Which is weird, because the same authors published a more notable paper on exactly this subject very recently in Quaternary [0]. I don't think the argument is unreasonable, but the author of this article is terribly misinformed about many things. For example, the cyclades would have been visible from the mainland, as they still are today! [1] is the view from the western mainland, [2] is the view from the eastern side, today the island of Ikaria. Notice that Crete is also visible from both the Cyclades and the mainland under ideal conditions.
they find human-made tools (which they can assign dates to) on islands distant from shore.
Their only explanation that they are hypothesizing is that humans traveled there across water. Do you have a better idea? They're not saying they found boats, they're saying there is clear evidence of human travel.
Focus on the evidence there is, not evidence you would like to see. What do you hypothesize that fits the evidence?
That the tools were moved to Crete way later than when they were made. Obviously, there are no proof of that either. I am not saying it is impossible Neaderthals got there by boat-ish means. But recycling seems like a possibility not moving back seatravel too far into the past.
"Sail" can mean any travel over water by ship. It's one of those weird words that can be really confusing even when used correctly but out of the context where that portion of its meaning is customarily used.
Also seems possible that the tools might have been moved, at a later date? I imagine a stone age person digging through some Neanderthal settlement remains, would loot any tools.
Except those "stone age" people came around 50,000 years later. Not only is it unlikely they would find any evidence of the Neanderthals, but they would already have more sophisticated tools by then, don't think those (even in their time) by then ancient tools would be worth looting.
> Long before modern humans existed, 100,000 years ago
100,000ya ago is not "long before modern humans existed." Modern humans are Homo sapiens, and the oldest known Homo sapiens remains (to date, that we know of) are dated to 300,000 years ago, which is now apparently 200,000 years before "long before" Homo sapiens existed. I guess the good news is we invent the time machine before too long.
I remember when I was a kid, textbooks would draw a distinction between “homo sapiens” and “homo sapiens sapiens.” But it is odd, when I search “homo sapiens sapiens,” I only see links to like, homework helper/yahoo question sites referencing it. Wikipedia and the Smithsonian seem to have dropped the second sapiens.
Is this an update to how this stuff is understood? I vaguely think the extra sapiens was added on to draw a distinction between “behaviorally modern” humans or something like that. But that always seemed more like a cultural thing anyway.
This was an artifact from a long-running debate about how we should organize the taxonomy of genus Homo. On one hand, people made good arguments that archaic hominins like Neanderthals were distinct enough to consider them separate species. On the other, there were reasonable arguments that they were closely related enough that archaic and modern hominins were a single species with a number of distinct subspecies. Modern humans would be called H. sapiens sapiens in the latter scheme.
This debate was mostly ended in favor of the separate species perspective by the early 2000s, but not everyone was reconciled and archaeogenetics forced us to rewrite the human taxonomy anyway. People will understand what you mean if you continue using H. sapiens sapiens, it's when you use "H. sapiens" to include Neanderthals and Denisovans that people will be confused. Sometimes that terminology is also also used it to exclude transitional subspecies like idaltu, which I think is why wiki uses it.
imo the correct answer is this stuff is incredibly complicated and in incredible flux due to revolutionary advances in genetic research on our prehistoric ancestors and present day people. There's a lot of different perspectives but anyone with some humility would admit a new finding could be announced tomorrow that would upend quite a lot of what we think we know. Already e.g. Naledi, Denisovans, Floresiensis, Longi, Oase, etc are pretty mind-blowing to the consensus views 20 years ago. I would pay less attention to the labels used and more on the broader research.
There's a distinction between biologically modern and behaviorally modern humans. Biologically modern humans have been dated to at least as early as 300k years ago. However behavioral modernity, is more recent. There's debate about how exactly to define things and draw a line, but it's generally around 70k years ago.
The article isn't particularly well written but that's probably what they're referring to.
Might also just be talking about specific geographical range. There is still a lot of debate on the time line and nature of the diaspora of modern homo sapiens.
Anyone here ever read "Critical Path" by Buckminster Fuller? In it, BF winds a compelling narrative of the speculative pre-history of humanity, and touches on the early seafarers and how their tools and science have affected civilization from that point on.
> Unfortunately, archaeologists are unable to provide additional evidence because any boats used by Neanderthals would have been made of wood, which would have long since decomposed to nothing.
Why make the leap to assume they invented sails, given the lack of physical evidence? I mean, it seems reasonable to think they could have rowed or even floated 40km long before they developed sails, and that they would develop those techniques on the way to doing that.
Yep, that's definitely the rub. And to be sure, you're right that that verb doesn't necessarily imply a sail is involved. However, in fairness, the original article talks about how neanderthals "went sailing", which isn't typically what people say when they go rafting or rowing. At any rate, it's a pretty ambiguous word to use when there are less suggestive ones out there!
Did they take sea levels into account? It may not be realistically swimmable now, but it could have been at some point fairly recently when sea levels were lower.
It is laughable to think that the first supported travel over water was done in “boats“ or by “sailing“. Children instinctively climb onto floating objects. It seems very likely to be that some unwary homo-something crossed an unswimmable span of water quite by accident and survived. Perhaps some other individual observed their fate and followed, perhaps from the same species or perhaps not. Perhaps alone, or perhaps with others.
The evidence is merely that there are early tools on islands.
About 40 million years ago, some monkeys in Africa evidently floated a few thousand kilometers across the ocean to South America, probably on driftwood. Neanderthals were a lot bigger than those monkeys, but a similar scenario might have happened here.
Given our recent performance in extinction level interspecies violence and our considerable capability of intraspecies violence I find your characterization of violence as only one of many competing theories surprisingly ... endearing. But you are not wrong, given the low populations involved on both sides it's not impossible at all that violence wasn't the decisive factor.
That isn't evidence that we killed the Neanderthals for food. Rather than, say, having added some ecosystem stress through competition that left them less able to handle a major volcano 40,000 years ago.
I think that if human practiced widespread and consistent cannibalism, then it stands that we likely ate Neanderthals and other homo species to some degree
