholarly works.

* The conference proceedings are interesting, and from my cursory skimming of a few of them, properly tentative, with speculation noted as speculation.

The proceedings, some full papers and some just abstracts, are temporarily available for download (zip file) from:

http://stel.ub.edu/evolang2008/proc.htm

"Proceedings of the 7th Evolution of Language Conference (Evolang 2008)

"Download articles (.zip file - 12 Mb)

"This is the authors' version of the work. It is posted here temporarily by permission of World Scientific press for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is published as the book

"Smith, A. D. M., Smith, K., & Ferrer i Cancho, R. (2008). The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference (EVOLANG7). Singapore: World Scientific Press.

"You can order it from
- World Scientific Press
- Amazon - Amazon UK
- Barnes & Noble"

And body painting isn't the only proxy associated with Neanderthal
remains. Neanderthals adorned their bodies with ornamentation, such as
necklaces made from shell beads.

The sorts of beads used by modern humans, and the ornaments they
fashioned from them, vary geographically. This is often interpreted as
a sign of ethnic and cultural diversity among humans, and a means of
symbolically binding groups and differentiating them from others.
D'Errico suggests that the same holds true for Neanderthals.

Other researchers agree, and point to a double standard of some
researchers in interpreting the archaeological record, including
evidence of burials, care of the infirm and social cooperation.
'Inferior ability'

"Some archaeologists are happy to associate these same features with
language if they occur with modern humans, but are not willing to
associate them with language among the Neanderthals," says
anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St Louis, US.

"The double standard doesn't work - if they reflect language in one,
they must reflect in it both."

This seems to be a reasonable opinion.

However, even if Neanderthals had language capabilities, that does not
mean they spoke in the same way as humans.

"The archaeological record does not show that they ever attained the
cultural level of the humans who could talk as we do," says Phillip
Lieberman, a linguist at Brown University, Rhode Island, US.

I'm not certain about this. After all, the material culture of Neandertal and contemporary H.s. was apparently roughly equivalent. I wouldn't argue, however, against the idea that H.s.'s culture was more progressive toward the end of the period when the two species (or sub-species--I'm a taxonomic romantic) co-existed.

"Neanderthals possessed language, but their linguistic and cognitive
ability was inferior to the humans who replaced them," he says.

I think this is going beyond the evidence. I think linguistic and cognitive differences might well have implied mere difference, not superiority or inferiority. Except possibly in the particular of evolutionary fitness in the situation where Neandertal died out and H.s. survived.

But we don't yet know why we are still here and Neandertal isn't, so it seems premature to me to attribute superiority or inferiority wrt evolutionary fitness in this case. And it is certainly not clear, to me at least, that the emic experience of language and thinking was intrinsically better for H.s. than for Neandertal.

So in either case, Lieberman's statement seems to me to be unwarranted interpretation of the available evidence. But I'd be happy to entertain new evidence.
.

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