Neanderthals and trees

[JTEM is lucky in love AND money]

One point I've made many times, and never seen
repeated much less discussed, is that Neanderthals
were well built for tree climbing.

They were very strong, they were stocky/stout and
even their rib cage was more bell shaped, similar to
a chimp's, than those of a so called modern are. And
this fits in well with two concepts:

#1. Ambush hunting.

You know where the water supplies are. Maybe you
even know where the Cave Bear's den is. Animals
make trails. Find a tree along that trail, climb up in it
and wait. When an animal wanders by you hurl you
spear down as hard as you can into it's back. The
animal flees in panic, increasing the already devastating
lever-like action of the spear as it runs through the
forest, banging the spear against trees & brush as it
goes.

See, a long blade works best here. Maybe you get lucky
and pierce the heart or take out it's diaphragm, leaving
it unable to breath, but even if you don't you can still
kill the animal quickly, before it gets too far away or you
lose it in the woods.

If you have a 6, 8 or 12 inch blade, the lever action of the
spear shaft if going to slice a massive fan-shaped
swath through the innards of the prey. And as the animal
runs away, banging that lever against trees and what not,
you might even chop through bone!

With ambush hunting from a tree even one man could
likely take on a Cave Bear or a wild boar.

Boars were known for their aggression even in modern
times! They've been mellowed out through interbreeding
with domesticated animals but they occasionally hurt
(and sometimes kill) people even today.

Seriously. Spears and swords made for hunting boar had
a cross bar built into them, because they were so
aggressive they were known to run up the length of a
spear, to attack the hunter, after being stabbed...

So ambush hunting makes a lot of sense. And it explains
why throwing spears seem vanish from the archeological
record for 200,000 to 300,000 years.

#2. Storage.

If they hunted mega fauna then it's unlikely they were
carrying the carcass back to the ol' cave and processing
it there. The same is true if they were taking many
animals, such as during a seasonal migration. So, big
animals or many animals; they would have processed
them remotely, and they would have had far more food
than they could eat short term.

Preservation?

Maybe they had something like Beef Jerky, but where did
they keep it?

HOW ABOUT TREES?

Moving storage outside of habitation space would certainly
cut down on the predators & scavengers barging in on you.
And being up high in trees would be ample protection against
everything EXCEPT maybe things like cats and birds, but the
birds "Eat like birds" anyway, so maybe it was just a matter
of storing more than they could steal. And the cats? Well
they might've been able to construct all types of traps or
impediments -- the neanderthal equivalent to barbed wire...

For starters, they could have hung it from branches so unless
the cats (etc) could fly they couldn't even reach it...

The use of trees also eliminates archaeological evidence.

Even if there's only one forest fire on average every 500
years, there would have been between 48 and 80 fires
destroying all the evidence, depending on whose date you
use for the last of the Neanderthals.

So, there you have it: Trees!

Wild speculation? Sure. Well, maybe. I mean, not entirely.
A hypothesis explains the facts as we know them and
there are some rather odd facts that need explaining, like
why throwing spears vanish for so long.

...coming up with something better -- i.e. ambush
hunting -- is a plausible explanation for the disappearance
of throwing spears.





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https://jtem.tumblr.com/post/646013271637475328