Neanderthals develop written alphabet before contact with Homo sapiens
- Thread starter acgoldis
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They'd need to develop agriculture first. Not only that, develop it in such a way that they'd develop stratified societies from that, all that before they could come up with writing.
Agree. Writing pretty much everywhere seemed coming after development of agriculture and early urban developments. Whole idea probably was born due needs of byreocracy. So without agriculture there hardly would be writing. And agriculture on ice age Eurasia is ratherly pretty hard when climate is not very stable nor warm enough. Not even sure if Neanderthals had capacities on development of writing. They were about as smart and intelligent as modern humans but not sure if their mental capacities were enough for that.
So probably only way is that Neanderthals survive much longer.
Göbekli Tepe is thought to have been built by hunter-gatherers, so it's plausible they could have achieved the much less demanding task of inventing a written language. It might not be decipherable after they went extinct tho.
This is probably an outdated theory. See post #4 .
Göbekli Tepe is buil before agriculture and looks stunningly more advanced than Stone Henge, which is 6000 years younger.
It seems more likely that development of spirituality, gods, religion, is far more important in humanoid development than technical achievements like agriculture. It could be, that technological developments as agriculture happened as a result of the development of religon and spirituality
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Record things on cave walls. Births, deaths, great deeds of chieftains, prayers to the hunting gods, etc.
And even if we can realise that as writing we certainly couldn't translate that. That language would be dead too long time ago without any other traces than that mysterious writing. We would have better chances to translate Indus Valley Script than ever get even some idea what Neanderthal text would mean. If Neanderthals still disappear long time before rise of H. sapiens civilisations we wouldn't even know surely what Neanderthal speak would had sound like.
Agriculture and pastoralism started 500 to 1,500 years before the first layers of Göbekli Tepe. The site was made by hunter gatherers that knew how to grow plants for many generations and were living in a semi-sedentary way of life for even longer. They also had a much more developed material culture and cultural practices even before constructing Göbekli Tepe, I mean, they had idols, polished stones, pottery, and many other complex instruments for tens of thousands of years by that point.
As smart as Anatomically Modern Humans, not modern humans, the AMH were probably not as developed cognitively as more modern (say 20,000 BC) humans.