Homo Heidelbergensis which likely evolved into Homo neaderthalensis engaged in selectively throwing certain youngsters down a shaft to their dooms in an act of human selection. I guess mindless violence is a defining characteristic of Homo in general.
or at least insane ideas about breeding.
How do we know it was selection for breeding that was the motive?
That doesn’t sound like “mindless” violence to me. It sounds like they knew what they were doing…
If they were selectivly doing it how could it be mindless?
I guess mindless is throwing ‘morals into the mix’. Is a passion killing a ‘mindless moment’? When one sees red?
mindless as in attempting to select for or against whatever qualities by throwing them down a shaft.
What if the children were handicapped or deformed or mentally retarded?
Well a skilled physical anthropologist through the skills of deductive reasoning (depending on fossil remains) can tell the sex, age, species, large parts of the diet and whether or not an individual is malformed/perhaps how they died.
and faust its a pit of females/others between 15 to 20 (most of the remains). Its not common practice for this to happen in human groups for regular reasons. Maybe it was superstition of sorts. Neaderthalensis would have been commonly fair perhaps red hair/blue eyes starting popping up among H heidbergensis, or maybe they were just ugly.
No evidence but maybe they were. I only know that H.H threw a bunch of young women down a shaft, very young usually valuable women, which isn’t a common occurance among (outside of a strong cultural belief) hunter gatherers, it doesn’t seem common to any homo species in prehistory.
Oh. Then it’s not quite established that they were killed for “selection” reasons.
Maybe there had been a plague of some sort…
Well, considering they appear healthy and are reproductive aged women, some kind of ‘selective’ reason is about the only only thing that could possibly make sense. Its not really ‘known’ because any-thing but direct evidence is only suggestive. For example, theres some hominids from our past that don’t have direct tool use attributed to them, however other animals, found in their fossil deposits have signs of being stripped of flesh/butchered. So while its only suggestive that some hominids use tools (in the same ways its suggesting H H threw people into the shaft for selective reasons) during that time period, unless we attribute tool use to one of them, in lack of direct evidence, it makes even less sense.
It could have been some religious purge where these young reproductive age women were all somehow connected outside of their age/sex. Its doubtful but when looking so many hundreds of thousands of years into the past, at fragmentary evidence at another human species, I won’t make any direct claims that aren’t aren’t 100% supportable, but it is awfully suggestive that it was some kind of selection.
Either way, for whatever reason they decided to drag people and throw them down a pit its massively interesting because its not the common reasons for people doing so.
If nothing else its very suggesting of massive culture long before neaderthalensis, thats probably to be expected looking at cranial capacity and tool-use, but its always nice to get examples from the fossil finds.
They might have been overpopulated with women and needed to kill some off. Maybe they needed a better male ratio for some purpose.
Oh, I know what you mean, now. I thought you meant selective for physical attributes alone - selective as in selective breeding.
But selection could have been for “religious” or proto-religious reasons. Which is conceivably the same thing, I suppose, in that, for instance, a sacrifice to a fertility god is meant to accomplish much the same thing as winnowing out the unfit - the survival of the group.
Yeah, it does surely suggest culture.
lol. Likely not. Homo traditionally has no problem with harems and some of the fossils may have been male. But again thinking its a rival tribe is sketchy. Women were considered valuable they’d usually keep the females if it was simply tribal warfare. A mystery of sorts.
It seems that you would have to know a great deal about the specific context to pass a judgment.
I agree. How bones got to be where they were found is pure speculation. Did hunter gatherers even dig wells?
That homo H took people and threw them down a shaft isn’t ‘just speculation’ theres a massive amount of science behind bone analysis. Anyway I said shaft not well. The reason for why they did is speculation’ but theres such a thing as educated speculation. Hunter gatherers didn’t need wells to throw people down a pit.
I agree with Faust; it seems culturally-pertinent.
And I would wager to guess that it was done out of necessity, even if they were religious rites.