Andre Willers
9 Feb 2013
Synopsis:
New evidence about Doggerland has surfaced.
Discussion :
1.Appendix I is a National Graphic article . The magazine has an excellent new map of Doggerland .
1.1The inundation process was drawn-out . Timescale shown was 16 000 BC , 8 000 BC , 7 000 BC , present .
1.2 Note that the Thames and the Rhine combined and flowed down what became the English Channel until about 7 000 BC .
1.3 Then , Bad Things happened .
1.4Note how close the river flowed to Cap de la Hague and the Alderne Island after 8 000 BC .
1.5 Note the large canoes found (see appendix III) . A 30 foot canoe is a long-distance coast-hugger .
2.Appendix II is a general discussion , a bit speculative . But without a time-machine , it is the best available .
3.Appendix III takes a step backward to look at the antecedent populations .
3.1Why I bother with this post is that archeological remains are much more likely to be found on the Alderne Islands .
For more than a 1 000 years canoes going down the Thames-Rhine would have hugged the southern shore .
Some remnants should still be on these islands , definitely more underwater .
3.2 See http://mapcarta.com/18430268 . It looks as if the Thames-Rhine at one stage flowed between Renonquet Isle and L'Equet Isle , judging by the channel depth .
3.3 Where archeologists should look :
The cargoes would have been valuable worked-flint tools from the quarries in Southern England . High points on Cap de la Hague and the various islands would have served as look-out points for pirates . Simple fire or smoke signals would do the rest . These points have been repeatedly been used over millennia for exactly the same purpose .
The latest was in WWII , when the Germans simply used slave labour to slap layers of concrete over everything .
Paradoxical preservation . Just tunnel under the concrete .
There might be curio-preservation of very fine worked flint tools in some private hands or German museums .
3.4 Underwater prospects would seem better . There are some strong currents , hence pockets .
3.5 Wouldn't the locals simply have salvaged ?
Yes, where possible . But cargo dumped in shallow water under threat of pirates became inaccessible as water rose .
The relative density of flint =2.6 . The tools would sunk , well , like a stone .
3.6 The Big Scourge :
When the English Channel formed . Either from ice-dams breaking or from the Storegga slides or both .
Look on the northern shores of the islands and the coast between Cap de la Hague and Cherbourg .
The deep layers of Cherbourg harbour (taking into account tsunami-waves) should have interesting artifacts still intact .
Look for tapered stone cylinders , Minoan style . See Appendix II
3.7 Oh No !
Surfing in 10 000 BC .
All those long , narrow canoes . That was how surfing developed . All you need are some waves . And those they had in plenty .
River seiches .
So do not be surprised if some surfboards are dug up .
More likely to be re-classified from existing museum specimens.
More fruitful to look at ski's . (Oldest proven about 6500 BC) But likely much older .
Skiing is but surfing over frozen water .
The old surfboards would be found mouldering in some museum basement . Long , thin , tapered planks .
Must be some religious totem .
Surfs up , dude ! Hot or cold !
Andre
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Appendix I
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/doggerland/spinney-text
Searching for Doggerland
For decades North Sea boatmen have been dragging up traces of a vanished world in their nets. Now archaeologists are asking a timely question: What happens to people as their homeland disappears beneath a rising tide?
By Laura Spinney
Art by Alexander Maleev
When signs of a lost world at the bottom of the North Sea first began to appear, no one wanted to believe them. The evidence started to surface a century and a half ago, when fishermen along the Dutch coast widely adopted a technique called beam trawling. They dragged weighted nets across the seafloor and hoisted them up full of sole, plaice, and other bottom fish. But sometimes an enormous tusk would spill out and clatter onto the deck, or the remains of an aurochs, woolly rhino, or other extinct beast. The fishermen were disturbed by these hints that things were not always as they are. What they could not explain, they threw back into the sea.
Generations later a resourceful amateur paleontologist named Dick Mol persuaded the fishermen to bring him the bones and note the coordinates of where they had found them. In 1985 one captain brought Mol a beautifully preserved human jawbone, complete with worn molars. With his friend, fellow amateur Jan Glimmerveen, Mol had the bone radiocarbon-dated. It turned out to be 9,500 years old, meaning the individual lived during the Mesolithic period, which in northern Europe began at the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago and lasted until the advent of farming 6,000 years later. "We think it comes from a burial," says Glimmerveen. "One that has lain undisturbed since that world vanished beneath the waves, about 8,000 years ago."
