This is an issue entirely separate from my ancient civilization shtick.
Archaeologists have discovered that 100,000-year-old shells found in Israel and Algeria were decorative beads. This suggests that modern human forms of behaviour, such as language, developed earlier than previously thought.
“Personal ornaments are a powerful tool of communication,” says Francesco D’Errico at the Institute of the Prehistory and Geology of the Quaternary in Talence, France, one of the team that studied the beads. “They can indicate social or marital status, for example. But you need to have a complex system of language behind that. To me [these beads] are very powerful archaeological evidence that these people were able to speak like us.”
People are a lot smarter than many allow, past, present, or future.
I agree. That’s part of my personal definition as cynic and optimist. Science tells me we are a perfectible species.
Just not in my lifetime.
Yeah, ’cause SUVs are the pinnacle of human intellect… dink.
When a man forgets to take the garbage out of the cave before going hunting for the 15th time in a row, flowers just won’t do. You need jewelry to get out of that jam. Some things never change, and “Let me decorate you” has always been a powerful statement 😉
Jeez, look how far we’ve come in our communications over the last 100,000 years – puka shells
yeah, who da thunk surfer speak as evidenced by puka shell necklaces would be the basic language building block of human communication – surfs up, dudes!
One of my great epiphanies was the realization that were I to encounter someone from, say, Roman Brittania, that they would be no less intelligent nor sophisticated than I. It was just one of those great moments in personal development where one experiences a shift in awareness that, in turn, provides insight into one’s own understanding of themselves and everyone else.
There’s probably a damned good reason why anyone would assume that a subjective abstraction implicit in a symbolic object should be considered as a possible indication of a second form of expression. It seems equally possible to me that the beads could have BEEN the language.
Pardon me while I stand on your shoulders a moment, Alix, but any insight on why they’d have assumed the existance of a verbal language from this?
Here is another thing you can bash Christians over:
I was taught in my fundamentalist church upbringing that man was actually de-evolving.
Modern science has given humans a minor boost in longevity but, generally speaking, we have shorter lifespans and our brain capacity is reducing every millennium. Basically, the human genetic code is slowly eroding.
For example, the ancients may have been able to speak extemporaneously in iambic pentameter. Or they could easily memorize the Pentateuch, Levitical laws, extensive oral history, etc.
PS:
I’m not saying I believe the theory I was taught and I certainly won’t argue for it. I do like one aspect of it: that it challenges our arrogance about ourselves.
Max,
I agree with the researchers that a made necklace implies a great deal.
1) It implies the leisure to pursue the assembly of material, skill, and tools in a place safe and secure enough to work in. That means a village or at least a well-organized tribe.
2) It implies the knowledge of higher concepts like body adornment and social status based upon artificially created symbols. This could have been a man’s necklace, you know. Only recently has masculinity eschewed beauty.
3) It implies that there were couples that bonded, which means families, which means society.
Many still think ancient humans of that time period were gnawing on bones and wearing poorly-cured hides in front of a rude campfire in a cave with no real bedding or furniture. This find provides proof that people of that time were far more sophisticated than that.
Here’s another article on this issue:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3310233.stm
Red-stained bones dug up in a cave in Israel are prompting researchers to speculate that symbolic thought emerged much earlier than they had believed.
I think we underestimate the abilities of people from ancient times. At this point, little surprises me in terms of their developments.
With all this information at our fingertips – and machines that do our bean counting and also emulsify our minds with evercrack games – where is the need to succeed? Not only could anchient man be as smart as us, he may be smarter than generations to come.