{"id":7699,"date":"2012-01-06T17:36:45","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T22:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=7699"},"modified":"2012-01-07T18:15:53","modified_gmt":"2012-01-07T23:15:53","slug":"neanderthal-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=7699","title":{"rendered":"Neanderthal genius"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about a review I recently read in the New York Times of a book called How to Think like a Neanderthal<\/a>. The book attempts to reconstruct, from available evidence, how Neanderthals might have thought about things.<\/p>\n

One thing I learned from the review is that Neanderthals developed a very impressive technology to make the spears they used for hunting — both a way to create the sharp-edged spear-head, and a way to lash that spear-head to a wooden shaft (which is not so simple to do, given the materials available at the time).<\/p>\n

Another thing I learned is that even though homo neanderthalensis<\/i> spent quite a lot of years in proximity to humans (the Cro-Magnons), Neanderthal culture never adapted their human neighbors’ far better spear-making technology. If they had, their chances for species survival would have been much better.<\/p>\n

Which leads me to conjecture that Neanderthals, in general, were not able to learn new technologies, whereas some particular<\/i> Neanderthals, were capable of not only learning new technologies, but inventing them. In other words, Neanderthals had the equivalent of super-geniuses, so advanced that they could invent new technologies, even though their friends and neighbors were not even capable of imitating new technologies.<\/p>\n

It would have been cool to meet one of those people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about a review I recently read in the New York Times of a book called How to Think like a Neanderthal. The book attempts to reconstruct, from available evidence, how Neanderthals might have thought about things. One thing I learned from the review is that Neanderthals developed a very impressive technology to … Continue reading “Neanderthal genius”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7699"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7699"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7704,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7699\/revisions\/7704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}