Who were the Neanderthals? And what can our discoveries about them teach us about intelligence, our extractivist relationship to the planet, and what it means to be human?
Ludovic Slimak is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France and Director of the Grotte Mandrin research project. His work focuses on the last Neanderthal societies, and he is the author of several hundred scientific studies on these populations. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, the New York Times, and other publications. He is the author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature.
"After working 30 years excavating in caves, in rock shelters, and really in tracking what I call the creator, my feeling was after many years, I didn't really know what to think about Neanderthals, but at a certain moment, after seeing millions of these tools, I began to realize something very interesting. We have two categories of humans which are deeply divergent. One is hyper-standardized, and the other is much more creative. It was clear to me that this creativity was related to the raw material that this population used. The Neanderthal will adapt his project to the function of the color, texture, and natural morphologies of the block. So you have a kind of dialectic, a kind of discussion between the craftsman and the natural environment. When you are dealing with Homo sapien technology, they have the same categories of technologies, but it's very clear that even very early Sapiens, when they have a project, they will constrain the natural world to their project."
http://ww5.pegasusbooks.com/books/the-naked-neanderthal-9781639366163-hardcover
https://lampea.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article3767
www.odilejacob.fr/catalogue/sciences-humaines/archeologie-paleontologie-prehistoire/dernier-neandertalien_9782415004927.php
www.creativeprocess.info
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