In his article News Flash: Negative Evidence Convicts Neanderthals of Gross Mental Incompetence, John Speth brings into question the conviction of Neanderthals as mentally incompetent beings due to their alleged lack of certain traits deemed indicative of modern human behaviour. He argues that the overplaying* of negative and missing evidence has resulted in possible misconceptions about the aptitude of our middle stone age (M.S.A) ancestors. He implies that the cognitive ability of neanderthals should be a long running and contentious debate in the anthropological community and instead their supposed unintelligence is almost uniformly written off as fact. Speth’s arguments are not as active in falsifying the opposing argument but more so in
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The point of contention for Speth is that M.S.A Neanderthal sites are approached with the assumption that Neanderthals have no capacity for symbolism despite only missing or negative evidence found behind this hypothesis, most of the verdict is based on the fact that evidence is yet to present itself. Things like tattoings, oral history, and ritual cannot leave evidence behind on the site – some of which is true even today. The dumping grounds of the M.S.A neanderthals, which were associated with the biomechanical nature of carnivores like hyenas, in reality could have been of massive spiritual significance like they are in many traditional cultures. He does not say that these traits necessarily existed, but that it is not just to assert that they did not. This is Speth’s prerogative, to derail a one-sided discussion to shed light on a new perspective. It is difficult to find the sources to argue against it as he is testifying to both the lack of evidence of absence of M.S.A symbolism, which is also makes potential spiritual rituals and cultural common place impossible to disprove. There is every chance that M.S.A Neanderthals were not underdeveloped – or at least not as underdeveloped as is lead to believe. If one were to assume that all of this …show more content…
Their sociocultural, political and economic development from middle to upper Paleolithic periods follow similar timelines in their sites and produce similar artifacts in knifes and cave art in the Upper Paleolithic. Calling one “cognitively impaired” and one normal does give evidence to the exaggeration of the potential cognitive inability referenced earlier in the text. Speth alludes to the idea that if it were possible to challenge orthodoxy enough to change labels on intellectually modern human it would seem apt to either include M.S.A Neanderthals in the group of cognitively modern humans or exclude both. Assume we exclude both the early North American Paleo-Indians and their ethnographic contemporaries from the group of intellectually modern humans, this creates a division purely in time period. It has been argued that the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic was the emergence of modern human intelligence (Vaquero, 2012). Assuming this to be true, the counter argument to Speth would not lie within the symmetry of the transition, but in the significance of the transition itself. In this scenario Speth’s ‘absence of evidence’ argument cannot be used, as the analysis is based off of the same evidence of sites that he had re-evaluated
The point of contention for Speth is that M.S.A Neanderthal sites are approached with the assumption that Neanderthals have no capacity for symbolism despite only missing or negative evidence found behind this hypothesis, most of the verdict is based on the fact that evidence is yet to present itself. Things like tattoings, oral history, and ritual cannot leave evidence behind on the site – some of which is true even today. The dumping grounds of the M.S.A neanderthals, which were associated with the biomechanical nature of carnivores like hyenas, in reality could have been of massive spiritual significance like they are in many traditional cultures. He does not say that these traits necessarily existed, but that it is not just to assert that they did not. This is Speth’s prerogative, to derail a one-sided discussion to shed light on a new perspective. It is difficult to find the sources to argue against it as he is testifying to both the lack of evidence of absence of M.S.A symbolism, which is also makes potential spiritual rituals and cultural common place impossible to disprove. There is every chance that M.S.A Neanderthals were not underdeveloped – or at least not as underdeveloped as is lead to believe. If one were to assume that all of this …show more content…
Their sociocultural, political and economic development from middle to upper Paleolithic periods follow similar timelines in their sites and produce similar artifacts in knifes and cave art in the Upper Paleolithic. Calling one “cognitively impaired” and one normal does give evidence to the exaggeration of the potential cognitive inability referenced earlier in the text. Speth alludes to the idea that if it were possible to challenge orthodoxy enough to change labels on intellectually modern human it would seem apt to either include M.S.A Neanderthals in the group of cognitively modern humans or exclude both. Assume we exclude both the early North American Paleo-Indians and their ethnographic contemporaries from the group of intellectually modern humans, this creates a division purely in time period. It has been argued that the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic was the emergence of modern human intelligence (Vaquero, 2012). Assuming this to be true, the counter argument to Speth would not lie within the symmetry of the transition, but in the significance of the transition itself. In this scenario Speth’s ‘absence of evidence’ argument cannot be used, as the analysis is based off of the same evidence of sites that he had re-evaluated