The story of that vanished land begins with the waning of the ice. Eighteen thousand years ago, the seas around northern Europe were some 400 feet lower than today. Britain was not an island but the uninhabited northwest corner of Europe, and between it and the rest of the continent stretched frozen tundra. As the world warmed and the ice receded, deer, aurochs, and wild boar headed northward and westward. The hunters followed. Coming off the uplands of what is now continental Europe, they found themselves in a vast, low-lying plain.
Archaeologists call that vanished plain Doggerland, after the North Sea sandbank and occasional shipping hazard Dogger Bank. Once thought of as a largely uninhabited land bridge between modern-day continental Europe and Britain—a place on the way to somewhere else—Doggerland is now believed to have been settled by Mesolithic people, probably in large numbers, until they were forced out of it thousands of years later by the relentlessly rising sea. A period of climatic and social upheaval ensued until, by the end of the Mesolithic, Europe had lost a substantial portion of its landmass and looked much as it does today.
Many have come to see Doggerland as the key to understanding the Mesolithic in northern Europe, and the Mesolithic, in turn, as a period that holds lessons for us—living as we are through another period of climate change. Thanks to a team of landscape archaeologists at the University of Birmingham led by Vince Gaffney, we now have a good idea of what this lost country looked like. Based on seismic survey data gathered mostly by oil companies prospecting under the North Sea, Gaffney and his colleagues have digitally reconstructed nearly 18,000 square miles of the submerged landscape—an area larger than the Netherlands.
At the university's IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, which he heads, Gaffney projects images of this terra incognita onto huge, full-color screens. Just off the map, the Rhine and the Thames met and flowed south into the Channel River. Gaffney sweeps a hand across other river systems, comparably large, that we have no names for. In the climate of the day—perhaps a couple of degrees warmer than today—the contours on his screen translate into gently rolling hills, wooded valleys, lush marshes, and lagoons. "It was a paradise for hunter-gatherers," he says.
The publication in 2007 of the initial section of this map allowed archaeologists for the first time to "see" the Mesolithic world, even identify likely locations for settlements, with a view to potentially excavating them. The expense of underwater archaeology and the poor visibility in the North Sea have kept those settlements tantalizingly out of reach, at least for now. But the archaeologists have other ways to reveal who the Doggerlanders were, and how they responded to the inexorable creep of the sea into their homeland.
First, there are the treasures brought up in the fishermen's nets. In addition to the human jawbone, Glimmerveen has accumulated more than a hundred other artifacts—animal bones showing signs of butchery and tools made from bone and antler, among them an ax decorated with a zigzag pattern. Because he has the coordinates of these finds, and because objects on the seabed tend not to move far from where erosion liberates them, he can be confident that many come from a specific area of the southern North Sea that the Dutch call De Stekels (the Spines), characterized by steep seabed ridges. "The site or sites must have been close to a river system," he says. "Maybe they lived on river dunes."
Another way to understand the Doggerlanders is to excavate shallow-water or intertidal sites of similar age nearby. In the 1970s and 1980s a site called Tybrind Vig, a few hundred yards off the coast of a Danish island in the Baltic Sea, yielded evidence of a surprisingly advanced late Mesolithic fishing culture, including finely decorated canoe paddles and several long, thin canoes, one of them over 30 feet long. More recently, Harald Lübke, of the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology in Schleswig, Germany, and his colleagues have excavated a series of underwater settlements in Wismar Bay, on the German Baltic coast, dating between 8,800 and 5,500 years ago. The sites vividly document the people's shift in diet from freshwater fish to marine species, as the sea rise transformed their land over centuries from inland lakes surrounded by forests, to reedy marshes, to fjords, and eventually to the open bay there now.
A similar metamorphosis took place at Goldcliff on the Severn estuary in Wales, where archaeologist Martin Bell from the University of Reading and his team have been excavating for 21 years. In the Mesolithic, a narrow, incised valley initially contained the River Severn. As the sea rose, the river spilled over the valley's sides and spread out—perhaps within as little as a century—creating the outlines of the modern estuary. At some point the estuary would have been dotted with islands.
One August day, during an exceptionally low tide at Goldcliff, I followed Bell and his co-workers out across the sucking, streaming mudflats, past huge black trunks of prehistoric oaks lying preserved in the mud. We had less than two hours to work before the tide would pour back in. We arrived at an unremarkable ridge that, 8,000 years ago, formed the edge of an island. A team member blasted it with water from a high-pressure hose, and suddenly a sequence of ancient footprints was thrown into relief—39 in all, made by three or four individuals and heading in both directions along the ridge. "They may have been heading out from their campsite to check their fish traps in a nearby channel," says Bell.
