175,000 year old structures found built by Neanderthals

But really though, that's interesting.

Ancient dildos

It's no Graceland, but it's still pretty cool.

oddly, I took a DNA test for genealogy (was a groupon purchase) and it said I had 1% Neaderthal.

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I took a DNA test for genealogy (was a groupon purchase) and it said I had 1% Neaderthal.

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That's not surprising at all to the geneologists. Most people do - and the percentage is a bit higher in Europeans as a rule because European origin humans and neanderthals were probably competing and even reproducing more than people in other parts of the world.

There's a lot of neat new information floating around since someone managed to sequence most of the Neanderthal genome.

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176,500 years ago, long before modern humans left Africa for the Eurasian continent, a band of Neanderthals conducted an elaborate ritual deep inside Bruniquel Cave in a region we know today as southern France. The Neanderthal group wrested hundreds of stalagmites from the floor of the cave to build elaborate circular structures, their work illuminated only by firelight.

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Oh, man... I wonder how many of the tree-hugging Neanderthals gave this "band" shite for destroying the natural formations in the cave?

Geologic terrorists!!!

OK. For fun...except one part (uranium dating) I will add another interpretation.

I have a few problems with these claims. There is a branch of geology called geoarchaeology, and I actually am looking over to the textbook on my bookshelf dealing with this. But I don't need to go into the textbook to find problems with their interpretations.

I can explain away each and every thing due to natural physical processes.

First, before I do this, I have to say that uranium age-dating should not be used in this way.

This chart shows the effective age range for different radiometric tests:


You can see both uranium decays are outside of the result they give. The decay rate is so long that you cannot viably have a good age detection with so many years. They should have used potassium 40. And even then, they are pushing the limits of that technique. The hard part is they are in a zone of time that has limited tests. They did highlight that the Carbon 14 limit is a problem too, and that is right.


OK. The next thing is the shape of the cave formations. The stalagmites and stalactites are found along areas where there the rock has a conduit for water to move through it. In a lot of places that means jointed/fractured rocks at the surface.


Here you can see a line of stalactites and a couple of drip curtains running in a single line. That is because water is moving through a crack in the rock and forming these as the water leaves the crack and dries out in the cave air, leaving the calcite making the stalactite.

If you see a lot of stalactites that have a criss-cross pattern that means the rocks above are fractured, and the cave formations below will follow them.



I bring this up because they have a circle of cave formations that could be made by a joint/fracture in a rock that is circular.

They also find that the cave formations are broken and rested in piles along this circle.

Here's where what I have given you all comes together.

Something that is very prominent in cave areas is sinkholes. Sinkholes form when the ceiling of a cave collapses. And cave collapse when the cave ceiling cannot support the weight of the land above it.

So, we have cave formations forming on the ceiling and on the floor, and sometimes those connect in a column, then we have them all formed in a ring. Well, what would a circular joint make given enough time and enough burden on a cave ceiling? A cave roof COLLAPSE! Not a big one, but a decent enough one to drop the ceiling enough.



So if you do that, you break the stalactites, you break the columns and you rest them around where they were made, just not longer attached to the ceiling an wall!


So, now we have every part of their findings figured out except for 1 thing, the fires. To that I have to say that fires are naturally occurring and large ones could have impact on caves. Animals may have been living in the cave or sought refuge in the cave.

If you want to debunk if the Neanderthal were that old, the trick would be to Carbon date the soot that is on the ceiling and walls. They didn't check that, they just looked at the stalag/stalactites. You date the Neanderthal fires, you date the Neanderthals. The problem is, caves are very ephemeral structures. Given a few more thousand years, the rock will be eroded into something entirely different.


OK. So there you have my rebuttal to this article. Again, I just explained how you can get a ring and pile of cave formations without any human involvement. Remember, one GLARING problem they have in their interpretation, however is the use of uranium dating and get a result that is outside the effective date range for that method.


-pec

upvote.

I said it was for fun.

I also said that it was bad they used uranium.