THWOTH wrote:Spearthrower wrote:THWOTH wrote:Spearthrower wrote:For example, the genetic relationships within a group or location, and the social organization such as group size, male to female ratio, and the territorial range of their community.
Well I guess that's saying something, but not very much about a society or its culture.
Right, but the study is about social organisation, not culture.
I'd be interested to hear some explanation as to how 'social organisation' and 'culture’ can be viewed as uniquely distinct, non-contingent features of a society.
There is some area of overlap, but by and large, they're distinct quantities.
Culture is the practices of a population, for example, the ceremonies they perform, the language they speak, the beliefs they hold. There is a material element too in terms of the items they make - their material culture. In essence, culture is transmitted by word of mouth - enculturation. While some other species may potentially be accused of it, by and large, culture is a human phenomenon resulting from the thoughts of the population.
Social organisation is at a deeper, biological level. All animals that live together have social organisation; one that doesn't arise at all from the ideas those animals have, but from genes. Bees, for example, don't have a cultural overlay that changes the organization of their society - they just hive.
When it comes to such long-dead species as neanderthals, we have very little means of accessing their culture as, by and large, it doesn't preserve. Aside from artifacts they made, or materials they used, we'll never be able to study the culture of neanderthals - it's just not available to us.
But a fair amount of knowledge about social organisation is open to us as it requires no insight into the minds of the species, only quantifiable elements, like the number of individuals in a group, the male to female ratio, the number of older individuals, the survival rate of injured, in what proximity they lived to one another, how far they ranged to find food and whether there was a distribution of labour - all these things can potentially be discovered through material evidence and they can paint a previously unseen picture of neanderthal life.
This study is based on an exceptionally rare find of a lot of neanderthal remains from the same location and from the same time who lived together and were related to varying degrees. The fossils we typically find are geographically and temporally disparate from other neanderthal finds, so this study is a very rare insight into the structure of a neanderthal group.
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