Where did they usually live then, and how did they stay warm?
Comment on How did living in caves not backfire on cavemen?
snota@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Because they didn’t actually live in caves that often.
The image of these people living in caves arises from the fact that caves are where the preponderance of artifacts have been found from European Stone Age cultures. However, this most likely reflects the degree of preservation that caves provide over the millennia, rather than an indication of them being a typical form of shelter. Until the last glacial period, the great majority of humans did not live in caves, as nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes lived in a variety of temporary structures, such as tents[4] and wooden huts (e.g., at Ohalo). A few genuine cave dwellings did exist, however, such as at Mount Carmel in Israel.>
shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Esqplorer@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
We are finding evidence of pre-Homo Sapiens structures. Wooden structures typically rot. “Cavemen” is a misnomer from the evidence survivorship bias.
Also notable is your claim they were less intelligent. Human intelligence hasn’t dramatically increased genetically or biologically. Human knowledge has dramatically increased since the invention of writing recently in our history. Creativity and problem solving are highly evolved in our species and we have contemporary evidence of huge ability to transmit knowledge through oral transmission and the influence of tribal tradition.
anonionfinelyminced@kbin.social 8 months ago
Look at Inuit and other cultures that live in the Arctic. Humans can live (relatively) comfortably in extreme conditions without keeping their environment at a constant 22C.
scarabic@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Africa’s climate doesn’t offer that much deadly cold.
And where caves were involved, they may not have been a constant dwelling but a place to retreat to in times of need.
Your spelunking friends don’t consider rain a deadly threat because they have REI jackets and access to antibiotics, so their attention is entirely on the issues of rain destabilizing the cave. But disease and exposure were immediate deadly threats to more primitive people.
So hiding in a cave during the rain, despite your spelunker friends’ modern safety standards, was probably a survival tactic.
shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I mean, there were cave dwellers in Europe and Asia too. The richest cave culture finds were in France.
I can attest all threats are considered to the best of one’s ability (minus the “things everyone is willing to risk”), even with everyone’s REI vests/jackets, which is why everyone often takes different routes based on what they’re good at (for example, one is bad with slopes, the other panics at puddles, though they insist this is “fun”). Once a cave even had classic stereotypical radiation in it (I should note one unspoken con of caves is they have an extremely high radon composition, which is natural in caves even though hearing it might be a mind changer). Every cave is different.
DivergentHarmonics@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
If i would guess, something like: look up “native american dwellings” and “how to make permanent shelters from tree branches”.
octoperson@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Here’s your answer. It’s likely there’s more people living in caves in modern times than there ever were in prehistory
youngalfred@lemm.ee 8 months ago
That makes sense - never considered cave artifacts to be an example of survivorship bias before
DivergentHarmonics@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
The whole of paleontology/paleo-anthropology has this problem because for remains of organisms to be preserved certain conditions must be met, which is not the case everywhere at any time.