Behavior is one of many characteristics, along with anatomical and genetic characters, used by biologists and paleontologists to distinguish one species from another. For this reason, paleoanthropologists have attempted to define something known as “modern human behavior”—generally seen as behaviors unique to the Homo sapiens and which is not observed in the H. neanderthalensis. What archaeological evidence is there for modern human behavior, and what behaviors might be considered uniquely modern? Can biological anthropology contribute to this question? In this talk, I examine many of the behaviors that are argued to be unique to H. sapiens; in the end, I conclude that we cannot reject the hypothesis that these behaviors are also found in our Neanderthal cousins.
speakers
Trenton W. Holliday
Trenton W. Holliday is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he has been on the faculty since 1998. He earned his B.A. in Anthropology from magna cum laude from Louisiana State University in 1988 and completed his MA (1991) and PhD (1995) in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. His main research interests have been the origins of modern humans and the disappearance of Neanderthals. He has published papers on the estimation of Pleistocene human population sizes, and limb proportions, body size, and locomotion in hominid fossils, including such notable fossils as the Australopithecus afarensis “Lucy” and Liang Bua 1 (Homofloresiensis or “the Hobbit”). He also contributed to the study of the recently discovered hominid species, the Australopithecus sediba it's the Homo naledi. His work has been published in the Journal of Human Evolution, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, American Anthropologist, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (EUA) and Science. In 2023, his book Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe was published by Columbia University Press. Over the years, he has excavated at Paleolithic sites in Portugal and France.