Why I find it unbearable to watch most documentaries on the stone age

[Nutsack]

Have you ever thought about how in, it seems every single documentary about the stone age, they always have to portray early humans in a terribly bizarre and, I would say, disrespectful manner. Now maybe my opinion and beliefs of what the stone age and it's people would have been like differs from others, I am by no means any expert of this historical period. But I am aware that this historical period also spans a huge timeline, and that it exceeds our own species of Homo Sapien and includes many others such as Neanderthals.

I believe that ever since we began discovering stone age skeletons and cave paintings, mostly back in the 1800's society has had a very tainted view of our ancient ancestors. We often portray them as dumb and stupid, unable to talk and as if they all live in caves. This is where we get our "caveman" stereotype from, as so often shown in the Geico commercial - "so easy even a caveman could do it". And the caveman in question is a Neanderthal, which I find odd because supposedly the Neanderthal was at least as intelligent as we are, or similar to us. Some even claim that the Neanderthal were smarter than us because, as I believe, they had larger brain cavities (although I am aware that larger brains doesn't necessarily mean greater IQ).

Now I would like to emphasize on two things that I consider are most frequently poorly portrayed in almost all documentaries - body language, and speech. In almost all stone age documentaries I've seen, many of the re-enactors seem to act upon an extremely bias understanding of the people they are supposed to portray, as if they or the director has a huge prejudice against stone age people, perhaps based from our society, cultural and popular conceptions. I honestly don't understand why most people have the understanding that stone age people were mentally challenged. Given that they probably had to endure far harder lives than we do today, and they managed to get through it, I would like to argue that perhaps we are the ones who are retarded in comparison to them. Also because we seem to have a complete misunderstanding about that whole period doesn't help either.

As a Youtube user commented in the following video: I always find it annoying when actors trying to act like cave-men by taking on a limping hobble. Early men must have been strong, agile, fast super-athletes, like most wild animals are.

Please watch following clip at exactly 4:40 minutes and you will understand what I am talking about. This is just one of many examples of what I believe is poorly portrayed stone age society.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Who the hell would run like that from a tiger? Now come on, you got to admit that was pretty funny!

Now, the second part I would like to deliver is speech. In almost all documentaries I've seen, early homo sapiens are portrayed as having a cave-manesque language. What I mean by that is they speak like they were mentally challenged. They also often raise their voices at each other for no reason at all, nothing like we would talk to each other today. You all probably understand what I mean.

I don't consider it to be a huge leap of faith to at least assume that stone age Homo Sapiens had a language somewhat comparable to our own. What I base that off of is that they have the same intelligence and vocal cord capability, so why the hell should they not be able to speak like us? I would also like to argue that Neanderthals probably had language skills comparable to our own, and even made rock art and I'm going to make a wild guess on religion too. But, I would also like to extend these things to earlier Hominids. Do you honestly assume that if you went back in time to the stone age and mingled with the local populations, learned their language and managed to have a conversation with one of them, that all they would say was "OH, ME LIKE ROCK! ME THROW ROCK AT TIGER!! ME LIKE SEX!!!!! ME PUT DICK IN TREE!!!!!!!"

The video I linked to earlier I can't stand to watch. The entire film is a huge shame to our ancestors and completely disrespectful. They completely underestimate our early ancestors.

So my question is, as a society are we completely blatantly wrong about our perception of early hominids and homo sapiens? Also perhaps more questions should arise later but for right now I'd like to see what you think.

I believe we have a prejudice against "cavemen", as a society. We have throughout history always believed we are greater than animals, and most religions reflect that we are made in the image of God. We are the best. For some reason we draw the line somewhere between where hunter-gatherer/stone age society ends, and where civilization as we know it began. Because as soon as we start seeing pyramids we quickly admire ourselves and pat ourselves on the back. We seem to ignore the fact that we have changed very little since the stone age and are genetically almost identical, so why that major difference?

Also, one last thing before I'm done. Many documentaries give us the credit for the extinction of the mammoth. I've heard it argued, and successfully so, that even if we hunted the mammoth with spears we wouldn't have been able to take one down. People, we are talking about a ing mammoth here. It's larger than an elephant, which people don't even hunt today without rifles. I highly doubt we threw spears at mammoths, but I'm almost certain we devised traps instead. We humans use our brain, not our brawn when it comes to these things. I hate seeing scenes where 5-10 humans surround a mammoth supposedly taking it down with wooden sticks, like the mammoth wasn't going to completely destroy them all if that happened. What I consider more likely is that humans dug huge ditches in narrow places and tried to make the mammoths converge in that area with fire or whatever. The pits would trap a mammoth and might have had sticks and mud in it. This is a much more likely scenario than a bunch of guys throwing sticks at the largest land mammal with the thickest skin and expecting to survive at the end of it.

