Singing Neanderthals

The articles on Neanderthals presented speculation about methods of communication between Neanderthals. With a lack of cognitive fluidity and a heavy facial structure speech was very unlikely but in place of speech they were able to create a large range of sound with perfect pitch in a “Hmmmm.” Although their advancement as a species was difficult without a vocabulary they were able to survive for a long period of time through their “singing” and most likely dancing. I found it fascinating that the Neanderthals could live a life that did not mechanically advance much farther than the way it started and stay in existence for such a long time. The article discusses the importance of communication in the development and rearing of offspring and the organization for group hunting. I believe that it would be possible for the Neanderthals to live and communicate through body language and singing because both dancing and singing are very emotional forms of communication and I think almost everything that needs to be communicated within a community can be represented through singing and dance. Also mentioned in the article is reliance on imitation for learning and carrying on methods of tool making. Since all of the tools looked exactly alike it would be easy to see that imitation is a large part of survival and even though they did not advance beyond where they started as a population, they could get by and survive on passing on methods that had worked for their peoples in the past. It seems that for the Neanderthals, speech was not necessary and they were just as capable with singing and dancing in place.

Why Do We/Did We Believe?

Of the three main arguments in favor for humans being hardwired to believe in God presented by psychologist Justin Barrett in the article Why Do We Believe, I thought the mental module that causes us to always look for the presence of an agent in our world was most convincing for a belief of God or the supernatural in our “hardware”. Other arguments for hardwiring discussed were causal reasoning, and folkpsychology. Causal reasoning means we are constantly looking for an explanation for things that happen to us, and folkpsychology is described as our “ability to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe.” I thought the idea that we are always looking for the presence of an agent in our world seemed most convincing because the way that this argument was presented in the text made it seem like it was an innate, almost reflex reaction like our fight or flight response. An example of this from the text is that many people mistake a rock for a bear but few people mistake a bear for a rock. This means that we are usually assuming that something is more powerful and capable of acting more than it really is and to me if we are always overestimating the capability of things we would naturally believe in a higher power than ourselves at the suggestion of it with minimal evidence to support it.
In reading Genesis 1-4 I thought it was interesting that the messages of how to behave implied in the reading are only recently starting to change. Ideas that human kind is made in Gods image, that God made mankind to “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air…” and that God made woman for man have shaped the way that human beings have behaved and conducted themselves for centuries. Only lately have been questions been risen as to whether behaving according to these ideas impressed in Genesis is the right way to live. It is easy to see now that living according to the egotistical thought that human beings are “God-like” and can control and do with the earth and its creatures what they want leads to our global catastrophe of wiping out keystone species and destroying natural systems that are crucial to the survival of the planet and its habitants. On a more social level, women are finally getting a voice and more of equality in status with men. It seems like the actions towards change away from the ideas from the reading are in the right direction for our society but if our old ways were mostly implemented because of Genesis 1-4 does that mean we are evolving away from religion and our possibly “natural” beliefs in a higher power? It also makes me wonder if until now were the ways that people interacted with one another solely based on the ideas from the bible?