There were numerous camps in the estuary at any one time, Bell believes, each of which was inhabited by an extended family group of perhaps ten individuals. The camps were not permanently occupied. The oldest one would have been submerged at very high tides, so it's clear the visitors were seasonal, and that each time they returned they built their camp a little higher up the slope. The remarkable thing is that they kept coming back, over centuries and possibly millennia, finding their way through a landscape that was changing beyond all recognition. They would have witnessed the engulfing and death of the oak forest. "There would have been a time when colossal oak trees were sticking up, dead, through the salt marsh," says Bell. "It would have been a weird sort of landscape."
Summer and autumn would have been times of plenty at the coast, with grazing on the marsh attracting wild animals to hunt. There would be good fishing, and hazelnuts and berries in abundance. At other times the groups moved up to higher country, probably following the valleys of the Severn's tributaries. With only an oral culture, older individuals would have been vital repositories of environmental knowledge, able to read the migration patterns of birds, for example, and so tell their group when the season had come to leave for the coast or head for the highlands—decisions on which their survival depended.
Finds of much larger concentrations of artifacts suggest that Mesolithic people, like later North American hunter-gatherers, came together for annual social events—possibly in the early autumn, when the seals came in and the salmon were running. In western Britain, these gatherings took place on cliff tops, overlooking sealing grounds. They would have allowed young men and women from localized groups to find mates, and information to be exchanged about other river systems beyond each group's territory—knowledge that became crucial as the sea continued to disrupt the landscape.
The most rapid rises of sea level were on the order of three to six feet a century, but because of the variable topography of the land, the flooding would not have been even. In areas as flat as modern-day East Anglia, a six-foot rise could have shifted the coast inland by miles; in hillier places, less. Down in low-lying Doggerland, the rising sea turned inland lakes into estuaries. Gaffney's digital reconstruction shows that one in particular, the Outer Silver Pit, contains massive sandbanks that could only have been created by fierce tidal currents. At some point the currents would have made it dangerous to cross in a log boat, and eventually, created a permanent barrier to once familiar hunting grounds.
How did Mesolithic hunters, so attuned to the rhythm of the seasons, adapt as their world began to dissolve around them? Jim Leary, an archaeologist with English Heritage, has mined the ethnographic literature for parallels with Inuit and other modern hunter-gatherers confronting climate change. For those who learned to exploit the rising sea, becoming skilled boatbuilders and fishermen, the new resource would have been a boon—for a while. But eventually there would come a tipping point, when the loss of territory offset those rich pickings. Older Mesolithic people, those "storehouses of knowledge," as Leary calls them, would no longer have been able to read subtle seasonal variations in the landscape and help the group plan accordingly. Cut off from ancestral hunting, fishing, or burial grounds, the people would have felt a profound sense of placelessness, says Leary—"like Inuit whose way back is barred by melting ice floes."
"There would have been huge population shifts," says Clive Waddington of Derbyshire-based Archaeological Research Services Ltd. "People who were living out in what is now the North Sea would have been displaced very quickly." Some headed for Britain. At Howick in Northumberland, on the cliffs that run along Britain's northeast coast and would therefore have been the first hills they saw, his team has found the remains of a dwelling that had been rebuilt three times in a span of 150 years. Among the earliest evidence of a settled lifestyle in Britain, the hut dates from around 7900 B.C. Waddington interprets its repeated habitation as a sign of increasing territoriality: the resident people defending their patch against waves of displaced Doggerlanders.
"We know how important the fishing grounds were for the subsistence of these people," says Anders Fischer, an archaeologist at the Danish Agency for Culture in Copenhagen. "If each generation saw its best fishing grounds disappear, they would have to find new ones, and that would often be in competition with neighboring groups. In societies of low social complexity, where you have no authorities to handle conflicts, it would probably have ended with violence."
Migration, territoriality, conflict: stressful ways of adapting to new circumstances, but adaptations nonetheless. There came a time, however, when the sea exhausted the Doggerlanders' capacity for survival. Some 8,200 years ago, after millennia of incrementally rising seas, a massive release of meltwater from a giant glacial lake in North America, called Lake Agassiz, caused sea levels to jump by more than two feet. By slowing the circulation of warm water in the North Atlantic, this influx of frigid water triggered a sudden plunge in temperature, causing Doggerland's coasts—if any remained—to be battered by frigid winds. If that were not enough, around the same time, a landslide on the seafloor off the coast of Norway, called the Storegga slide, triggered a tsunami that flooded the coastlines of northern Europe.
