Searching for a Stone Age Odysseus

[sukumvit boy]

Neanderthals , Stone Age peoples may have voyaged the Mediterranean .
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...-mediterranean
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6387/362

[Stavros]

Interesting, but should we be surprised? Maybe the mistake lies in assuming there were limitations in the Paleolithic era which had already been breached? I am not sure if we will ever know the truth about our origins so far back in time.

Or could it be that the secret lies in the origin of cooked food? Using fire to cook food -we assume early humans discovered this by accident- may not just produce a tastier meal, it may also affect the chemical development of the brain and with that set off a sequence of changes that improved intelligence, adding a new layer of ingenuity to strategies of survival. It is a well-known and argued hypothesis which is discussed in relation to discoveries in South Africa here-

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may...king-with-fire

[sukumvit boy]

Right , Stavros , it's now a widely accepted theory in both Anthropology and Neurology that meat and later cooking provided the nutritional support necessary for our expanded brain and even bipedal way of locomotion.
It's astounding how much more nutrition we can extract from food by cooking it ,without the burdensome digestive machinery the cows, elephants and gorillas ,for example have to carry around.
Meat and seafood was important for the high cholesterol required by a growing brain.

[sukumvit boy]

It just shocks me to now start thinking of Neanderthals as sailors having grown up with the accepted stereotype of Neanderthals as club wielding dullards.
Anthropology is also revealing how early human populations were able to rapidly expand along the coasts and exploit the fat and nutrient rich shell fish easily available all along the way.
https://www.newscientist.com/article...ient-mariners/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-


nutrition/article/rift-valley-lake-fish-and-shellfish-provided-brainspecific-nutrition-for-early-homo/065929BB43BD917531916B822B1583F3
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...916B822B1583F3

[Stavros]

Are we moving away from or toward The Flintstones as documentary rather than cartoon comedy?

If you want to detach yourself from the stereotypes then Marshall Sahlins is a good place to start, as he has pioneered an overhaul of pre-literate hunter-gathered societies through numerous books, Stone Age Economics, 1972 being a famous one. He is both cautious and bold, depending on the need of the argument, but has, in his overview of Levi-Strauss suggested through the quote 'there never is any original' that we may never know the origins of human society as social structure even though we cannot exist without it, OR (my argument) it may be that Neanderthals died out precisely because they were unable to maintain a social structure possibly through the destructive pattern of inbreeding. Whether or not we owe language as well as diet -ie cooked food- to Neanderthals may not be known, for while we can find remains of ash in archeological digs that implies cooking with fire, and while cave paintings may be traced that far back there can be no aural trace of language for obvious reasons.

In this link you will find a typical Sahlins presentation that the hunter-gatherer economy is efficient/affluent where others have said the opposite, although I think on the evidence of Papua New Guinea and the Amazon basin he underestimates the extent to which inter-tribal violence may have eroded the sustainability of palaeollithic societies as much as my claim for a role played by in-breeding-

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

Sahlins on Levi-Strauss here (a short but fascinating obituary/appraisal)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120526...-Blog-Post.pdf

If you have access to a good library I recommend his article Goodbye to TristesTropiques, Journal of Modern History Vol 65, No 1 (1993), 1-25

General view
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Sahlins

[Stavros]

Correction to the above -the article on Levi-Strauss was published in July 2009 whereas Levi-Strauss died in October.

[sukumvit boy]

Thanks for those interesting observations and additions , Stavros.
Perhaps I should have posted this thread in the Politics and Religion section , too many 'distractions' over here in General Discussion,LOL. Sometimes these things end up being a two way discussion , but an enjoyable and informative one, none the less.
Claude Levi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins , despite being Anthropologists of immense status were scientists of a different era . Levi-Strauss was noted more as a theorist than a field scientist . He famously quipped , "I hate traveling and explorers". Whereas modern anthropologists are more of a combination of Indiana Jones and a geek with a mass spectrometer . Collaborating with geologists, geneticists,physicists and scientific sub specialties that didn't even exist until within the last 1 or 2 decades.
Additionally , the pace and dissemination of relevant discoveries in anthropology and related fields is orders of magnitude greater . Darwin was never aware of the genetic discoveries of Mendel although they lived and worked at the same time . Darwin just theorized that there must be some "units of inheritance " in the sperm and egg passed down to the next generation. And Mendel's published findings of the 1850's lay undiscovered until 1900.
https://www.newscientist.com/article...-got-together/

[Stavros]

You are clearly well-read across a range of disciplines and I think that helps give your posts their depth and interest. Unfortunately in the UK the attempt to establish Area Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies came and went in the 1980s as Academics retreated into their pigeon holes and resented anyone from one department stepping into theirs. A classic example was the nomination of Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge's English Faculty. The Philosophy faculty objected and the university had to arrange a convocation of the Senate to vote on it, which they did in the affirmative to the annoyance of the Philosophy Faculty. When Michael Tanner was asked on radio why they objected so much he whined about the English faculty 'they didn't ask us first' which just about sums up how childish some of these academics can be. When Harvard -along with many other US universities- closed down its Geography Department in 1948 the disciplines simply re-emerged in another form in other departments, as the link below describes. So I don't know how often people from different disciplines comes together to share knowledge and participate on projects, I would like to think more often than not, but I am not sure.

https://www.thoughtco.com/geography-at-harvard-1434998

[sukumvit boy]

Exciting new human DNA evidence indicates that ancient Polynesians mixed and mingled with South American Indians long before European contact .
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6500/128
Previously it was thought that ancient South Americans ventured West into the Pacific on the Trade Winds .How else to explain that the sweet potato,a plant native to South America was widely distributed throughout the Polynesian Islands long before the first European contact.
Remember Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon Tiki expedition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl
The New findings indicate that it was the Polynesians who sailed to Northwestern South America and than brought the sweet potato back home to Polynesia.
Historians have often opined that ,"for the polynesians the sea was no obstacle".

[Fitzcarraldo]

Exciting new human DNA evidence indicates that ancient Polynesians mixed and mingled with South American Indians long before European contact .
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6500/128
Previously it was thought that ancient South Americans ventured West into the Pacific on the Trade Winds .How else to explain that the sweet potato,a plant native to South America was widely distributed throughout the Polynesian Islands long before the first European contact.
Remember Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon Tiki expedition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl
The New findings indicate that it was the Polynesians who sailed to Northwestern South America and than brought the sweet potato back home to Polynesia.
Historians have often opined that ,"for the polynesians the sea was no obstacle".

Wow!