The Cave Men of Atapuerca July 19, 2012
Posted by cantueso in history, Spain.trackback
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1] They had no fire.***
In the caves of a million years ago—even of 200,000 years ago or less—there is no evidence of any fire. No inventor had come up with the idea of using it, and so they ate their food uncooked. The piles of bones have scratches from flint tools but no scorching, no signs of cooking.
***According to Greek mythology, it was Prometheus who gave fire to humans, but he had to steal it from the gods. To punish him, the gods chained him to a rock and a vulture came down from time to time to get some of his liver.
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2] They were cannibals.
They ate people as they ate deer and bears and threw all the bones on the same heap. There didn’t seem to be a ritual of any kind. No sacrifice to any gods. — And remember, they ate them raw.
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Neolithic man and Neanderthal lived 150,000 years ago, and the remains found in Atapuerca were 800,000 years old. They are the oldest human remains ever discovered in Europe. The creature was called Homo Antecessor.
Data with permission from http://100falcons.wordpress.com/
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How do these scientists define “human”?
As they are typically more interested in the distant past than in recorded history, they define “human” as “any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage.”
Photo by ghD. Boy with yellow cap from a drawing by Gary Olsen at http://www.dubuque.k12.ia.us/cartoons.
Classification:
Kingdom: ………. Animalia
Phylum: ………. Chordata
Class: ………. Mammalia
Order: ………. … Primates
Family: ………. Hominidae
Subfamily: ………. Homininae
Tribe: ………. Hominini
Genus: ………. Homo
Species: ………. H. sapiens
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Atapuerca is in the province of Burgos, Spain:
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The original photo can be seen at http://www.panoramio.com/photo/535453.
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More about Atapuerca at http://conoceatapuerca.blogspot.com/
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I always wished I had become a paleontologist. Columbus is blamed as beginner of slaughter of Indians and idyllic life. Idyllic my patuzzi. They were also cannibals. Carib, Arawak, Aztec and so on killed millions for dinner. No wonder Spaniards felt they were subhuman devils. Bernal Diaz de la Castilla wrote the Conquest of Mexico(1519-1521) in about 1565. He was a foot soldier with Cortez. He well documents these atrocities. In one city alone he counted over 100,000 skulls.
If you were a lawyer or rather a preacher, how would you establish that eating each other is morally worse than kill and let rot?