Practice question · Multiple choice
Neanderthals and modern humans made comparable tools, buried their dead and used pigment. Why did the older picture of them as brutish persist so long?
Hints
- Ask what the La Chapelle-aux-Saints individual was suffering from, and how that shaped the reconstruction.
- The error survived the correction. Why?
Show the answer
C. The first skeleton was an arthritic old individual
Why
Boule's 1911 reconstruction of a severely arthritic individual set the image, and it endured because it agreed with what people wanted to be true about their own ancestry. Braincase volume actually exceeds ours on average, which was known and did not disturb the picture, a useful lesson about what evidence gets absorbed.
Practise The Lower and Middle Paleolithic
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More questions on The Lower and Middle Paleolithic
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