#neanderthal

I do not have any tattoos. But I’m thinking of getting one. Right now I’m considering the possibility of getting one for Shanidar One, the Neanderthal who died with some severe disabilities that, essentially, is one of the many example of early humans caring for each other. I could make a whole post about him but that’s not what this is about.

I’d love to get a tattoo related to Shanidar One, learning about him was a huge defining moment in my life and legitimately changed how I think about people and encouraged me to learn more about anthropology. But I have no idea what to get!!! So any ideas, in any capacity, would be HUGELY appreciated. I definitely want it to be a drawing of some kind, not a quote, but I’m struggling to figure out what I could possibly use.

guess who's back and gon' dip for another month...🗣

(no i am gen busy writing the book but in the meanwhile here is some sketches about the crime duo and nandy NOT having a seizure because of antla. RARE moment.)

For a while now ive wanted to make a Neanderthal-like common ancestor between humans and some of the more humanoid pokemon lines! And this is what I landed on!

For this line, I actually made the final stage first and worked backwards, in both name and design. Pondoras is a combination better Ponder, or to think, and Pandora, the first woman of Greek mythology. Thus the other two stages are that prefix "pon" combined with "tot" and "teen" to denote age.

I hope you enjoy, and if ya do i take commissions and have a patreon! Details on the pinned post!

I was hairier and more aggressive and impulsive than anyone else in the family, but now I can be proud to have so many neanderthal throwbacks:

From Eats History

Scientists found 70,000-year-old remnants of a neanderthal meal in a cave in Iraq. They ran it through a scanning electron microscope. It was a bean burger....

In 2022 a team from the University of Liverpool published a peer-reviewed study in the journal Antiquity documenting their analysis of charred food remains from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, one of the most significant Neanderthal archaeological sites in the world. The cave is already famous for the Shanidar IV burial, a Neanderthal skeleton discovered surrounded by flowers, the first documented evidence of Neanderthal ritual burial. What the 2022 study found in the same cave's ashes was something nobody expected. Evidence of complex, multi-ingredient, multi-step cooking by Neanderthals 70,000 years ago. Wild lentils, wild peas, wild grass seeds, wild mustard and wild pistachio, soaked to remove bitter outer husks, ground together, combined with water, formed into cakes and cooked over fire. As Professor Chris Hunt, coordinator of the excavation, told the Guardian: our findings are the first real indication of complex cooking, and thus of food culture, among Neanderthals.

The myth of the strictly meat-eating caveman is not accurate and the archaeological evidence has been dismantling it for decades. Neanderthals were primarily hunters, the main species at Shanidar was the agile mountain ibex which required genuine skill to catch, and isotope analysis of Neanderthal bone shows a diet heavily weighted toward animal protein. But they were also gathering, processing and deliberately combining plant foods in ways that demonstrate cognitive planning and accumulated generational knowledge about how to make food more digestible and more palatable. They were soaking pulses to reduce bitterness. They were grinding seeds to remove husks. They were combining multiple ingredients deliberately. They were cooking. The Shanidar Cave Project noted one additional detail that I find genuinely wonderful. The Neanderthals did not remove all the bitter parts from the pulses, which might mean they actually liked the bitter taste. A 70,000 year old flavour preference, preserved in ash.

I made the recipe. Fava beans, lentils, wheat berries, almonds, pistachios and mustard seeds, soaked overnight, crushed together, formed into small round cakes and grilled over fire exactly as the evidence documents. No salt. No oil. No seasoning of any kind beyond what the 70,000 year old charred remains show. I rated it 1.3 out of 10. If I were a Neanderthal in the Zagros Mountains with a freshly killed ibex roasting over the fire nearby, I would not be reaching for the bean cake. But the story of what those burned remnants reveal about Neanderthal intelligence and food culture is one of the most extraordinary things I have covered for this channel. Full history sourced directly from the peer-reviewed Antiquity study and the Shanidar Cave Project, and the complete recipe, on the blog now. Link in bio.