[athanaric]

Good points. Also, I couldn't help noticing they filmed this documentary in America, not in Europe. The background noises give it away.

[Lord Baal]

I remember seeing one really neat documentary about our ancestry where they used, you know, normal dudes (I remember one bald guy and a girl) simply doing their business around barely naked, , but very realistically, in practice it won't be very different from let's say of some African, American or Australian aborigines. In the documentary they found a family of Neanderthal, and those where definitively not the stupid stereotype. They were somewhat squatter and fatter (stronger), but as intelligent as the Humans.

People forget that Neanderthals were just as we a "pinnacle" of evolution at is time, and I bet they where as dangerous (if not more) than any other human.

[John I Tzimisces]

I agree almost totally fully and I'll post more later because I'm rather busy at the moment!

Except for the neanderthal rock art bit. There's no conclusive proof the neanderthals had a creative side as we think of it. Those "seals" on some stalactites in some cave in spain almost certainly can't be neanderthal (this was in the news earlier this year) and the only thing linking the art to neanderthals is carbon dated ash that was found in the vicinity of the paintings (rather than the paintings themselves, which, if they were made by neanderthals, possibly/probably wouldn't even be visible because stalactites grow over time...)

As for their language it's highly debated. They had genes linked to speech that we also possess (the particular mutation of Fox P2) but A. there's no empirical evidence they spoke (duh, since none are around to show us) and B. it's possible their throats wouldn't have been able to produce as varied a range of sounds as we can.

Also I'll see if I can find a chart that shows the earliest known instances of certain human innovations we describe as modern (IE, things Homo Sapiens do that no other hominins do). You can basically see there wasn't a switch that went off like 40 thousand years ago and suddenly we got brainy and got good posture, but rather starting like 200 thousand years ago there's a kind of staggered progression of innovations.

[hellheaven1987]

IExcept for the neanderthal rock art bit. There's no conclusive proof the neanderthals had a creative side as we think of it.

Interesting enough BBC today just has a new article about Neanderthal.

Our evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals were harvesting feathers from birds in order to use them as personal ornaments, a study suggests.

The authors say the result provides yet more evidence that Neanderthal thinking ability was similar to our own.

The analysis even suggests they had a preference for dark feathers, which they selected from birds of prey and corvids - such as ravens and rooks.

Details of the research appear in Plos One journal.

Numerous tribal peoples from history have also adorned themselves with feathers, and the authors stress that they are not suggesting we learned the practice from Neanderthals.

Feather ornamentation could in fact go back even further, to a common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Clive Finlayson and Kimberly Brown from the Gibraltar Museum, along with colleagues from Spain, Canada and Belgium, examined a database of 1,699 ancient sites across Eurasia, comparing data on birds at locations used by humans with those that were not.

They found a clear association between raptor and corvid remains and sites that had been occupied by humans.

They then looked more closely at bird bones found at Neanderthal sites in Gibraltar, including Gorham's and Vanguard cave, near the base of the rock: "The Neanderthals had cut through and marked the bones. But what were they cutting? We realised a lot of it was wing bones, particularly those holding large primary feathers," Prof Finlayson told BBC News.

Co-author Jordi Rosell, from Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, said: "We saw the cut-marks on bird bones at one cave, and then started seeing them in others. I think it's a common aspect to the caves in this rock."

Juan Jose Negro, director of the Donana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, who is another co-author, said: "The wings make up less than 20% of the weight of the body of those birds," adding, "there is no meat in the wings - they were not consuming these animals.

"The only explanation left is the use of those long feathers."

Not only this, but the ancient humans appeared to have a preference for birds with dark or black plumage. Species represented at the sites include ravens, crows, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, various types of eagle and vulture, red and black kites, kestrels and falcons.

Source

[Exarch]

maybe you're watching the wrong 'documentary'?

[MrMofo]

The 'prejudice' is largely in part to thinking that we're some kind of endpoint, and therefore our ancestors were somehow 'unfinished.'

This misguided mindset was only exacerbated by the first finds of modern archaeology (Not to mention that fledgling archaeology was all about classification of different races, and pretty much proving that the white man was superior because he had the most stuff).

Neaderthals are named after skeletons found in the Neander valley in France. The first articulated skeleton of a Neanderthal man was put together wrong. It was the skeleton of an old man with arthritis or osteoporosis. I forget at the moment. He was bent over and stunted anyway, but then because he couldn't possibly be as svelte and lethal as modern humans (ie: 19th century Europeans), their prejudice made him furtherly degenerate.

They then popularized their find, and that prejudice has stuck for centuries.

[athanaric]

Neaderthals are named after skeletons found in the Neander valley in France.

You mean Germany.

Although there are theories of interbreeding of the Homo Neaderthalis with the Homo Sapiens, that would indeed make them part of our ancestry, if you know what I mean, grwwwlll...

