Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Stone Age Seafarers And Neanderthals.

STONE AGE SEAFARERS found according to articles in Science (AAAS) News 24 April 2018 and Science 27 April 2018 doi: 10.1126/science.360.6387.362. Over the past 10 years archaeologists exploring the Greek islands of the Ionian and Aegean Seas have been surprised to find artefacts dated as belonging to Stone Age humans or Neanderthals. In 2008 and 2009 Greek and US scientist found hundreds of stone tools, including picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces at a site on south coast of Crete. Crete is believed to have been separate from the European mainland for five million years. According to Science “The artefacts resemble Acheulean tools developed more than a million years ago by H. erectus and used until about 130,000 years ago by Neanderthals as well”. Another team of scientists from Canada and Greece have now found hundreds of tools embedded in the soil of a chert quarry on the island of Naxos, another island that has only ever been accessible by sea, even when sea levels were lower. These tools are described as hand axes and blades resembling the “so-called Mousterian toolkit, which Neanderthals and modern humans made from about 200,000 years ago until 50,000 years ago”. Artefacts also classified as Palaeolithic (“Old Stone Age”) have been found on the islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea and Lemnos in the Aegean Sea. John Cherry, an archaeologist of Brown University, commented: “The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don’t have seafarers until the early Bronze Age. Now we are talking about seafaring Neanderthals. It’s a pretty stunning change”. A summary of the finds in Science concludes: “The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea—and the cognitive and technological means to do so—predates modern humans”.
 
ED. COM. Finding evidence of people with the intellect and technology to go seafaring around the Mediterranean region is no surprise to us. The people who initially populated Europe were not the ignorant descendants of ape-like creatures who had monkey-stepped their way out of Africa. Instead, they were the highly intelligent larger brained descendants of Noah’s family, who had not only built a seaworthy vessel the size of an ocean liner, and lived on it for a year, but they were migrating to the west into Europe as part of the dispersion that took place after the judgement at Babel. That was only a few generations after Noah’s family got off the Ark. Any people capable of building skyscrapers, had no lack of technology to build small boats either. The fact that migrating people also used stone tools once they reached remote islands is not a sign of being primitive. It is a sign that they were smart resourceful people who made use of whatever resources were available. It is quite likely they also had artefacts made of wood and textiles, but none of those would have been preserved in the climate of those islands for very long. These finds are also more evidence that the large-brained Neanderthals were not some primitive sub-human creatures, but fully human people who had the intellect to explore the world and make a living wherever they ended up.

Christian women are standing firm in the face of persecution.

How Christian women are standing firm in the face of persecution. Anita Laryea    12 March 2024. The Tears of Gold exhibition by Hannah Rose...