Was the Storegga tsunami the coup de grâce, or had Doggerland already disappeared beneath the sea? Scientists can't yet be sure. But they do know that sea-level rise slowed down after that. Then, around 6,000 years ago, a new people from the south arrived on the thickly forested shores of the British Isles. They came in boats, with sheep, cattle, and cereals. Today the living descendants of these early Neolithic farmers, equipped with vastly more sophisticated technology than their Mesolithic counterparts, once again look to a future contending with a rising sea.
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Appendix II
Doggerland.
Andre Willers
2 Dec 2008
Where are the bodies ?
See New Scientist of 6 Nov 2008 p40 .
An interesting little problem .
There is a dearth of Mesolithic (circa 15 000 to 8 000 years ago) human skeletons in England . Even Neanderthals practiced some funerary rites , even if it only involved eating granny's stringy carcass salted with tears .
Discussion :
Let us step back to about 12 000 years ago . The lower sea-level (due to all the water locked-up in the ice-masses in the ice-age) made south-east England and the continent a contiguous land-mass . The English channel did not exist . In today's North Sea was a low lying 23 000 sq km landmass called Doggerland , nearly as big as England .
This has been mapped (see British Archaeological Reports number 31 , Archaeopress 2007 , by Gaffney et al) using seismic data from oil exploration companies .
Ireland was also contiguous with England (with maybe a narrow channel)
The Gulfstream meant that the southwestern regions had a fairly balmy climate . This became rapidly worse as you moved northwards . What is today England and Ireland were the highlands , ranging from heavily forested in the south to tundra and ice to the north .
Agriculture or domesticated animals had not arrived yet . Humans existed , and existed very well by fishing , fowling and hunting(mostly small game) . In the warmer and more fecund areas to the south , they were sedentary . As the living became more marginal in the colder areas to the north , nomadism increased .
Doggerland was a low-lying , marshy area teeming with birdlife and small game . Fishing abounded in the shallow waters .
If the trench between Ireland and England was open , the gulfstream would have branched up it . The surrounding areas would have been even more of a hunter-gatherer's paradise than Doggerland .
Population densities .
These can be surprisingly large , approaching agricultural levels . See Amerindian population levels in California pre-Spanish . At these levels it involves heavy use of what we call "sustainable ecological principles" . It really is farming , but not involving agriculture .
We are talking about a period of at least 5 000 years here , so there was plenty of time for the population to approach Malthusian and technological limits .
But the populations would be mostly around the coasts .
Funerary practices .
Being humans , every community would have different ones .
Recycling would be popular (cf Hindu , Pacific , African or Evenk sky-burial , where vultures do the honours) .
Burial , sea-burial , cremation , you name it .
Catastrophe .
Tsunamis were the major culprit .
As the temperature increased , big dams of melt-water built up behind the moraine-dams of the large glaciers bordering the north-sea . As they broke , huge waves washed over Doggerland without any warning whatsoever .
Underwater landslides contributed , as well as tectonic activity caused by plate-rebound as the ice burden eased .
Anything human was simply washed away . This included any graves . Any bones would have ended up on the bottom of the North Sea . Trawlers have dredged up human bones for more than a century .
Timeline :
About 9 000 years ago : the Irish Sea forms .
About 8 000 years ago : Doggerland disappears . The North Sea breaks through to form the English Channel . A huge mass of icy North Sea low-salinity water scoured a deep channel past Dover . This would have changed the weather for at least one season , as well as killed most sea-life .
Most surviving humans would have perished of hunger . (They had little in the way of food preservation , or reason to do so .)
Warfare for food left very few survivors .
(Present human civilizations would not survive such a fluctuation either.)
Note that the three known Mesolithic burial sites are on very high ground .
The Aftermath
The tsunamis continued for a thousand years or more . The survivors prudently avoided low-lying areas and eked out a miserable existence on the fortified hilltops . Things gradually improved as the climate became warmer and more stable . The tsunamis became infrequent . Immigrants from the continent brought the agricultural and domesticated animal civilization packages (a-la-Jared Diamond) .
Before you could say New Economic Paradigm , they were building graves that could not be washed away and seismic observatories .
(See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Nazca Lines and seismic prediction" )
Refugees .
This depends on their ship-building technology .
Even a small town can build sea-worthy ships .
The Vikings did it . So did the Greeks . Just about any civilization has done it . The question was: " Is there a profit in it?" A reason , apart from normal human inquisitiveness .
Trade (Cornish gold , tin and copper for Egyptian textiles springs to mind .) The foundations of the Bronze Age .
They had only to hug the coast around to Gibraltar to get into the Med .
Doggerland's major population centres would have been south of London , in the present English Channel .
The catastrophes described above did not happen all at once .
They would have seen their land being eaten up by the rising sea in the south and washed away by tsunamis in the north . (A bit like Florida).