Well according to what they taught us in university, we're actually the same species, just different subspecies (H. s. sapiens and H. s. neanderthalensis). So it's more like a European Brown Bear and a Grizzly Bear mating. Nothing too unusual about that.

[MrMofo]

You mean Germany.

Oops. You're very right. Time to mail back my degree.

On a side note. Robert Sawyer's Homonid books are rather interesting.

[Nutsack]

Given that Neanderthals were larger, stronger and stuff, I believe it's safe to assume they had to have more energy intake. They had to eat more food than us. It's very easy to assume that because they had to eat more, they would have to live in smaller societies (because any given territory will be able to feed less Neanderthals than Sapiens).

I believe one of the major reasons is because Homo Sapiens were far more numerous than Neanderthals.

Not only that, because of how Neanderthals had stronger/larger muscles, they would have had to spend more time feeding their body and less time waging war/creating things/whatever else. And because the Neanderthals were larger and demanded more energy intake - creating new life would have been slightly harder as well. I think we can safely assume that a Neanderthal pregnancy might have been a little more demanding than a Sapiens and perhaps a little longer.

[Phier]

Given that Neanderthals were larger, stronger and stuff, I believe it's safe to assume they had to have more energy intake. They had to eat more food than us. It's very easy to assume that because they had to eat more, they would have to live in smaller societies (because any given territory will be able to feed less Neanderthals than Sapiens).

I believe one of the major reasons is because Homo Sapiens were far more numerous than Neanderthals.

Not only that, because of how Neanderthals had stronger/larger muscles, they would have had to spend more time feeding their body and less time waging war/creating things/whatever else. And because the Neanderthals were larger and demanded more energy intake - creating new life would have been slightly harder as well. I think we can safely assume that a Neanderthal pregnancy might have been a little more demanding than a Sapiens and perhaps a little longer.

I would assume then we should wipe out the pigmes, before they dominate us all?

[John I Tzimisces]

Neaderthals are named after skeletons found in the Neander valley in France. The first articulated skeleton of a Neanderthal man was put together wrong. It was the skeleton of an old man with arthritis or osteoporosis. I forget at the moment. He was bent over and stunted anyway, but then because he couldn't possibly be as svelte and lethal as modern humans (ie: 19th century Europeans), their prejudice made him furtherly degenerate.

They then popularized their find, and that prejudice has stuck for centuries.

As others said it was germany but that's a minor detail, they were all over france too. Also, it was the latter: an elderly male. I believe he lost an arm, "recovered" (because the bone healed over the break), he was missing most of his teeth (again, the bone grew over the cavity formerly occupied by the teeth), and was suffering from arthritis. I think he's thought to have been in his 40s or 50s (there is evidence that Neanderthals aged faster than homo sapiens as well, but this is based on the remains of juveniles. Things like three year old neanderthals resembling in size/proportions a 5 year old anatomically modern human)

Various early ideas about the "first" neanderthals' skeletons actually included their being escaped mental patients or, get this, Polish people (...this is late 19th century germany bear in mind). But yes, this idea of Neanderthals being knuckle-dragging dummies barely eking out an existence existing solely to be replaced by well-groomed homo sapiens was eventually popularized as well, despite the efforts of archaeologists not even too far into the 20th century (Carlton Coon semi-famously posited that if you gave a neanderthal a shave and a fedora you wouldn't really look at him twice).

If anything this first specimen tells us it's that Neanderthals possessed in them the capacity to value people who couldn't take care of themselves (not including children I mean.) I believe a similar trait can be inferred from remains of the first Homo Erectus found outside of Africa, in Georgia (sometimes referred to as Homo Georgicus...)

[Lord Baal]

John I Tzimisces I agree, but even with a lesser variety of sounds they could still have some kind of language. Sadly that's almost impossible to determinate 100% unless we find viable DNA and are able to clone one or travel back in time and see. When any of those two things happens I gladly eat my hat with cheese and bread.

MrMofo, I agree there too. Not that the Neaderthals where actually our direct ancestors, but that too is a commonly accepted wrong opinion. Although there are theories of interbreeding of the Homo Neaderthalis with the Homo Sapiens, that would indeed make them part of our ancestry, if you know what I mean, grwwwlll...

[Lord Baal]

But with great differences of course. Is obvious if interbreeding indeed happened to a significant degree that we don't got much from Neanderthals, which in returns kind of prove it didn't happen to a great deal. But I think there's a disease or condition, I think it was to do with the mandibular size of the person, that is speculated to have entered into our gene pool from the Neanderthals. But my memory is too shady about it, so don't believe me.

[Col. Tartleton]

Even assuming the most exotic looking features a Neanderthal might have we're still talking about someone who would pass as a modern person. I'm fairly confident the artist people responsble for 99% of the depictions are over-exaggerating the Neanderthal features. They can't not do it, they have a societal bias and they've never actually seen that skull with a face on it.



