Beautiful Bone Carving From 51,000 Years Ago Is Changing Our View of Neanderthals

Claude J Greengrass

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Scientists have now announced the discovery of a 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer bone which was produced by Neanderthals in the Harz Mountains, now northern Germany. The carvings on the deer bone are precisely and artistically arranged into chevron patterns.

Previous evidence of symbolic and artistic traits in Neanderthals has been scarce, but the new findings raise exciting questions about how complex Neanderthal behavior might truly have been.

more here


...sorry. no image. CS doesn't like .webp images
 
Convert it to a .jpg and delete the transparency:

carved_deer_bone_neanderthal.900.jpg


Interesting article.
 
Yes, interesting. They keep turning up much brighter than we've previously thought! Art, tools, behavior, language, etc.
 
They must be just a more isolated subranche of people those who were found uggly by their peers.. and or unimpressive.
 
Probably the result of the hatchet job to get the meat off the bone ... who can realistically say it was or was not?
 
Probably the result of the hatchet job to get the meat off the bone ... who can realistically say it was or was not?
stole my thunder. A couple of parallel cuts in a bone fragment do not a sculpture make imo. Certainly not a "beautiful" one. It seems a trend lately to give the Neanderthals a culture participation trophy for every found piece of flotsam. I think it's collective Homosapien-guilt kicking in for all the less-than-politically-correct jokes we've made about them in the past.
 
The main important thing is that it's a 51,000-year-old bone with tool marks on it and it establishes people lived that far back in that area of Germany. Everything else is speculation. I like to follow this stuff, and it seems archaeologists are always putting on layers of symbolism and ritualism that they can't define as if hard-pressed hunter-gatherers had nothing more urgent to think about.
 
According to the Smithsonian, there is Neanderthal dna mixed in with ours so they weren't necessarily all killed off, they were assimilated.
 
Very Interesting article, thanks for posting.
In college I took an intro course in anthropology. I found it one of the most fascinating courses. The lab had display cases with a myriad of bone fragments, an array of hominid skulls showing the progression of skull enlargement to accomodate the enlarging brain, hands and feet at different stages of evolution, etc., etc. To me, a facinating science.
To me, science is not an collection of opinion, but rather evidence of truths.
 
Very Interesting article, thanks for posting.
In college I took an intro course in anthropology. I found it one of the most fascinating courses. The lab had display cases with a myriad of bone fragments, an array of hominid skulls showing the progression of skull enlargement to accommodate the enlarging brain, hands and feet at different stages of evolution, etc., etc. To me, a fascinating science.
To me, science is not an collection of opinion, but rather evidence of truths.
Sounds like the anthropology course was interesting. I like watching videos on it. PBS (if you're in the US) and YouTube have quite a few.

I agree with your comment about science too. My background is in mathematics, computer science and with data driven decision making so evidence based science is a pretty natural fit for me.
 
Very beautiful to me... art or not... the creator of this may have been playing w it a little? The marks don’t all look utilitarian.
 
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