On topic: The Day We Learned To Think

[eridanus]

here is a video on topic of evolution.
46 minutes
the video goes rather slowly, for it was made as a tool to educate
people. You cannot educate people with a very thick video full of
data. The not trained person could change of canal if it goes too
fast and could not retain a huge flood of data.
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It is called
The Day We Learned To Think (Documentary)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnSf7pAjw38&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs

It is about 46 minutes long, and it treats the question of when humans
started to think.
The documentary goes a little slowly and goes telling about that someone
had sudden the idea watching the caves of prehistoric art in France, it
was then, in Europe when the humans showed they were able to think.
This can be a crap like any other, that suddenly occur to anyone able
to think a little more than he should. He said that this art proved
that this humans were able to speak and to think. It was also coherent
with the more sophisticated aspect of stone tools of both Neanderthal
and modern humans. Then, as he was inspired, he speculated that god
suddenly infused these beasts with a superior intelligence and language,
and the ability to think. Then, it was like a miracle of god.
Suddenly these animals became humans.

As I had been all my life, since being a child rather iconoclast, I
would had laugh if I had read this silly argument.
A little while in the video, someone find in a cave in Israel, a hioides
bone among other Neanderthal bones. This hioides was identical to
the modern bone humans have and that proved that the Neanderthals were
able to speak.
Around the minute 30 a later, there is also the story of another cave
in south Africa that uncover some stones of ocher not natural to the
cave but carried there. One of those pieces of ocher stone, had a
series of geometric marks, that proved that those humans from 70,000
years ago, were also able to make art. A few years later in another
cave they had found also some sophisticated pieces of harpoons and
points of horn or bone, that proved they had an intelligence. These
artifacts were also from some 70,000 years ago.
At about minute 38 the video tells something new. In a cave of France
they found some stones of manganese that were used for painting. One
of the stones had the form of pencil, with a point side. They found
also some pieces of jewelry like to make a necklace. At the end the
speaker talks about a plausible reason to explain the sudden
disappearance of the Neanderthals. He points to the possibility
that new invaders of Europe brought with them some microbes that
killed the natives. A little like it occurred in America with the
arrival of Europeans. That nearly exterminated the native populations.

Eridanus