This random white guy makes a fair case he looks pretty similar (obviously not identical) to a neanderthal. From other angles it's more convincing. Other than his nose and brow he's got the head shape down. He also points out from a younger picture orthodontics changed his face slightly.

We're really talking about an ethnic group, not a species.

I mean hell, Russian Boxer Nikolai Valuev with a beard is just a much larger stereotype neanderthal and he's perfectly human.

[John I Tzimisces]

Even assuming the most exotic looking features a Neanderthal might have we're still talking about someone who would pass as a modern person. I'm fairly confident the artist people responsble for 99% of the depictions are over-exaggerating the Neanderthal features. They can't not do it, they have a societal bias and they've never actually seen that skull with a face on it.



This random white guy makes a fair case he looks pretty similar (obviously not identical) to a neanderthal. From other angles it's more convincing. Other than his nose and brow he's got the head shape down. He also points out from a younger picture orthodontics changed his face slightly.

We're really talking about an ethnic group, not a species.

I mean hell, Russian Boxer Nikolai Valuev with a beard is just a much larger stereotype neanderthal and he's perfectly human.

Neanderthals were definitely not an ethnic group, and that guy does not look like a neanderthal.
Here's a handy list of features that differ just off the top of my head.
-Nose, neanderthals had wide noses in conjunction with very large sinus cavities.
-brow, neanderthals had rounded supra-orbital toruses (tori?) larger and thicker than what we see in modern humans.
-chin. That we have chins is the result of our having smaller teeth than other human species in proportion to the size of our jaws. That said Neanderthals also exhibited taurodontism which is off the top of my head only exhibited in modern humans with rare mutations or in persons with Down's syndrome or things like that. Neanderthals also exhibit a retromolar gap, something which is unique to them, IIRC.
-forehead. Neanderthals had similarly sized brains (although perhaps not in proportion to their bodies) to us, however the shape of their cranium more closely resembles those of our common ancestors than any modern human braincase. As such their brains were football shaped rather than bulging upwards creating taller foreheads in modern humans.
-he doesn't display mid-facial prognathism. Modern humans display orthognathism, which is to say our faces are relatively flat. Neanderthal skulls display a projection of the middle of the face. Possibly related to how their faces seem to have been adapted for both extreme cold and blows to the face.
-on the rear of his skull he does not display an occipital bun.

also tarleton?? http://archure.net/#neanderthal ???? where on earth did you find this my eyes are bleeding who the is this guy

@hellheaven That's neat and all but the logical conclusion is not necessarily that they were using large feathers for cultural purposes, just that they may have had a use for large feathers. That neanderthals may have used projectiles akin to atalatls is subject to debate, but if they did it's possible they used feathers as stabilizers for the dart, akin to fletching.

[Col. Tartleton]

Neanderthals were definitely not an ethnic group, and that guy does not look like a neanderthal.

They are an ethnic group, they're homo sapiens just like us. Only shorter, with funny features, thick muscular builds, huge beards, and a preference for cavernous lifestyles.

Here's a handy list of features that differ just off the top of my head.
-Nose, neanderthals had wide noses in conjunction with very large sinus cavities.

Like a dwarf.

-brow, neanderthals had rounded supra-orbital toruses (tori?) larger and thicker than what we see in modern humans.

Like a dwarf.

-chin. That we have chins is the result of our having smaller teeth than other human species in proportion to the size of our jaws. That said Neanderthals also exhibited taurodontism which is off the top of my head only exhibited in modern humans with rare mutations or in persons with Down's syndrome or things like that. Neanderthals also exhibit a retromolar gap, something which is unique to them, IIRC.

Like a dwarf.

-forehead. Neanderthals had similarly sized brains (although perhaps not in proportion to their bodies) to us, however the shape of their cranium more closely resembles those of our common ancestors than any modern human braincase. As such their brains were football shaped rather than bulging upwards creating taller foreheads in modern humans.

Like a dwarf.

-he doesn't display mid-facial prognathism. Modern humans display orthognathism, which is to say our faces are relatively flat. Neanderthal skulls display a projection of the middle of the face. Possibly related to how their faces seem to have been adapted for both extreme cold and blows to the face.

Yeah. Blows to the face and extreme cold. Like a dwarf.

-on the rear of his skull he does not display an occipital bun.

Yeah. Like a dwarf.

also tarleton?? http://archure.net/#neanderthal ???? where on earth did you find this my eyes are bleeding who the is this guy

Internet.

I was punking the thread.

[Enzo]

If we're talking about something like homo eretus they would have been something more like that than modern humans.

[Enzo]

A neanderthal brought up in the 21st century would pass for a regular guy. He would look a little distinctive but some people do anyway.

[John I Tzimisces]

I honestly prefer this reconstruction. Happier if nothing else.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: