Research Team Investigates Demise of Neanderthals in Spain
La Roca dels Bous, a Paleolithic site located near the southeastern Pyrenees of Spain, has been cited by archaeologists as a key location with Neanderthal-related remains that may shed light on the changes that may have contributed to the demise of the Neanderthals in Europe. Now, a team led by Dr. Rafael Mora of the University Autonomous of Barcelona will be returning to the site in 2013 to excavate and explore lithic assemblages, fossil bone, and other remains that may date as far back as 50,000 BP.
The excavations may help research efforts focused on constructing a better understanding of the factors that may have contributed to the decline and eventual disappearance of humanity’s most closely related extinct human species. Read more.
A letter to Tim Flannery
Just finished your book ‘Here On Earth’ and really enjoyed it. Your description of mankind moving out of Africa in a wave of destruction and only coming to an equilibrium in the crash that followed the destruction of those resources was instructive. Do you really think we will, this time, see the destruction coming and minimize it? It seems too much to ask for. It’s that short term thinking you talk about, we won’t deal with it until forced to by circumstances and by then, as in Jared Diamond’s Collapse, it might be too late. The less I watch politics on television the better I feel about our chances. An hour of CNN can depress me for weeks. The best description I have seen of this short term thinking is Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’, if you haven’t yet read it, give it a look.
A couple of quotes and some points to make,
“As societies have grown more complex over the millennia, so they have grown more internally peaceful.”
You have not sold me on this point in the text of your book. The only true hunter gatherer tribes you look at are those in Australia and South America. Both of these were anecdotal to do with societies under severe pressure from disease and colonialism. I don’t think looking at a remnant population ravaged by a 90% mortality plague and active genocide, is a good representation of ancestral hunter gatherer societies.
In 1491 Charles Mann makes the case that many of the hunting tribes, who still use agriculture for a large slice of their caloric energy, are remnant populations of earlier agricultural societies that collapsed under the weight of European introduced disease. The Spanish document first contact in the Amazon Basin or the U.S. Southwest and encountering large settled populations that are never seen again. The populations we came to know in historical times were under severe pressures and are not good representations of traditional cultures, which in many instances were agricultural to begin with.
The Bushmen of Kalahari deal with inter band tension by moving. Their family ties are spread out over many bands taking up many, many square miles of area. In a hunter gatherer society the population is more spread out than we can imagine and you are related to many of them. War, strife, internal and external, is strictly controlled. ‘The Old Way’ by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is the best book I have read on the Bushmen and the ancestral way of life.
Maybe they are the outliers, and maybe, being on the ancestral continent, still in contact with the megafauna we evolved with they are the ones not representative of bands that left Africa, but your citations and reasoning on this point do not convince me enough to go along with your argument. That being that our societies are more peaceful on a whole than a band of Kalahari Bushmen.
“….the dawn of agriculture, wherin the individually weak farmers triumphed over the powerful few.”
I am grateful to your narrative of the spread of humanity. I have often struggled with what drove mankind, so quickly and over such a wide area, to take up agriculture. There seems to be very little reason to do so. You yourself outline the sacrifices in health and freedoms that people made to take up the lifestyle. In my mind the collapse of the hunting way of life helps explains it. When the mammoth went away, maybe it seemed a reasonable choice.
But your characterization of agriculture being a better way of life seems a misreading of history. The farmer has never been the one to benefit from agriculture. Those who benefitted were those who did no farming, warriors, priests, kings. The helots in Sparta who farmed were slaves, as those in Rome, and one assumes in the earlier civilizations of the fertile crescent. The excess produced by farmers was controlled and consumed by those at the top of the hierarchy. In much the same way Monsanto today benefits from corn farmers who produce more on a square yard of soil than our grandfathers did on an acre, yet need government subsidies and a second job to make a living. He only keeps his land because making him do it is cheaper than Monsanto buying it and paying some kids or illegal aliens minimum wage, or less, to do it for them.
You would have to site the civilizations where farmers were the guys in charge rather than the powerful few they supposedly triumphed over. Off the top of my head I can’t name any. The injuries you site to bones of Neolithic men, they were agriculturalists and pastoralists. What do the Paleolithic bones tell us, the ones still smart and robust and healthy because they hadn’t yet taken up agriculture. Spencer Wells goes over the effects of agriculture very well in ‘Pandora’s Seed.’
Over all, I don’t think you can make the argument that we are better off than the Bushmen of the Kalahari, one of the few true hunter gatherer societies that we met in historical times that we were able to interact with before destroying. They had, under traditional lifestyle, low infant mortality, good longevity and health, more free time than you or I, and were sustainable and self sufficient. I think, like those big game hunters who wiped out the game they depended on, we are still in an agricultural wave of destruction that has yet to play out. Coupled with the industrial wave of destruction, it’s hard to see how we get out of the coming collapse.
