Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by spiraldancing on Tuesday January 28 2020, @07:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the shallow-end-of-the-ocean dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There may be a little more evidence to suggest that Neanderthals waded, swam, and even dove to gather resources along the shores of the Mediterranean. A new study claims Neanderthals at a coastal cave in Italy waded or dove to get clamshells straight off the seafloor to make scraping tools.

Neanderthals who lived at Grotta dei Moscerini around 100,000 years ago used the sturdy shells of Mediterranean smooth clams to make sharp-edged scraping tools. Clamshells wash up on beaches all the time, but University of Colorado archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues say that some of the worked shell tools at Moscerini look less like flotsam and more like someone scooped them off the seafloor while they were still fresh.

[...]

If Villa and her colleagues are right, Neanderthals at Moscerini may have practiced free diving, and they certainly did a lot of wading. Mediterranean smooth clams usually live in at least half a meter (1.6 feet) of water, and usually more. They bury themselves just beneath the sand, and it’s easy to spot where their feeding siphons reach up to the water above. Neanderthals could have easily scooped them up by hand if they were willing to go deep enough.

Members of the hominin family tree have used shells to cut and scrape things for at least 430,000 years, when Homo erectus groups on the shores of Java used freshwater mussel shells as tools. Even after agriculture reached most of Europe during the Neolithic period around 9,000 years ago, people still used mussel shells to clean hides and finish the surfaces of ceramic vases. But usually, people just picked shells up and used them, without any kind of reworking to make them better tools. Moscerini is one of the only known sites were people were working shells into a particular sharp-edged shape, as if it were flint.

PLOS ONE, 2020. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226690


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:54AM (#950521)

    What's the matter with these researchers - they never went near a river or lake when they were kids?

    Quite possibly not. The researchers of today were probably shuttled between school, the Little Einsteins program, the supplementary math classes and debate club their entire childhood. Forget about unstructured exploration. There could be child molesters lurking in the neighborhood, and they could catch the cold outside.

    Quoting from the paper:

    The technical competence, capacity for innovation, and broad knowledge of the environmental resources have a greater time depth among non-modern humans than commonly acknowledged,” wrote Villa and her colleagues. In other words, Neanderthals were smarter and more competent than we’ve given them credit for until recently.

    Hmm, that's like racist, isn't it?