The Latest About Neanderthals Things just keep getting older, I have heard this saying so many times in the last few years and it usually is a reference to dating ancient objects, structures, races and even humans. In the very beginning it was thought the human race was about 10,000 years old, at least that is what a lot of supposed educated people used to say. Then the scientists stated it was about 100,000 years old and now it we seem to be dated somewhere around 140,000 to over 200,000 years ago. Just as the age of modern humans keeps getting moved back we are discovering our ancestors, if they are really that, were a lot smarter than we thought. A recent discovery on cave walls in France seems to indicate the drawings there are at least 65,000 years old and may have been created not by modern humans, but by Neanderthals which are said to be our closest relatives. At first, we were told how mentally inferior they were and they had no speech facility, then we were told they could talk and some of the stone weapons we found were made by them, not us and now we are being told they were drawing on cave walls long before we ever did. It seems they were brighter than we thought. Neanderthals knew about fire and they even buried their dead. What does all this mean? Did we copy the abilities of Neanderthals rather than discover them ourselves? We have to realize our two races overlapped. We have been told the Neanderthals were on this earth about 500,000 years before modern humans and are said to have existed up to 30,000 years ago sharing the Earth with us for tens of thousands of years before coming extinct. If one was to research the Neanderthals they would find a statement that the Neanderthals began to evolve 300,000 years ago. I have to wonder what is meant by this. Does this refer to the earlier tools we found from them or something else? The reason the race was called Neanderthals was the remnants of a skeleton was found in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Germany. This valley has yielded many more Neanderthal bones. Sometimes science gets things incredibly wrong. Evolution theory has many areas where things don’t seem to fit and other things seem to be forced. As we find out the modern human race has been around longer than we thought, is it possible they may even predate the Neanderthals? If we asked this question we would be laughed at by the scientists and they would tell us there was never any bones or structures found from modern humans that would predate the Neanderthal. What if humans came from somewhere else to the earth, they could be an older race. Another thing is I have heard it said modern human bones may not have survived much longer than those we have found and this could account for not finding older ones. When we talk about structures from truly ancient times hundreds of thousand of years ago. they could have been built, but disappeared because of the dynamic action of the planet. We have found a lot of structures which are only a few thousand years old and yet they were covered with so much earth we were lucky to find them. Imagine what would have happened to a structure built more than 20,000 years old, we might never find it or it could be so smashed we wouldn’t recognize it. If we humans colonized a planet a few hundred thousand years ago and there was a race of human like beings living there already, might future archaeologists think one of the races evolved from the other or was a different branch of that race? Scientists still debate some of the features Neanderthals had, for existence they debate the purpose of their wide nose. Some say that nose helped humidify and warm cold air, but other scientists do not agree with that statement. Here is an interesting fact, scientists believe about one percent of all Neanderthals had red hair, light skin and probably had freckles. I would love to know how they came to his conclusion since only bones have been found. Have they found something we were not told about? It is said Neanderthals had larger brains than we have so maybe they were smarter than us, but we just haven’t found anything yet to indicate this. If Neanderthals were less smart than us at the time, how come they learned how to create glue and use pitch to fasten sharp stone tips to wooden shafts? This doesn’t seem to be the action of a dumb brute does it? Science tells us they may have occasionally become cannibals when the weather became very harsh. We were also told they ate only meat, but this has been found to not be true. We discovered they cooked and ate vegetables. The real burning question which has been debated for years is did Neanderthals interbreed with modern humans? It turns out science has found 2.5 percent of non-African DNA comes from Neanderthals. I believe we still have a lot to learn about the Neanderthals and what we do learn might just overturn some of the things we believe about them. One of the most mysterious things is how and why they disappeared. Some scientists think we killed them, others don’t think so. There might have been some sort of virus attack which they were susceptible to. I guess we will just have to wait to find out. |
