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Neanderthal behavior is subject to much study and speculation. From their physiology neanderthals are presumed to have been omivores but animal protein formed the majority of their dietary protein showing them to have been apex predators not scavengers. However, new studies indicate that they had cooked vegetables in their diet.〔Ghosh, Pallab. "(Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables )." BBC News. December 27, 2010.〕 They made advanced tools, had language (the nature of which is debated) and lived in complex social groups. Neanderthal brains were somewhat larger than humans but were shaped a bit differently since they evolved separately for several hundred thousand years. The size and distribution of archaeological sites shows that Neanderthals spent their lives mostly in small groups of 5-10 individuals (compared to 20-30 individuals for Cro-Magnon humans). Elders were rare as few Neanderthals lived past 35. Skeletal evidence shows that injured individuals were often nursed back to health by others. Neanderthals rarely made contact with outsiders or traveled outside their small home territories. Although many Neanderthal sites have rare pieces of high-quality stone from more than 100 kilometers away, there is not enough to indicate trade or even regular contact with other communities. It has been suggested by one pair of researchers that these stones may instead be "gifts" brought by adolescents wishing to join a new community (some form of "marrying out" was essential due to the small size of Neanderthal territories). In their view, this lack of trade could indicate that Neanderthals may have lacked some cognitive abilities for dealing with strangers, such as "cheater detection" and the ability to judge the value of one commodity in terms of another. Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. The quality of tools found at archaeological sites is further said to suggest that Neanderthals were good at "expert" cognition, a form of observational learning and practice acquired through apprenticeship that relies heavily on long-term procedural memory. Neanderthal toolmaking supposedly changed little over hundreds of thousands of years. The lack of innovation was said to imply they may have had a reduced capacity for thinking by analogy and less working memory. The researchers further speculated that Neanderthal behavior would probably seem neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic to modern humans.〔 ==Language== The idea that Neanderthals lacked complex language was once widespread, despite concerns about the accuracy of reconstructions of the Neanderthal vocal tract, until 1983, when a Neanderthal hyoid bone was found at the Kebara Cave in Israel. The hyoid is a small bone that connects the musculature of the tongue and the larynx, and by bracing these structures against each other, allows a wider range of tongue and laryngeal movements than would otherwise have been possible. The presence of this bone implies that structured speech was anatomically possible and that the repertory of sounds that might be produced was wide enough to contain well-defined sets of phonemes, and not simply inarticulate guttural grunts. The bone found is virtually identical to that of modern humans. A recent study on the Kebara hyoid has used X-ray microtomography and finite element analysis to compare it to modern human hyoids. The study concluded that the Neanderthal hyoid showed histological features and micro-chemical behavior similar to a modern human's hyoid, indicating that the two were used in the same way. There is some circumstantial evidence for thinking that Neanderthals had language with words and some kind of syntax; some of their tool-making and hunting tactics would have been difficult to learn and execute without it.〔Wynn & Coolidge, p.27〕 A recent extraction of DNA from Neanderthal bones indicates that Neanderthals had the same version of the FOXP2 gene as modern humans. This gene is known to play a role in human language. The morphology of the outer and middle ear of Neanderthal ancestors, ''Homo heidelbergensis'', found in Spain, suggests they had an auditory sensitivity similar to modern humans and very different from chimpanzees. They were probably able to differentiate between many different sounds. Neurological evidence for potential speech in ''neanderthalensis'' may exist in the form of the hypoglossal canal. The canal of ''neanderthalensis'' is the same size or larger than in modern humans, which is significantly larger than the canal of australopithecines and modern chimpanzees. The canal carries the hypoglossal nerve, which controls the muscles of the tongue. This suggests to some theorists that ''neanderthalensis'' had vocal capabilities similar to modern humans. A research team from the University of California, Berkeley, led by David DeGusta, however, argues that the size of the hypoglossal canal is not an indicator of speech. His team's research, which shows no correlation between canal size and speech potential, shows there are a number of extant non-human primates and fossilized australopithecines that have an equal or larger hypoglossal canal. Another anatomical difference between Neanderthals and modern humans is the former's lack of a mental protuberance (the point at the tip of the chin). This may be relevant to speech, as the mentalis muscle contributes to moving the lower lip and is used to articulate a bilabial click. While some Neanderthal individuals do possess a mental protuberance, their chins never show the inverted T-shape of modern humans. In contrast, some Neanderthal individuals show inferior lateral mental tubercles (small bumps at the side of the chin). Steven Mithen (2006) speculates that the Neanderthals may have had an elaborate proto-linguistic system of communication that was more musical than modern human language, and that pre-dated the separation of language and music into two separate modes of cognition. He called this hypothetical lingual system 'hmmmmm' because it would be Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Neanderthal behavior」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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