Most would have stayed , assured by their priests and rulers that everything is under control . Those who left would not have gone to England , Ireland or France (too inhospitable) . Spain was better , but not very defensible . An island in a warm climate close to their main trading partner , Egypt ,would be ideal . Crete .
They would already have had trading outposts on Crete . The whole process probably took place about 8 000 to 9 000 years ago .(ie 6 000BC to 7 000BC) .
The Minoan and Egyptian civilizations then developed pari-passu into the Bronze Age .
Which is why the repopulation of England and Ireland proceeded so rapidly . The Minoans had ships and knew where all the mineral deposits were .
Atlantis .
(You didn't think you were getting away without another Atlantis , did you ?)
Plato's description of the destruction of Atlantis sounds like a horrified eyewitness account of a survivor of a tsunami . That rings true .
But he got it from an Egyptian source after about 5 000 years , who in turn got it from an Atlantean source . The periods involved get blurry .
Another puzzling feature is his insistence that the Atlanteans warred against the Athenians . The times don't match , even in his time-line .
But , remember , he was quoting an Egyptian account . From their viewpoint , Athenians were people from Athens (more specifically , the fortress of Akropolis) , not necessarily even Greeks .
The Akropolis had been a fortress since time immemorial .
He was also insistent that Atlantis was an imperially aggressive naval power . This fits in with the above speculation .
The Minoans aggressively established a trading empire across the Med .
An Outpost-Model , later copied by the Phoenicians , Portuguese , Dutch , etc. Characteristic of Sea Powers .
Thera .
Thera was a Minoan colony . Both it and the Minoan civilization was devastated by the explosion of the island and the resultant tsunamis on Crete .
Irony .
Etruscans .
An anomaly .
They were not molested by the Minoans or the Greeks . Even the Romans incorporated most of their civilization .
Likely a fundamentalist religious splinter group of the Minoans (ie Atlanteans) .
The timing seems about right . But well after the diaspora .
This would explain why the Romans were so determined to eradicate British Druidism . Normally , they tolerated just about any religion of a subject people (especially in the Republican era)
But Julius Caesar and all subsequent emperors went out of their way to destroy British Druidism . This is understandable if some of the Mysteries they took over from the Etruscans included religious beliefs about the Old Country . British Druidism would seem an abomination to them .
Architecture :
If you look carefully at Etruscan architecture (called Tuscan now) , you can see correlations with Minoan , Karnak and Carnac styles .
The Egyptians and Greeks were great copy-cats .
Look at the columns of their temples . They were too cheapskate to copy the taper from top-to-bottom Minoan look , so they tacked that ridiculous little flourish on top (see Ionion , Corinthian , Karnak styles)
Geomancy .
The western feng-shui . Not a well-known fact .
There is an extensive and well-developed western geomancy directly derived from the Etruscans via the Romans . The Greek version derived from the Minoans .
All cathedrals , without exception , were built according to these principles .
A whole plethora of rules about ratios , alignment with magnetic poles , etc , etc .
Most good architects are well aware of them , and keep to them . They usually make sense , and clients insist on them .
Traces of Atlantis.
If they used monoliths as pillars , the distinctive Minoan taper might be picked up on deep-sonar , deep-radar or gravitic sensors in the English Channel . Some elements might have been buried under deep silt from the Doggerland ground-mass , but the scouring action of the flood as the English Channel formed makes any small-piece survival unlikely . At the edges , maybe .
Their ship-building technology and architecture was copied quickly . There was no high-tech .
The only drawback is English snobbery . If it comes out that Atlantis was a suburb of London , we will never hear the end of it .
Andre
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Appendix III
Neanderthal Harbours
Andre Willers
5 Apr 2012
"A girl in every port"
Synopsis:
Sea-going Neanderthals survived and merged into the Homo Saps , while their unsophisticated land cousins became extinct .
Discussion :
Evidence:
See NewScientist 3 Mar 2012 p10 "Neanderthals were ancient mariners"
Mousterian (ie Neanderthal) tools has recently been found on Greek islands (Lefkada , Kefalonia ,Zakynthos) that could only have been reached by boats in the last 300 000 years . Crete as well .
Nobody has really looked elsewhere , but Malta would be a good bet .
So would the Orkney Islands . See link below
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/120127-stonehenge-ness-brodgar-scotland-science/
Why go to sea ?
The Neanderthals faced two major challenges :
Overheating and short legs . (Their evolution did not include a period of cursorial raptors , but more cold-adapted , ambush hunters ) .
A dugout canoe solved both problems . Rapid transport and cooling via a quick dip over the side .
