Nature is reporting on structures built 175 000 years ago deep inside a cave in France.
These structures are uniquely old, and are made from stalagmites which have been broken off and piled together to form what look like walls. There are smaller mounds in the centre which look to me like sockets for posts.
What is so delightful about this is that we have tended think of the Neanderthals as fairly brutal, a sort of sub-human D-stream draft of the perfection that is us. It's lovely to get another shock to make us re-think that a bit.
Building these structures 330m into a cave is impressive. Building anything 330m into a cave is impressive. There was no light there. None. It would have been pitch black, and literally impossible to see anything at all. Anyone in there would have been effectively blind. So fire must have been used, not only to explore the cave and find the location, but also to light any construction work.
That's stunning technology from a bunch of people we fondly imagine to have been weighed down by overconfident eyebrows and limited to grunting.
As a species, we seem to be programmed to over-estimate out own importance, and massively to under-estimate the place, role and significance of others.
Think about space, and the fact the we consider ourselves the only intelligent life in the universe, in spite of being incapable of exploring even our own tiny solar system.
Think about history, where the assertion of superiority has shaped nations.
Those Neanderthals were not so shabby, and would have been at the contemporary cutting edge of technology. That's a thought I want to hang on to.
No comments:
Post a Comment