First may I offer my apology for the ridiculous length of time it has taken me to reply to this. My holiday destination this year was a technology free zone and I am only now back online.
No problem, Tao! I'm behind after a week of business travel myself.
Since mitochondrial DNA sampling unequivocally points to a common ancestor and not interbreeding I tend to go with that line of thinking.
I'm not a geneticist, so I really can't comment. I know geneticists on both sides, so I figure the jury is out. I don't understand early human genetics well enough to make a firm decision. I guess I'd say I can toss out the basic sides, but I'm in the "Not my area" camp.
However the absence of grave goods does not explain why 'graveyards' containing the remains of multiple individuals over a considerable period of time would be practised.
It could mean something socially, or it could just mean that humans had enough logic to realize that burying the dead in a consistent location, then putting camp far away from it, is best for avoiding scavengers and predators.
No clue how early communities viewed goods (either as valuable or not). My guess is that few people viewed goods (in a general sense) as highly valuable unless they were rare (for example, stone tools from a particular quarry). Most hunter-gatherers do not view their goods as very valuable and give away a lot of stuff. This is because all of it is handmade from readily available local materials and so is easily replaced. Perhaps this is different in past times for certain materials, such as furs being difficult to obtain and valuable due to the cold. We don't really know. We can speculate, but since there is no definitive indication of any sort of hint of religious ritual or afterlife thoughts until grave goods show up, that's sort of the baseline though there are certainly other possibilities.
Personally, I speculate that there was a whole lot going on in the area of religious and philosophical thought, tool-making, and language before the Neanderthals and modern humans, but these are my personal speculations rather than scientifically backed hypotheses.
In this case I care not if it is an uncommon definition. To me, as a person who has made his own tools, I "know" the process to be an artistic one in which aesthetics are as vital as function... I would go as far to say that preference is the mother of all aesthetics and preference is of course common throughout nature. So as soon as our first ancestors began making tools aesthetics in their production were inevitable.
I can appreciate this, and having a husband as a carpenter as well as some experience myself in the aesthetics of function, I agree in theory. However, this doesn't explain why both chimps and humans have both made and used tools for a long time, yet there have been no strong artistic movements coming from any species but humans. The rudimentary elements are there, and apparently the preference (I haven't read that research- the stuff I'd seen with chimps were always one-off tools, so it's news to me) but not the extension into art for art's sake. Similarly, chimps learn language and even create new words, but they don't start into philosophical discourse. So it appears that something is distinctive about the human brain and its tendency for symbols and higher-order thinking.
I was under the impression that cranial capacity was a rather good indicator of when the brain had grown sufficiently to form speech.
Cranial capacity, along with frontal lobe expansion (the real crux of the matter), is a good indicator that symbolic thought is possible. The actual language structures in the brain are impossible to see in the fossil record. It is an issue of cranial capacity expansion being a forerunner of modern language, but not an indicator of it.
