You quote Shreeve:
>"And then, suddenly,it all came crashing down again. In the 1980's, just when
>it looked as if the Neandertals had secured a permanent place on OUR side of
>the gartel, their humanness took a precipitous fall.Some anatomists looked at
>the structure of their vocal tracts and decided that they had lacked fully
>human speech. A couple of archaeologists gathered together all the
>indisputable evidence for a symbolic sense among Neandertals, and found they
>had gathered nothing. People began to question their hunting abilities,their
>organizational talents, even their habit of burying the dead." [Shreeve, p.
>54]
>
>So Shreeve is not reporting on Neanderthal humanity. Indeed, Shreeve thinks
>Neanderthal possessed a "different sort of self and a different kind of
>consciousness" than we do. [p. 340]. He doesn't argue for their humanity.
>That's why his book is called The Neandertal ENIGMA and not The Neandertal
>Human.
Jim, Jim, Jim. You are not doing a good job of distinguishing between
observational fact and review of historical events. Shreeve reported the
fact that a Neanderthal was found with what appears to have been a cape.
Shreeve also reports the historical fact that the 1980s were not good for
Neanderthal. But the 1990s have been much better. New discoveries have
overturned lots of the criticisms. I agree that Shreeve does not believe that
neanderthals were human But let me point out what has happened to the points
you raise via Shreeve.
Shreeve writes (p. 54)
>"And then, suddenly,it all came crashing down again. In the 1980's, just when
>it looked as if the Neandertals had secured a permanent place on OUR side of
>the gartel, their humanness took a precipitous fall.Some anatomists looked at
>the structure of their vocal tracts and decided that they had lacked fully
>human speech.
The speech defect that was proposed that Neanderthal had prevented the
production of certain vowels. This was based upon the concept that the
Neanderthal vocal tract was different than modern man, both in the position of
the hyoid bone and the curvature(flexing at the base of the skull). If the
differences had existed, the hyoid bone (Adam's apple) of Neanderthal would
have been different in shape. When this hypothesis was proposed, no hyoid had
ever been found. In 1990 a neanderthal hyoid was found in place. Guess what?
Neanderthal's vocal tract was just like ours! Shreeve notes (p. 272)
"The discovery of the hyoid bone in the 'Moshe' skeleton found at Kebara has
seriously challenged the notion that Neanderthals lacked the anatomy for
rapid-fire, fully human speech."
and
"Having fended off Moshe's challeng, however, the Neandertals-can't-talk
argument is losing ground on another front. Many of Lieberman and Laitman's
arguments were based on the flat skull base of the Neandertal Old Man of La
Chapelle, a badly distorted skull that had never been pieced together
properly. In 1989, Jean-Louis Heim of the National Museum of Natural History
in Paris set out to reconstruct the skull by more meticulous procedures, and
low and behold his version of the skull base showed a lot more of the flexing
seen in modern skulls. Recently David Frayer of the Ubiversity of Kansas
compared Heim's new Old man to a sampling of modern human specimens from the
Upper Paleolithic to the Moddle Ages and found that the degree of flexing, it
held its own with many of them, including a medieval Hungarian skull. 'Nobody
argues that the medieval Hungarians weren't able to talk', says Frayer." (p.
273)
What is remarkable is that even if the vocal track had been different
Neanderthal would have been able to speak. Hayden reports that if the
neanderthal had the speech defect they suggest his speech would have been as
follows:
"'...et seems emprebeble theth ther speech wes enedeqwete bekes ef the leck ef
the three vewels seggested. The kemplexete of speech depends en the
kensenents, net en the vewels, es ken be seen frem the generel
kemprehensebelete ef thes letter.'"~Brian Hayden "The Cultural Capacities of
Neandertals ", Journal of Human Evolution 1993, 24:113-146, p. 131
And modern men with the same defects talk just fine.
"Finally, Le May has shown that modern men, with the same speech
physiology as Neandertals, have normal modern speech."~Brian Hayden "The
Cultural Capacities of Neandertals ", Journal of Human Evolution 1993,
24:113-146, p. 132
Jim, your objection is moot.
Jim further quotes Shreeve (page 54)
> A couple of archaeologists gathered together all the
>indisputable evidence for a symbolic sense among Neandertals, and found they
>had gathered nothing.
They have since found that neanderthal made jewelry and flutes. If you
committed a murder of someone who made flutes and musical instruments would
you use as your defence that musical instrument and jewellry making does not
prove that your victim was human? If you do, you better roll up your sleeve.
Both are symbolic.
Shreeve continues:
> People began to question their hunting abilities,their
>organizational talents, even their habit of burying the dead." [Shreeve, p.
>54]
>
Andre Gourhan writes of the Neanderthals,
"If we find a human skeleton lying on a bed of powdered red ochre, as happened
several times, it is probable that it is related to some sort of
ritual."~Andre Leroi Gourhan, The Hunters of Prehistory, transl. Claire
Jacobson, (New York: Atheneum, 1989), p. 61
Schepartz notes of symbolism and burial:
" What
these and other researchers overlook is that all Middle Paleolithic burials
contain symbolic evidence--that of a hominid body intentionally positioned by
other hominids."~L. A. Schepartz, "Language and Modern Human Origins,"
Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 36:91-126(1993), p. 113
>This same thought is echoed by Richard Leakey in The Origin of Humankind
>(1994) p.156:
>
>"Neanderthals, as I've suggested,and probably other archaic sapiens,did have
>an awareness of death and therefore undoubtedly a highly developed reflective
>consciousness. But was it of the same luminosity as we experience today?
>Probably not."
>
So? my cat and dog had NO awareness of death. Deer will return to a feeder
where a buddy has been shot just a few short minutes earlier and the carcass
is still on the ground. This is truly a lack of death awareness. Neanderthal
was the first to bury their dead and use flowers as happened at Shanidar Cave.
>On the supposed "shaman cape" referred to above, Glenn writes:
>
><<The arrangement was as if the individual was wearing a leopard skin cape.
>This is attested by several facts. The position of the paw indicate that
> the
>bones of the paw were left in the skin. The fact that a human skeleton was
>found without large parts of a leopard skeleton indicates that there was
> not a
>lot of leopard skeleton when the man was buried.>>
>
>Wait a minute. I searched in vain for a reference to a human body and/or
>burial here (Shreeve, pg. 52) but there is none. Nothing about human bones.
>Nada. Maybe you had some other reference for this, but it isn't from the
> book you quoted.
I did have another source in mind. I have seen a diagram of the way trhese
bones were laid out but can't find it just now. I will continue to search for
it.
>
><<Now, if we have Neanderthal engaging in shamanism, then Neanderthal must
> be a spiritual being.>>
>
>But that is the very question. A few have suggested there is evidence of
>shamanism, but it is scant and not persuasive. By contrast, the shamanism
> of modern man is explosive, pervasive, recent and clear.
>
Jim, Do non-Fallen beings make clothing? Are you saying that non-spiritual
creatures engage in making the one thing we wear which marks our Fall? If so,
I would suggest that you are ignoring an inportant aspect of the Bible.
>Mark Twain once remarked, "The difference between the right word and the
>almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning
> bug."
>
>With Neanderthal, we have the "lightning bug" of consciousness, compared to
>the "lightning" of true humanity. And this lightning is recent. As Leakey
> puts
>it:
>
>"Modern humans became modern when they spoke like us and experienced the self
>as we do. We surely see evidence of this in the art of Europe and Africa from
>35,000 years onward and in the elaborate ritual that accompanied burial in
>the Upper Paleolithic." (pg. 156)
Neanderthal was fully capable of speech as even Shreeve acknowledges.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm