At 08:58 04/06/2003 -0400, you wrote:
I've been poking through some literature on Neanderthals recently, and a couple of things struck me as being important to their demise or survival as compared with Homo Sapiens. One is the distinction between foragers and collectors. In "The Last Neanderthal" (Macmillan, 1999) Ian Tattersall suggests that Hn were foragers having to move around a lot in order to find food.In any such small group, the disabling of one or more significant foragers through illness or death could have been quite disastrous.
- "This is largely a matter for speculation, but in general, Neanderthal sites do not suggest that social groups were big. Particularly if they were practicing radial mobility, groups could not have been very large, for forays from a central base in search of sustenance for an extended group would quickly have become impossibly long. Perhaps ten or a dozen adults at most, plus children of various ages, would have been a likely size for Neanderthal social groups."
In contrast, Hss was a collector, tending to live in one place and knowing quite precisely where to get various types of food and probably devising means of keeping competing species such as Hn away from important sources. Living in one place, knowing where to find food and how to get it, would likely have meant larger and more specialized communities, and therefore a far better chance of survival.
Ed Weick
In most social mammals of small group size the insurance against population collapse is by means of having an excess of itinerant bachelor males who prowl settled groups hoping to find a place in one of them as soon as there is a vacancy (or fight their way in) and be able to breed. Thus the deaths of paternal males within groups could be made up almost instantly. The accidental deaths of females of child-bearing age could not be made up quite so quickly of course but, on the other hand, they do not expose themselves to danger as much as the males (with their lower genetic threshold to risk-taking).
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
