More recent stuff on Neanderthals of interest, Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean:
A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.
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But a growing inventory of stone tools and the occasional bone scattered across Eurasia tells a radically different story. (Wooden boats and paddles don’t typically survive the ages.) Early members of the human family such as Homo erectus are now known to have crossed several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago in Indonesia, to islands such as Flores and Sulawesi. Modern humans braved treacherous waters to reach Australia by 65,000 years ago. But in both cases, some archaeologists say early seafarers might have embarked by accident, perhaps swept out to sea by tsunamis.
The effective population size of Australian people is just too large for me to imagine that it was only a few individuals swept out on driftwood. There was some sort of sea-going craft which mediated migration to Sahul from Sundaland. Just because we have only recent evidence of sea-going craft doesn’t mean that they weren’t around for tens of thousands of years before that.
I’ve been hearing about Neanderthal tools on islands like Crete, which were never connected with the European mainland, for a while now. It seems that people are finally convinced that this is the real deal, as the stratigraphy came together to confirm dates. One thing that seems obvious from this, as well as Neanderthal “art”, is that the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals were more quantitative than qualitative. Differences of degree, not of kind.
It is hard to deny that modern human expansion between 60 and 15 thousand years ago is sui generis. Hominins didn’t make it to the New World or Sahul, what later became Oceania, until our own kind. There’s also a fair amount of evidence that our lineage pushed the northern frontier of human habitation beyond what Neanderthals ever did. But in the process of marking off our distinctiveness, it seems to me that we’ve overemphasized the differences between us and Neanderthals, and dismissed or ignored evidence of “human-like” “advanced” behaviors from them.
I’ll still go with the prediction that we’ll never find a singular gene which marks us off from other human lineages.
Any idea what the reference to H. Erectus on Flores is? I hadn’t heard of that one before now and it almost seems like someone is implying that hobbits were H. Erectus, which is pretty strongly disfavored.
well some ppl think that flores are derived erectus.