We can thus infer that Neanderthals were strong swimmers, with their cold-adaptation subcutaneous fat giving them extra buoyancy and insulation .
Don't sneer at dugout canoes . Melanesians paddled all over the Pacific with them .
The Neanderthal build was ideal for a paddler . Strong upper body , with lots of fast-twitch muscles . And Europe abounded in trees suitable for the purpose . From big barks , to big hardwoods .
Population grew slowly and proceeded by growth at the peripheries . Living was easy by the shores , but lack of large food surpluses kept numbers down .
Still , they got around in the period 300 000 to 30 000 years before present .
They would have preferred the same sites for harbours as later civilizations . So you would have to dig deep to find traces .
The Neanderthal-HomoSaps meeting . (about 50 000 years ago)
This was not a collision , or even a competition initially . The Neanderthals had the best spots (water , harbours , hunting ,etc) . Small family groups of HomoSaps drifted in and joined them . They were cousins , after all (even if the HomoSaps dogs could smell the difference). Interbreeding started .
The Neanderthal civilization was a thin coastal layer , connected by canoe networks , coastal hopping . This was still faster than walking . Living was easy .
The good news spread east . HomoSaps plus dogs were more efficient hunters than Neanderthal ambush hunters . A population pressure developed towards the west , towards easier living (remember , agriculture had not developed yet , but Humans were even then territorial.)
The Neanderthals split into two groups :
1.The inland ones could not compete with HomoSaps plus dogs and became extinct . See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Death of the Neanderthals" Sep 2009 . Repeated in Appendix I for your convenience.
2.The coastal ones (the sophisticated ones) incorporated HomoSaps into their civilization , interbred with them . Initially Lords of the Manor , figuratively speaking , their descendants' genes became mixed in the wash according to well-known genetic principles .
Sheer HomoSaps numbers meant that the present contribution of their genes varies between 4% – 10% , with even higher percentages in certain geographical locations where gene-pools have remained isolated . For instance , there is some evidence that Neanderthals were pale-skinned and red-haired (google it) . Geographical isolation of genepools in the North-Sea islands needs some investigation .
Think of it this way : "Cousin George couldn't make a living anymore in the old family cave , so we invited him and his family to stay here in Cosy Harbour . We have plenty of lazy HomoSaps servants and he can work on one of my canoes."
!Click speakers
Neanderthals were definitely !click speakers . Note their propensity for caves , and large stone heritages . See previous posts on Click language.
Interesting asides:
1.Red hair and temper .
Ambush hunters are known for hair-trigger , explosive adrenalin surges . Neanderthals would then have had an explosive temper that quickly flared and then burned out . Definitely not a cursorial raptor characteristic . Good for quick , decisive combats , but a weakness against a cursorial raptor .
2.Hairy Mediterraneans :
I have seen many Levants , Italians , etc who were extremely hairy . Shaggy is the word . I could never figure out where they came from . Even HomoSaps from cold climates were not that hairy . Now you know why . They had a heavy influx of neanderthal genes . Spread out all over the Med shores .
The Neanderthal Harbours :
A pesky question . They would have preferred the same sites for settlement that later humans did , with subsequent destruction of evidence .
But , there is one difference : Flint .
What is worthwhile transporting in a canoe and can be traded ? Worked tools . This meant Flint at the time . And work it they did . England was rich in flint and was extensively mined .
This happened in fits and starts over a period of at least 1 000 000 years , including the Neanderthal period . The flint had to be dug out , worked , transported. This meant logistics .
The miners might have been supported by local hunting , but the knappers were sophisticated technicians demanding luxuries (ie imports) . The end product had to be exported . This was done by water-transport . Canoes . A currency of some sort (markers of promise , supervised by priests) would be needed .
Fashion : initially , good old-fashioned , workmanlike Mousterian tools were sold all over the place , but the fashion shifted to lighter , fancier , more specialized tools .
So , before the Bronze-age civilization there was the Neolithic civilization , encompassing about the same trade-routes and using the same the same shippers . The Neolithic civilization did not collapse , except for some ports . It segued into the Bronze-age civilization .
But Bronze-age civilizations would not need the same harbours as Neolithic civilizations . These harbours should still be reasonably pristine .
Where to look in England :
There is a whole clutch of flint mines near the South Coast of England (Cissbury) . The coastline kept changing , so look for least-effort routes from Cissbury to the sea .
The harbour would probably be no more than an inlet that would allow a large canoes to ground safely . But there would be an associated warehouse and guardpost .
