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Did Neanderthals create the first Spanish cave paintings?

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If they did, that’ll be even less reason to think of them as some kind of “missing link”:

What if, long before Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, the Neanderthals were humanity’s first artists? At any rate, this is the hypothesis raised by new dating of Spanish rock paintings published in February 2018 in the journal Science (link is external),indicating that the hands and animals depicted on the walls of three caves date back 65,000 years. This would mean that they were painted 25,000 years before the arrival of the first Homo sapiens in the Iberian peninsula. The estimated ages are based on uranium-thorium dating of the calcite layer that coats the frescoes. Could these be the work of Neanderthals? A certain amount of additional data supports this view. For example, traces of pigments in a shell have been dated to 115,000 years ago, while drawings of cats and handprints in the Grotte des Merveilles, Rocamadour (southwestern France) are believed to be between 50,000 and 70,000 years old. In light of this evidence, it is not difficult to imagine that the Neanderthals were endowed with artistic ability.

The interpretation of this research, however, is purely speculative at present. Firstly, the estimated ages will have to be confirmed by other dating methods, especially since no Neanderthal bones were found in these caves. Léa Galanopoulo, “Who Was the First Artist?” at CNRS News

Drawings of cats 50,000 to 70,000 years ago? The ultimate ancestor of the now saturation-point funny cat vids at YouTube?

See also: Neanderthal art found.

Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence

and

A deep and abiding need for Neanderthals to be stupid. Why?

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Comments
OK, so the NFL breeding experiments included support for Fine Arts majors. I don't have a problem with that. Ann Gauger says in her book that the simple fact is that there are only 2 classes of primate fossils: 1. things that look like chimps or gorillas, and 2. people that look like humans (with the distinctive changes in pelvis shape and rib cages). So, yeah, Humans appeared POOF! without ancestors. Live with it.vmahuna
January 16, 2019
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Of note:
“The artists were Neanderthals”,,, - 2018 According to Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology archaeologist Dirk Hoffmann and his colleagues, however, the art in La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales Caves is unequivocally Neanderthal. Uranium-thorium dating of rock deposited over paintings in all three caves indicates that the paintings can’t be any younger than 64,000 years. And there were no humans in Europe 64,000 years ago; the first H. sapiens wouldn’t show up until 20,000 years after the rock of the caves began flowing over the art.,,, https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/neanderthals-were-artists-and-thought-symbolically-new-studies-argue/
And this would be the last shoe to drop against the thesis that Neanderthals were some type of missing link.
Neanderthals were stereotyped as savages for a century — all because of one French scientist - Sep 20, 2016 Excerpt: Ever since that scientific description was published in 1911, we humans have told the story of Neanderthals in a way that makes us look good: We were smarter, less savage, better equipped to inherit the Earth than the Neanderthal.,,, The dominant narrative about Neanderthals is based on the work of a French paleoanthropologist, Marcellin Boule. Boule is one of the premier paleoanthropologists at the beginning of the 20th century.,,, ,,, all the different characteristics he could have emphasized, he emphasized the primitive. His conclusion is that this Neanderthal is going to walk with a kind of hunched posture. He's going to have really divergent big toes, which is considered a more primitive characteristic. We look at it today and say, "Geez, that was really biased.",,, Later, in the middle to second half of the 20th century, scientists and anthropologists begin to go back and look at Boule's original material. They’re starting to reexamine Neanderthals and look at their culture and look at their sophisticated tool use.,,, We now say, "Oh, look, they have culture. They bury their dead. They can start fires. We're interbreeding. They're more human than we first thought." There was a great publication a couple of months ago that points out Neanderthals carried fire starters. That's fascinating, right? I think that what happens is we keep saying they're more like us. It's a very additive thing. We keep adding all these characteristics. They're not so different from us,,, http://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12968814/neanderthals-savages-stereotype-boule
A few more notes:
"The majority of the Neandertal divergences overlap with those of the humans (Fig. 3), reflecting the fact that Neandertals fall inside the variation of present-day humans." (A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome, May 2010, sciencemag) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710.full Are These Really Transitional Fossils? - David F. Coppedge - August 24, 2018 Excerpt: The science media are reporting another case of interbreeding between human ancestors: Neanderthals and Denisovans Mated, New Hybrid Bone Reveals (Live Science) Neanderthal mother, Denisovan father! Hybrid fossil: Newly-sequenced genome sheds light on interactions between ancient hominins (Science Daily) The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father (Nature, original paper) Mum’s a Neanderthal, Dad’s a Denisovan: First discovery of an ancient-human hybrid (Nature, commentary by Matthew Warren) Needless to say, if mating produced successful offspring, the two groups were members of the same species. This should collapse the Neanderthal and Denisovan categories into one. Then that blended category, which hybridized with modern humans and produced offspring surviving to the present, is also one species. They’re all varieties of Homo sapiens. https://crev.info/2018/08/really-transitional-fossils/ Review of "Contested Bones" (Part 3 - Chapter 3 "Homo neanderthalensis") 2-10-2018 by Paul Giem - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2OOt2qFdu4&list=PLHDSWJBW3DNU_twNBjopIqyFOwo_bTkXm&index=3 Skull "Rewrites" Story of Human Evolution -- Again - Casey Luskin - October 22, 2013 Excerpt: "There is a big gap in the fossil record," Zollikofer told NBC News. "I would put a question mark there. Of course it would be nice to say this was the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and us, but we simply don't know." - http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/10/skull_rewrites_078221.html “A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens…Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense.” Dr. Ian Tattersall: – paleoanthropologist – emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History – (Masters of the Planet, 2012) “Neanderthals are known for their large cranial capacity, which at 1600cc is larger on average than modern humans.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Anatomy If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? - January 20, 2011 Excerpt: John Hawks is in the middle of explaining his research on human evolution when he drops a bombshell. Running down a list of changes that have occurred in our skeleton and skull since the Stone Age, the University of Wisconsin anthropologist nonchalantly adds, “And it’s also clear the brain has been shrinking.” “Shrinking?” I ask. “I thought it was getting larger.” The whole ascent-of-man thing.,,, He rattles off some dismaying numbers: Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. “I’d call that major downsizing in an evolutionary eyeblink,” he says. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.” http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking
Given the tendency of Darwinists to associate intelligence with brain size, I would think the fact that Neanderthals had bigger brains than humans, and that humans have been steadily losing brain size over the past several thousand years, should be rather disconcerting for Darwinists. One final note on just how devastating it is for Darwinian storytelling to find symbolic capacity in Neanderthals:
Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language - December 19, 2014 Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,, (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, "The mystery of language evolution," Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).) Casey Luskin added: “It's difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti092141.html
bornagain77
January 16, 2019
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They were among, or closely related to those who did as during The ice ages we were a fairly close knit community. Also keep in mind those caves were not even formed prior to the 1656 anno mundi 'Mabul' impacts year mass extinction event. So for the most accurate context consider not 50k-115k YA during a 25M year The ice ages span but about 3800-4000 YA during the approx. 340 year span from 1656 - 1996 based on this being 5779 anno mundi. With the original single continent still in place by the start of the Mabul and The ice ages setting in cause and effect as a result. Neanderthal having their features in part due to longer life spans, and greater genetic diversity, think 'founder effect', being w/in several generations of those 8 who boarded the ark of Noach, by that early genetic bottleneck reference: www.amazon.com/dp/B077Q4KB9VPearlman
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