Jeebuz! I go away for 5 minutes and all Hell breaks loose in the world of Neanderthal myth-making. How else am I supposed to think when, upon my return to the Subversive Archaeologist's saddle I'm confronted with this stuff.
You must be joking! Glottochronology? Again? 50 years after it was thoroughly debunked? We're in worse shape than I thought we were.
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A house-proud race. Hmmm. Aside from the loosely logical inferences that produced this claim, I think we're in real trouble. I haven't read the article yet. But I have to say that, if the journ-o thinks there's such a thing as a human race, we're doomed.
You must be joking! Glottochronology? Again? 50 years after it was thoroughly debunked? We're in worse shape than I thought we were.
Oh. All right. We can extend the ethnographic analogies beyond the limits of the archaeological record? My least vituperative response is Pshaw!
I think we should consider ourselves privileged in that we have all lived long enough for Ralph Solecki to remember what happened at Shanidar in the 1950s and 60s. I think we can all agree that it would have been better if he had awoken 30 years ago, when a comprehensive report on the excavations would have been of some use. Under the circumstances I have to wonder if there were any records kept of the plunder excavations at Shanidar. There's certainly never been an adequate accounting of the sedimentary context of the various skeletal remains. For such an important site, the published record is unforgivably thin. R. Solecki has had decades to produce something other than a descriptive account.
All I can say for sure is that 'work' like that of Solecki has given credulous palaeolithic archaeologists plenty of reasons to fabricate extrapolations like the one below, which has just come to light. Can you imagine any [ANY] serious archaeologist getting so exercised about a fragment of marine shell such as the one mentioned below? I hope to Jeebuz not.
I'm still working on this latter bit of fluff. Hang in there.
