> > If the results are correct, it means they were physically close enough > together for intercourse, and that they were biologically compatible. > To put love into intercourse is unfounded romanticism. It might have > been rape. The social circumstances could be anywhere between > respectful and peaceful coexistence, constant war, or assimilation > through slavery. > > My point was that if you look at modern man's known history and tally > the societies that have not resorted to the latter two, you get a > pretty short list. The likelihood that what we are today has evolved > from something both expansionistic and exceedingly peaceful is > pitifully small in my opinion. >
As I mentioned before, you can't take historical behaviour as a reliable guide to prehistoric behaviour. We don't need to have been 'expansionistic' as you put it to have peacefully colonised so much of the globe in the prehistoric era. There are many other possibilities. Populations often move to avoid conflict over resources, particularly when they are not tied to a specific territory by agriculture. There are also frequently cultural norms which cause groups to split when they reach a certain size and move into new territory, and of course changes in the environment also drive migrations. The people involved don't need to be aware that they are migrating, or have any type of expansionist or exploratory agenda, although we like to flatter ourselves that they did. By following and exploiting a sufficiently rich food source such as the shoreline, people could have made very small and peaceful migrations to Australia, for instance, in a relatively short time. Each individual migration may have been imperceptible to the people involved, but looking back through the depth of time it appears to us like a massive, and rapid journey. When the climatic conditions changed to open a pathway into Europe, people probably entered using the same or similar mechanisms for all previous migrations, following shorelines and river valleys, and tracking herds drifting into new places as a result of climate change. The Neandertal population was always extremely small - there was an awful lot of room in Europe to expand into, and no shortage of resources. Some estimates based on genetic variability in DNA samples suggest a maximum of about 70,000 individual Neandertals at any one time from about 70,000 years ago. They were probably not competing very much for resources with us, and it's likely that meetings between us and them were few and far between, but with such a small population so widely dispersed (they ranged from Gibraltar to the Steppes) it seems very improbable to me that there would have been enough violent contact to put them out of business. They were either on their way out anyway because of environmental changes, or the little bit of extra competition arising from our remote presence pushed a struggling population over the edge. The idea that we deliberately killed them all is just not very parsimonious as an explanation. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
