All work and no play left little time for art

• Autores: April Nowell
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2905, 2013, págs. 28-29
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Nowell talks about Neanderthals having shorter childhoods than modern humans--something which profoundly influenced their minds. Even if they focus on just the period 50,000 to 30,000 years ago they find that early humans created bone flutes, the breathtaking cave paintings of the Chauvet cave in France, imaginative personal ornaments such as ivory beads carved to look like shells, and figurines incised with geometric patterns. The ability to reproduce a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface, or to "see" a figure in ivory, requires a completely different way of imagining the world. Neanderthals created nothing like these artefacts and she believes this can be explained by the games they played, or more correctly did not play, as children. Neanderthals matured more slowly than earlier hominins such as Homo erectus, but more quickly than modern humans. As a result, they had a shorter childhood than them. People know this because Neanderthals occasionally buried their dead so they have a relatively large collection of Neanderthal infants and children from which to measure their development.