Pirates : a high-value shipment like worked arms and tools would attract pirates . The shipments would then pulse in well-armed convoys . The detritus from these land and sea-convoys would be fertile fields for archaeologists , especially since they would be untouched by later non-neolithic civilizations . So look for detritus middens at strategic points near a old harbour . While the coastline would have changed extensively , strategic lookouts and defensive points changes much slower . So , you could probably use Google-Earth to rule out indefensible positions (most of them) . The remainder can be done in detail .
This is an important question .
Were Neanderthals more fertile with HomoSaps than with other Neanderthals ?
This is a distinct possibility . Epigenetic factors that evolved to limit fertility were inoperative in the crossbreeds . If they had children , they had lots of them , with no built-in limitation .
Pandemic of Fertility :
Was the worldwide population explosion from 1700 AD onward related ?
The answer seems to be yes. The act of Union of Scotland and England in 1704 exposed the rest of the world to prions evolved on some Scottish Island . These prions (folded proteins) inactivated epigenetic controls on fertility . They were very infectious . The pandemic of Fertility followed the well-known principles . It should be possible to find Person(0) , where it all started . Some mixture of Neanderthal and HomoSaps genes required for any immune response . HomoSaps without Neanderthal genes will just remain switched-on into high-fertility .
The cure: now that you know what to look for , engineer a prion that locks it .
And the Denisovans?
The third type of humans . The same principle seems to hold . They spread over the Pacific Islands . Fertility controls were deactivated and some nasty things ensued . But there should be clues on how to re-activate the epigenetic controls , or at least de-activate the prions responsible for de-activating the epigenetic controls . Compare with Scottish example .
Come , ladies and gentlemen .
You have enough clues now to solve this problem .
But I will give you a further clue :
Look at the Plant-Herbivore Wars . Some Plants want more humans without limit . Look at the husks of the seeds , not the contents . Especially after boiling .
Malthus was wrong .
Overpopulation is an epidemical disease , not a natural condition .
The overpopulation is caused by a disease , usually plant-induced .
Plant Power , anyone ?
Andre
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Appendix III.I
Death of the Neanderthals .
Andre Willers.
5 Sep 2009
Synopsis:
The Neanderthals died out because their legs were too short .
Discussion :
See Scientific American Aug 2009 p34 " Twilight of Neanderthals"
Start quote p 39 :
"the energetic cost of locomotion was 32 percent higher in Neanderthals than anatomically modern humans."
End quote .
What does this mean ?
They ran slower . With a heavier body . Heavy infantry vs light infantry .
The multiplier :
Rapidly varying climatic effects pushed Neanderthal communities into 3 subgroups (p37) , Western Europe , Southern Europe and Western Asia . These types of communities survived the genetic isolation in previous episodes by the occasional migration of males . It only takes a few males to revitalize genetic diversity .
Males' role in the scheme of things . Cf equivalent occurrences in Pacific islands
circa 17th and 18th centuries .
But humans were cursorial raptors .
Adapted to long-distance chases .
They inderdicted enough Neanderthal males trying to reach other enclaves to ensure a genetic diversity collapse .
Dogs .
Dogs (wolves) were fellow travelers with humans . Not domesticated then (and some think never really domesticated . Dogs can still interbreed with wolves . There has been no fundamental genome change . Genetically , dogs are still undomesticated . Notice how fast they go feral .) .
Humans could run with them and the chase enforced a pack-leadership type of social organization .
Wolves were (and are)smart enough to change their behaviour to ensure their survival. Both humans and wolves ate better if they shared prey according to pack protocols .
Humans-Dogs (wolves).
This partnership proved fatal to Neanderthals .
1.Genetic diversity was fatally impaired by interdiction of groups of males trying to travel to another enclave . While a bunch of Neanderthals could see off a bunch of humans , they still had to eat . And the faster dogs and humans chased all game away .
Or , more likely , let the Neanderthals make the kill (usually whooly rhinocerous) , then chase them away from the carcase . They could do this because they could run faster and for longer and had projectile weapons (spears) . The really classical advantage of mobility .
These would have been small groups of adventurous humans . Juveniles . the equivalent of soccer yobbos.
2.The Human-dog system enveloped the Neanderthal enclaves and simply removed their food supply .
3. MHC and dogs .
Dogs (or semi-wild wolves) would have learned to recognize the scent of Neanderthals . These would have been exterminated as enemies of the Pack .
The only surviving Neanderthal genomic material would be in those with MHC tolerable to dogs .
For some reason , Anatolian Sheepdogs keep on popping up in my mind . These were and are actually the only surviving , working wolf-killers , but they might have learned to tolerate Neanderthal MHC . (On the principle of the enemy of my enemy is my friend .)
