Bag of Worms Yet Words

94. Neanderthals Created Symbolic Artifacts

Looking at European archaeological sites primarily, evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists found no physical evidence of symbolic behavior by Neanderthal hominins. Obviously symbolic artifacts appeared with the appearance of Homo Sapiens. New discoveries at a Neantherthal site in southeast Spain, dating 37,000-50,000 years ago, have proved that Neanderthals did create symbolic artifacts. An international team have found cockleshells with holes suitable for stringing and red and black paint pigments on them. They also found nearby an undrilled cockleshell with several paint pigments, suggesting it was a painting palette. Hypothetically, strings of decorated cockleshells were worn by Neanderthal individuals.  Evidence of symbolic behavior for modern humans, similarly red ochre painted drilled cockleshells, has been found as early as 92,000 years ago in Israel. (Michael Balter, "Neanderthal Jewelry Shows Their Symbolic Smarts," Science, 327, 15 January 2010, p. 255.)

How can we doubt that we will eventually discover that other hominidae had and have symbolic behavior? That we have not yet discovered this behavior does not mean that evidence does not exist for it; it only means that we haven't figured out how to frame the research to reveal it.

93. Rhesus Macaques Hardwired For Elementary Mathematical Relationships

According to German primate researchers, studying rhesus macaques, these primates' brains are hardwired for elementary mathematical relationships, such as "greater than" and "less than". Some twenty percent of  brain cells, in monitored region, are dedicated to such reasoning.

92. Men's Testosterone Rises When They Smell Ovulating Women

Comparing two groups of men, one of which smelled the tee shirts of ovulating women and the other group smelling the tee shirts of non-ovulating women, the men smelling the tee shirts of ovulating women later had higher levels of testosterone.

This finding is exactly what it should be in a Darwinian evolutionary scenario, which is all about fertility and reproductive ratios. It is unlikely that men are self-aware of this result--increasing testosterone. They probably become aware when they begin to enter courtship practices toward the ovulating women under the pressure of the increased testosterone. Unawareness of what is biologically happening is revealed in the frequent complaint of the pregnant woman to the impregnating man, we only had sex once; well, that "once" was when the woman was most fertile.

(H/T Instapundit and FuturePundit.)

Old Testament in Written Form Might Date 400 Years Earlier Than Previously Believed

Writing on a recovered shard of pottery from King David's time has been identified as an ancient form of Hebrew and contains maxims of social morality similar to Isaiah. This discovery provides indirect evidence against the widely held historical interpretation that the first five books of the Old Testament were mostly written in the 6th century and contained much fictitious history  intended to legitimate the Israelite ruler of the time.

91. Moral Maps and Genetics

The valorized landscape, that is, the natural world in which an animal lives, and the mental and moral maps of that landscape in the animal brain, become the environment in which natural selection acts. Random (genetic) structures that enhance or make brain maps more useful would contribute to survival and be selected. In this way, moral maps could be genetically implanted and "inherited" to become the inborn moral taxonomy that scientists are now finding present behavior of higher primates.

90. Landscape Maps and Moral Maps

Even simple organisms with rudimentary nervous systems, such as bees, have brain maps of the landscape in which they live. (I am avoiding using the term, mental, as in mental map, because the presence of a mentality is not established for lower animals.) The landscape in which the organism acts is a valorized environment, in which natural features and animal interpolations in the landscape are evaluated through sensory filtering and action constructs. The animal's brain maps the features in the landscape significant to the animal's survival. In other words, values in the landscape are represented as features in the brain map. In evolutionary terms, the environment created by natural selection and in which natural selection acts (and other population genetic processes proceed) is a world of values.

Surely, this brain map of the valorized environment is the template upon which moral maps are constructed in the animal brain. In this speculation, morality appears first as a mapping in the brain of the value transactions performed by the animal in its environment. By "morality", I mean simply learned acts that involve consequences, either by creating them or avoiding their creation,  for other members of a population. If a wolf stays within its territory, because it has learned from previous experience, that going beyond a marker makes its pack vulnerable to attack from other wolves, the act of staying within the boundary is a moral act, in the sense I am using morality. Such acts performed in the environment are mapped in the brain, thus becoming a brain map.

Prior (in evolution) to the existence in an organism of a theory of mind and a theory of world, the animal cannot consult this brain map, as humans consult mental maps. The brain map would guide the animal's behavior "in the natural world" and is, for the animal, indistinguishable from the "natural world". Initially, in evolution, moral maps would have this ontological status.