Neanderthals

We’’ve been weeding the garden getting ready for this weekend’s festivities.  I came across this interesting article about some Neanderthals making rings in a cave, probably with the intention of a 3 ring circus, but Og couldn’t get the elephants down there.  Here’s an excerpt from MSN news.

“After French cavers found the rings in 1990, initial studies failed to pinpoint their age. [now estimated at 176,000 years] The structures, which sit in the middle of a large chamber, include an oval ring 22 feet long and 15 feet wide — big enough to encircle the largest sport utility vehicles — and a second, smaller ring. There are also four piles of stalagmites. Altogether, the builders pieced together about 400 sections of stalagmite weighing 2.4 tons, an amount that suggests teamwork and planning.

“The builders stacked the stalagmites in as many as four layers, bracing the walls with short buttress pieces. The rings easily pre-date the next-oldest human-built structures of a definitive age, which are 40,000 years old, says study co-author Jacques Jaubert of France’s University of Bordeaux.

“Perhaps Neanderthals, who flourished from roughly 350,000 to 40,000 years ago, blundered into the cave seeking shelter, says Marie Soressi of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. But even if they built the rings for practical rather than ceremonial reasons, the structures are “changing the picture of Neanderthal behavior,” she says. “We never thought before that Neanderthals would go underground.”

“The findings raise the possibility that Neanderthals were lords of the underworld well before Homo sapiens, our species of human. The oldest evidence for modern humans making use of deep caves dates back less than 42,000 years, the study says.

Neanderthals used caves because we know they didn’t have clothes but just hung a skin about themselves rather like Kim Kardashian. Colder than blitzen in the winter, so they used caves to escape the climate and paint pictures of the bison or that dadgum deer which got away on their hunt. 

 In a related topic, have I ever told you about my explanation of how agriculture began?  We know it was originated by women since they were the gathers and the men were the hunters.  Women are global thinkers and don’t forget anything.  So probably some cave woman noticed that peach trees were growing near the place where she remembered tossing some rotten peaches last fall and the dog digging for a bone and scattering dirt onto the discarded peaches.  Could she bury pits and get peaches to grow?  So she asked her husband, the cave man.  Being male he was a linear thinker and logical, took great pride in stalking mammoths.  “Why of course!” he noted, “You have both correlation between peach pits and trees, and causality from a pit sprouting.  Go ahead, Dear, and plant the pits and see what you get.”  He then congratulated his male ego and reminded himself that this is why he was in management.  Then promptly forgot about the entire issue.  But the cave woman, being of low self-esteem and communicative, decided to ask her friends if they had ever seen this done, or done it themselves.  And had anyone ever seen this on Pinterest? No one had but her friend remembered the conversation the following spring and being supportive, said that cave woman should try it and she would help her.  So at the mouth of the cave, they began planting peach pits.   Lo! Trees grew.  The cave kids played in the trees, the cave man brushed past them each night coming home, but hardly noticing.  Then one day cave woman served him a peach for dinner.  “Hey!  Where’d you get these?” asked the caveman.