A Look At Human Ancestry

On Friday the 13^th, we visited the Neanderthal Museum in Düsseldorf. To begin with, the museum primarily focused on the variations of human ancestry and the weapons used to survive. The weapon that most profoundly grabbed my attention, was a simple wooden stick engineered to increase the distance of thrown spears. The stick was a wooden shaft with a notched end used to hold the spear in place. Upon throwing the spear, the thrower had increased leverage, and thus provided greater rotational force (or torque) on the spear. A spear launched using the “launching rod” can increase the distance from 10 meters up to nearly 200 meters.

The hunting device is a symbol of neanderthal intelligence that most people commonly underestimate.

Another segment of the tour that sparked my interest was the transition of neanderthals to Homo Sapiens in human ancestry. I was intrigued by the fact the bigger and stronger neanderthals perished during the Ice Age, while the smaller Homo Sapiens survived. Many hypotheses were proposed, such as a hypothesis that physiological factors may have favored Homo Sapiens. The neanderthals may have had difficulty obtaining food to mainain their higher metabolic demands, and thus perished in the harsh conditions of the Ice Age. A second hypothesis, was that perhaps the Homo Sapiens (Cro Magnon) humans outcompeted the neanderthals for safer environments, such as caves. Either way, learning about the transition of one human ancestor to the next human ancestor is an intriguing subject.