So , if you were looking for some Neanderthal genes , the wilds of Anatolia would be a good place to look . Especially if there are lot of Anatolian sheep-dogs around . The Neanderthal anatomical features would have been very diluted .
Ie , it would not have been genetic incompatibility that prevented miscegenation , but the dogs not tolerating an alien .
These would long predate Bronze age , Aryan , Celtic , Persian , Greek , Roman or Turkic populations .
Old , old .
4.Neanderthals could not compete
Because wolves would not adopt them into the pack . They were not cursorial raptors. Their legs were too short .
5. Now do you see why humans run ?
Running releases aromatic compounds (pheromones , MHC's , etc) that defines a person as human . Your dog requires walkies not just for exercise , but to reassure himself that you are still a member of the pack . Humans are now so washed , deodorized and scented that a poor dog can only recognize his fuehrer if he sweats a bit .
The same is true for inter-human reactions .
Huddling together in gymnasiums .
Or even intra-human reactions .
The parts of a human interacting with each other , defining boundaries .
But all your organs still need chemical communication to tell each other they are part of the same pack .
6. The loneliness of the long-distance runner .
Actually , he is not lonely at all . He is enveloped in a cloud of sweat and aromatic chemicals that tells his identity and position in the pack . His ancestors are all with him . His footfalls entrain him .
Hence the effects of even slight breezes . Washing away the effluvium . A top athlete will perform better with a slight breeze from behind (reinforcing) , while the others will perform better with a breeze to the side or from front . (Reducing self-limitation.)
A heavier breeze from behind will actually reduce performance of the top athlete . These boundaries can be calculated exactly .
See Tim Noakes on fatigue and other self-limiting mechanisms . Olfactory and aural mechanisms are major pack governing systems .
7. School curricula
Can you see why running fast or long is so important to humans ? It defines them .
Thousands of years later , and children are still measured by these skills . Major planet-wide competitions are held .
8. Click , Chi and running and breathing .
Pronounce Chi the correct , old way :
!xi : A tongue click on exhalation.
!xo : A tongue click on inhalation.
In long distance , endurance running this measures the amount of oxygen inhaled or CO2 exhaled , depending on the patterns of clicks and tongue conformations .
And all those Eastern Mystical Ways ?
The force of Chi ?
Just another click .
A running song would automatically evolve in click-language in optimal configurations . A fast chasing song , or a slowlong-chase song or a rushing song . All automatically balancing O2/CO2 with slow-twitch/fast twitch muscle requirements .
You can see how songs evolved . Nobody is going to sit around saying !xi - !xo at every inhalation-exhalation . (Except the demented priesthood) . The rest simply made up songs (working ditties ) . The origins of mantras .
"Om mane padme sum" a well known mantra .
"!xm !xm!xn !xp!xd(left twist of tongue) !xme(right twist of tongue) !xsm(a fat click with a left twist to the tongue,recovering from the previous right twist of the tongue )
Combat : They were formidable heavy infantry . See Etruscans below .
As you can see , not a language for faint-tongued .
9.Click-poetry .
From the Lescaux caves : a free translation :
"!xp-!xp-!xop joined the thunder of the hooves . But I still see her shy backward look and hear her in the hesitant patter of the wind in the trees ."
10. Etruscans .
The indications are that Etruscans were remnants of Neanderthal genetic mixtures that fled from Anatolia circa 1200 BC .
Markers :
1.Big noses .
Neanderthals were cold-adapted . Over at least 500 000 years of climatic vicissitudes . This is a very strong positive adaptation to dry climates , whether cold or hot . Genes for this would have spread rapidly .
Greek noses were straight . Roman noses were , well , Roman .
So the Etruscans came in before the Greek irruption .
Roman noses came from the Etruscans (like most else Roman) .
2. Click language
Note the puzzling lack of recognizable inscriptions on their many tombs .
The inscriptions are there , but just not recognized .
Try Click-resonances as described above and in previous posts .
3. Suffixes in Latin .
A typical result of a click ur-language . The vowels are the opening and closing of the jaw after click , with some twisting and guttural effects .
4. Combat styles .
Heavy infantry .Most telling . Most people assume that the Roman Heavy Infantry style comes from the Greek Hoplites . Actually, it comes from the Etruscan , and there is some evidence that the Greeks learned a lot about this from the Etruscans .
Why else trade with them ? Greeks were Yankee or Viking traders : they only traded if they could not take .
So , if you want Neanderthal genes , go to Tuscany .
PS. Tuscan hounds (ie Anatolian dogs) were renowned in Roman days .Still is .
Nice doggie .
Andre
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