Interesting Historical Conjectures

jamlebrilla

jamlebrilla

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Hi everyone. I'm a recent addition to this forum so I don't really know if this particular thread has been done already. If there is, in my defense I did search for one, but didn't find it. I'm interested in all kinds of trivia, conjecture, speculations, etc. that have been applied to what current history we know of. So, I'm wondering what everyone in this forum knows as well, or what theories you've got going on.

For example,

In Micheal Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, he makes you speculate on whether the neanderthals really died out as early as we think. Maybe the last neanderthals were Grendel and his mother in Beowulf. From what we know of neanderthals, they have stronger body structures, bigger brains, a different shaped head, etc.

In Beowulf, the story goes that Hrothgar's finds twenty of his men slain in his great hall. They've all been killed by Grendel, an evil monster. What makes it possible for a neanderthal to have killed twenty men, is the notion that in all likelihood, those twenty men were incredibly drunk. Grendel didn't need to be an evil monster with incredible powers, he could have been a Neanderthal with better bone structure.
 
Jean Auel has her series of books following a Cro-Magnon who is raised with Neanderthals. They're a pretty good read, although she does go off at a tangent when it comes to sex or explaining a history of herbs for healing :)

The late Zecharia Sitchin claims (in a non-fictional sense) that Neanderthals were genetically engineered into Cro-Magnon by beings from Nibiru, the tenth planet. He then claims that they crossbred with Cro-Magnon to produce modern man. That's an interesting theory with a lot of emotion intertwined into it from those who oppose it :)
 
I've been told that the Neanderthals weren't that much different from us. Take one, bathe him, shave him, put him in a suit and give him a briefcase, then he could walk down the streets of Manhatten and nobody would notice.

What bugs me is artists' conceptions of Lucy and Ardi that don't show them walking around upright. The main reason why they were such spectacular finds was that the pushed back the date of the earliest hominids but so far, there are no pictures of them walking full upright.
 
Jean Auel has her series of books following a Cro-Magnon who is raised with Neanderthals. They're a pretty good read, although she does go off at a tangent when it comes to sex or explaining a history of herbs for healing :)
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Oh, yes, I've read those too. It was interesting how she theorized that since the Neanderthal could only make a limited number of sounds, they talked with their hands instead. And in her first book, there was the part where the shaman of the Cave Bear Clan (did I get the clan right?) foresaw that his specie of neanderthals were dying out and the only way for their blood to survive would be through a merging of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. It reminds me of a couple of theories my prof told me on why the neanderthals disappeared. 1. They were directly killed off by Cro-magnons. 2. They were driven out by Cro-Magnons from rich hunting grounds. 3. They intermarried, or merged with the Cro-Magnons.

I haven't read that book by Zechariah Sitchin, but it seems interesting. I'll look for it. =).

I've been told that the Neanderthals weren't that much different from us. Take one, bathe him, shave him, put him in a suit and give him a briefcase, then he could walk down the streets of Manhatten and nobody would notice.
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This reminds me of Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. It was about how a machine from the Neanderthal Earth accidentally opened a hole into our Earth. In the first book, Hominids, there were a lot of comparisons between the evolution of Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthals, and how, ironically, there was no real way to differentiate between the two just by basing them on appearances.
 
I believe the common belief now is that Neanderthal could speak and probably very well:

The discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid bone in Kebara Cave in Israel has made some anthropologists believe that Neanderthals were capable of complex speech like modern humans. Others believe that the debate over Neanderthals and speech will never end because the soft tissue of the vocal tract cannot fossilize.
...
Baruch Arensberg, whose team discovered the bone, says this feature is proof that Neanderthals had the same language capacity as modern humans (Foley and Lewin, 2004).
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To be fair to Jean Auel this was sometime after she had committed to her (almost) speechless Neanderthals.

I would agree with Dozmonic's comment on the herbs and sex and add food foraging to it. She really did seem to be obsessed by those topics. Not to mention one little cro-magnon girl seems to have been the "discoverer" of so many things (eg domesticated animals) as to be totally unreasonable. However they are a good read so long as you treat them as fantasy and skip the aforementioned bits :)
 
According to New Scientist, 4% of modern human beings have part Neanderthal DNA - Homo Sapiens interbred with Neanderthal.

Interestingly no African races have Neanderthal DNA - the interbreeding took place only after migration from Africa.
 
Homo sapiens sapiens (us), being the only remaining race of the the species Homo sapiens it is difficult to determine that possible ranges of physical and mental abilities that Homo sapiens might posses. Note I identified us as Homo sapiens sapiens, not just Homo sapiens. We are in fact one of several possible subspecies or races of our species. Black, Asian, white, European aren't races! Biologically anyways, all modern humans are the same race. It is unclear if neanderthals were Homo sapiens, or a different species.

Even if they were Homo sapeins, that doesn't mean that H. sapiens sapiens bred with them. The evidence goes back and forth all the time and there are alot of strong opinions in biology as to whether or not neandrathals were a race of Homo sapiens or not. They would have to have been a race of Homo sapiens to interbreed with us and have offspring that could reproduce themselves, that is in fact the definition of a species. If it can be proven any modern humans have neanderthal DNA, it means they were a subspecies of our species.

Beowulf is about thirty thousand years too late to have been inspired by any of our extinct brothers and sisters of the species Homo sapiens, neanderthal or otherwise. At least directly inspired. It is conjectured that a lot of Greek monsters were inspired by gross misinterpretation, perhaps willful,of fossils or bones of extinct mammals. The eye sockets of elephants, and mammoths are fused for example. Making the skull appear to have only one eye socket, and therefore presumably only one eye. If you have no mammoths (or elephants), and you find a mammoth skull, you might make that conjecture. I also wouldn't put it past the greeks to find the skelaton of a horse and a man together and come up with centaurs.

There are other stories of how biological or behavioral misinterpretation may have influenced stories. There was a show on forensic history, I forget its name, some years back. One of the episodes talked about how a fungus that grew on barley in Europe cause hallucinations like LSD. They conjectured, with other evidence, that this related to the origin of werewolves. I find it more likely werewolves came about from people with hypertrichosis. I am aware of a case of the Russian Army hunting and killing what they called a werewolf in the 20th century, turned out to be some poor guy with hypertrichosis hiding from ignorant villagers. But that's not what they put in the Russian papers, just the werewolf part.
 
Haven't they just discovered a new type of humanoid creature?: have tried to find an article but don't what to search for without remembering what it is called, but it means there were humans, neanderthals and at least one other similar species too.

Back to jamlebrilla's question on other historical conjectures, I get quite interested when the conjectures are linked with national identity. For example the opinion that Edward I stole a fake Stone of Scone, which Nigel Tranter believed when writing his Bruce Trilogy. Or that King Harold survived the Battle of Hastings and fathered more children who had a claim to the English throne.
 
River Boy said:
Haven't they just discovered a new type of humanoid creature?: have tried to find an article but don't what to search for without remembering what it is called, but it means there were humans, neanderthals and at least one other similar species too.
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Homo Floriensis
Plus there were recent reports of another homo in Central Asia
 
The Stooges did a few caveman episodes.. but nothing, you know... usually the women beat them up with their own clubs.
 
Apparently, Moe did all the throwing of pies, eggs and whatnot - and he never missed, maybe because they did a live show with no second takes.
 
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