Talk:Cave dweller

Neanderthal Ceremonies?

According to the article Neanderthal, there is no clear agreement that they ever had "ceremonies". They clearly had no art, and did other things in ways you might have expected from a bear or some such animal, but never from a human, such as not painting on the walls, pooping where they slept, or having different ways of doing things differently from place to place or from one century to the next, not storing the fish from the salmon run, or other things that would make you think they planned for the future. So even though the way one body was buried was interpreted to be ceremonial by some at one time, it may not have been, experts say, because the fetal position is not necessarily symbolic, but maybe just the easiest way to bury a body that had started to stink without digging a hole which was any larger than it had to be. Anyway, see the article if you want to know more, but you have not cited the "fact" that Neanderthals had ceremonies, and it's at least less than totally agreed upon as a fact. Chrisrus (talk) 23:54, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi, Chrisrus.

Thanks for your useful comment.

Wikipedia's "Neanderthal" may be a useful reference for improving this article. We should keep in mind that a good encyclopedia cites external sources, not itself.

I've added a citation to one source, of decent reputation but some age, for the statement that both Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals held ceremonies in caves. It's the writing of Karl Butzer.

Your statement that Neanderthals(?) "clearly had no art" seems problematic, in (1) that we weren’t around then and (2) that, a year ago, there was a report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that archaeologists working in Spain had "found solid signs that Neanderthals were using seashells in a decorative and symbolic way"[1], the shells dating from ten millennia before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe. You may also be interested in a September 2010 report in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory about tools and ornaments made by Neanderthals without Homo sapiens influence. According to the website of the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University (in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), "Discoveries of Neanderthal cave paintings have [...] been published, as well as small, carved figurines." There's also the hypothesis that the Divje Babe flute is a musical instrument made by one or more Neanderthals.

My expectations of modern humans, by the way, don't include "never [...] pooping where they sle[ep]": I've seen, read of, and/or heard of many who do this—infants, drunk persons, persons immobilized by disease or injury (treated or not), coprophiles, prisoners, and persons otherwise unaware of the drawbacks to this practice or forced by circumstance to engage in it. Modern humans and other animals also sometimes don't keep the bodies of animals they kill, don't properly store the food they keep, and do demonstrate foresight that sometimes seems to range from the questionable to the nonexistent. Also, several extant non-primate wild animal species do "things differently from place to place or from one century to the next".

There's also Wikipedia's "Neanderthal behavior" article, with its citations.

Obviously, you should feel free to add to this article sourced statements of disagreement about Neanderthal ceremonies in caves.

President Lethe (talk) 09:15, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Cappadocia

Dont forget to mention the cave houses and churches there.

• The above comment was posted three years ago (06:34, 7 May 2019‎ from IP address 94.212.84.2). It still bears asking: Why would you include the Puebloans (who actually built homes using bricks under cliff overhangs, which seems dubious as a "cave dwelling") but not Cappadocians (who carved homes out of megaliths). Over the last decade, there have been innumerable mainstream articles [2] [3] [4] on the trend of building underground. Can someone with subject-matter expertise take a shot at revamping this very dated article? Last1in (talk) 18:01, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Examples to remove

Despite her use of the word "caves", the Alice Morse Earle passage does not describe caves as they are understood in the rest of this article: she obviously describes dugouts in soil, not dwellings in natural openings in rock. I think we should remove this passage. If the houses in Australian mines are built in cavities made only by humans, not by natural erosion, their example also should be removed: it's one thing to start with a natural cavity and enlarge it; it's another to start with a solid rock, carve away part of it, and call it a cave—and, if one wants to counter that obviously the same term can be used to mean different things, we need only look to Wikipedia's main article on caves to know that here we should be restricting the term to naturally occurring cavities, which may be enlarged, but not created, by humans.

— President Lethe (talk) 14:58, 21 December 2021 (UTC)