Yesterday, two articles of interest to anthropologists were published in the the journal Nature‘s advance online publication. First is the announcement of a very complete bone flute, and fragments of other flutes, dating to around 35,000 thousand years ago from Germany. The finds come from the site of Hohle Fels in Southern Germany; a few months ago it was announced that the site produced the earliest Venus figurine. Venus figurines are some of the earliest pieces of carved art produced by humans, and are figures of corpulent women with corpulent lady-parts. This latter fact captures the popular imagination as the earliest ‘porn,’ but in truth no one’s sure what exactly they mean, although many researchers think they’re related to fertility. Anyway, the flutes are found in Aurignacian deposits, which by and large are attributed to ‘anatomically modern’ humans, as opposed to the contemporaneous Neandertals. The final sentences of the paper sum things up nicely:

“…early Upper Paleolithic music could have contributed to the maitenance of larger social networks, and thereby may have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans relative to culturally more conservative and demographically more isolated Neanderthal populations.”

I like their use of “culturally more conservative” description of Neandertals, whereas in the past the phrasing probably would have been “culturally primitive” or “…less advanced.” “Conservative” is certainly an interesting way to describe cultural differences between Neandertals and other Upper Paleolithic populations. I wonder if Neandertals were also more God-fearing and homophobic, as I understand ‘conservative’ to mean nowadays…

The second topic will have to wait. I just got invited to have dinner and drinks and watch soccer, which I’d be silly to pass up. Go South Africa!