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>“We continue to find evidence that the Neanderthals were not inferior primitives but were quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attri

>“We continue to find evidence that the Neanderthals were not inferior primitives but were quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attributed to modern humans,” said co-author Paolo Villa, adjunct curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. For that I blame the curators themselves. Whenever you go to a museum, the exhibits extrapolate far more than is reasonable from the thing they're actually displaying. And then they blend it in! Entire skeletons to glue together a few bones, leaving you unable to tell what's real - something pulled out of the ground where it's been resting for millions of years - and what's a historian's best guess. Thanks to that we still have exhibits of dinosaurs with bare skin. Show me the real fossil, it's far more interesting.

dalbasal 7y ago
It's a double edge sword. Without speculation and extrapolation, things get dull quick. OTOH, communicating degrees of uncertainty is not something that we typically do well.
- kurtisc 7y ago
  I'd prefer to see something like Matrera Castle. For architecture I find it a bit much, probably because it needs to be structurally sound, but for a skeleton or an antique it could bring more attention to the real parts and still offer a suggestion of what it might look like.
  - dalbasal 7y ago
    That would definitely be good for skeletons, but it doesn't solve the problem. Is is just this specimen that lacks ribs or is it the whole species? Do tend ribs vary much between species within the genus? It's a hard problem to solve, and people can get distrustful when they hear "facts" have been superceded, that the theory they read in a museum is no longer popular.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
It's not just the curators. Most modern peoples clearly assume we are currently at the height of human civilization and development and everything in the past was less well developed. I love watching TV shows where they try to recreate past techniques with what we know of their available tech and we fail. One TV show tried to melt rock to figure out how vitrified castles were made. They couldn't get enough rock to melt to recreate the effect. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4326 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4326 There are countless examples of ancient tech we don't really understand and can't readily recreate with the resources -- including knowledge and technology -- we believe they had available at the time. Yet we continue to presume we represent the height of human development, it's been a more or less steady climb up and the future will obviously see further advancements, never mind the overwhelming evidence of lost knowledge around the world and "dark ages" following a loss of development.

dalbasal 7y ago

It's a double edge sword. Without speculation and extrapolation, things get dull quick. OTOH, communicating degrees of uncertainty is not something that we typically do well.

kurtisc 7y ago
I'd prefer to see something like Matrera Castle. For architecture I find it a bit much, probably because it needs to be structurally sound, but for a skeleton or an antique it could bring more attention to the real parts and still offer a suggestion of what it might look like.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  That would definitely be good for skeletons, but it doesn't solve the problem. Is is just this specimen that lacks ribs or is it the whole species? Do tend ribs vary much between species within the genus? It's a hard problem to solve, and people can get distrustful when they hear "facts" have been superceded, that the theory they read in a museum is no longer popular.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

It's not just the curators. Most modern peoples clearly assume we are currently at the height of human civilization and development and everything in the past was less well developed. I love watching TV shows where they try to recreate past techniques with what we know of their available tech and we fail. One TV show tried to melt rock to figure out how vitrified castles were made. They couldn't get enough rock to melt to recreate the effect. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4326 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4326 There are countless examples of ancient tech we don't really understand and can't readily recreate with the resources -- including knowledge and technology -- we believe they had available at the time. Yet we continue to presume we represent the height of human development, it's been a more or less steady climb up and the future will obviously see further advancements, never mind the overwhelming evidence of lost knowledge around the world and "dark ages" following a loss of development.