Are we animals, or something else?

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Originally posted by rue:
"Recent discoveries in anthropology may show that we are not great apes at all as has been to most logical assumption in the past."

Now THAT'S an interesting (but false) idea !

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“Man’s greatest asset is the unsettled mind.”
- Isaac Asimov

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Huh. Whenever I doubled checked what DT said, I always found confirmation sources right away. I do that though. Someone says something, and I go double check. It's a good way to make me waste a few hours on wikipedia... Shouldn't have said that.

Good luck with the physical therapy. What for? Did you hurt yourself somehow?

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Originally posted by Niki2:

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We are definatly superior in a survival of the fittest sense to other animals that have become extinct, but equal to those that have survived

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I disagree. Other species fit IN with their world, instinctively or genetically; we change the world to fit our SHORT-TERM convenience, and along the way have made millions of other species extinct or removed them from competition with us or introduced species for our convenience which have caused others to go extinct, and in doing so screwed up the entire natural balance. Few other species have done that.

“We”, as a species, are not even winners in “survival of the fittest”, given that on our own individually we would be slaughtered by many other predator species. As in

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I'm sure we won't be the first species to breed themselves into extinction. As far as being slaughtered by other predator species, there aren’t many that could take on a human with a wooden spear. A big cat uses it's brain to stealthily attack from behind, if you also denied them the use of their brain they would be easy prey. Wolfs hunt in a pack, alone they would starve and become extinct. Intelligence and in some cases cooperation are what put predators at the top of the food chain, to say we are no match for predators in their environment means surrendering our greatest assets while letting them retain theirs.

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
Charles Darwin

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

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Neanderthal tools have survived and been found, but no Neanderthal art, as I understand it.

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...Apparently Neanderthals painted seashells.

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Yes , this is true !

I see them in the touristy shops down at the beach , all the time...

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Newly discovered painted scallops and cockleshells in Spain are the first hard evidence that Neandertals made jewelry. These findings suggest humanity's closest extinct relatives might have been capable of symbolism, after all.

Body ornaments made of painted and pierced seashells dating back 70,000 to 120,000 years have been found in Africa and the Near East for years, and serve as evidence of symbolic thought among the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens). The absence of similar finds in Europe at that time, when it was Neandertal territory, has supported the notion that they lacked symbolism, a potential sign of mental inferiority that might help explain why modern humans eventually replaced them.

Although hints of Neandertal art and jewelry have cropped up in recent years, such as pierced and grooved animal-tooth pendants or a decorated limestone slab on the grave of a child, these have often been shrugged off as artifacts mixed in from modern humans, imitation without understanding, or ambiguous in nature. Now archaeologist João Zilhão at the University of Bristol in England and his colleagues have found 50,000-year-old jewelry at two caves in southeastern Spain, art dating back 10,000 years before the fossil record reveals evidence of modern humans entering Europe.

At the Cueva (Cave) Antón, the scientists unearthed a pierced king scallop shell (Pecten maximus) painted with orange pigment made of yellow goethite and red hematite collected some five kilometers from that site. In material collected from the Cueva de los Aviones, alongside quartz and flint artifacts were bones from horses, deer, ibex, rabbits and tortoises as well as seashells from edible cockles (Glycymeris insubrica), mussels, limpets and snails; the researchers also discovered two pierced dog-cockleshells painted with traces of red hematite pigment. No dyes were found on the food shells or stone tools, suggesting the jewelry was not just painted at random.

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neandertal-art-human

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