Tuesday, January 17, 2017

It Seems Caveman Liked to Collect Rocks - Science

Of course you don't care but that's something of the point.  The story is based on a rock from 130,000 years ago and, sure, you still don't care but that rock is a pivotal part of the research because they wanted to know how it got to that cave since it was not made up of such rocks.  (Science Daily:  Discovery adds rock collecting to Neanderthal's repertoire)

See, I wasn't kidding.  Onward ...  (the article is in two parts on the same topic)


"Clam-shell" view of Side A and B showing black dendrites against the background of the brown mudstone.  The flake, only shown re-attached on Side A, is the result of a post-excavation fracture of the specimen.  Arrows point to large inclusion visible on Sides A and B. An international research team that includes Davorka Radovčić, Croatian Natural History Museum, curator, and David Frayer, University of Kansas, professor emeritus of anthropology, discovered a limestone rock recovered from the Krapina Neanderthal site didn't belong in the cave and was evidence a Neanderthal collected it 130,000 years ago.

Credit: David Frayer, University of Kansas

How is your Neanderthal rock love coming along so far?


An international group that includes a University of Kansas researcher has discovered a brownish piece of split limestone in a site in Croatia that suggests Neanderthals 130,000 years ago collected the rock that stands out among all other items in the cave.

...

The cave at the Krapina site was sandstone, so the split limestone rock stuck out as not deriving from the cave, Frayer said.  None of the more than 1,000 lithic items collected from Krapina resemble the rock, but the original archaeologists apparently did nothing more with the rock other than to collect it.

...

They suspect a Neanderthal collected the rock from a site a few kilometers north of the Krapina site where there were known outcrops of biopelmicritic grey limestone. Either the Neanderthal found it there or the Krapinica stream transported it closer to the site.

- SD

Maybe that tells you the research fell apart since, sure, the water moved it.  You're a scientist now and must consider all the possibilities and the first question about that stream is why was this the only rock.  Here at the Rockhouse, we believe their ball is still in-play.

Ed:  you're such a fan of ball games!

I saw some, probably not more than ten I attended but I did see some.


Since we would like to cheerfully blow your skull with this one, how about some more evidence of the sensibilities of Neanderthals.  How about the eagle talons they collected for jewelry.


The eight eagle talons from Krapina arranged with an eagle phalanx that was also found at the site.  (Luka Mjeda, Zagreb)

They're from the same cave as the rock which started this article.  (Fox:  Neanderthals wore eagle talons as jewelry 130,000 years ago)

Note:  the article is from Fox but it's based on a paper which originally was published in PLOS ONE and that's peer-reviewed science just as with Science Daily.  (PLOS ONE:  Evidence for Neandertal Jewelry: Modified White-Tailed Eagle Claws at Krapina)

The talons were first excavated more than 100 years ago at a famous sandstone rock-shelter site called Krapina in Croatia.  There, archaeologists found more than 900 Neanderthal bones dating back to a relatively warm, interglacial period about 120,000 to 130,000 years ago.  They also found Mousterian stone tools (a telltale sign of Neanderthal occupation), a hearth and the bones of rhinos and cave bears, but no signs of modern human occupation.  Homo sapiens didn't spread into Europe until about 40,000 years ago.

- PO

The case for the aesthetic value of that single rock suddenly gains a whole lot of credibility.

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