neolithic couple in Eternal imbrace

[imaginarypallies]

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070206/sc_nm/italy_embrace_dc

ROME (Reuters) - Call it the eternal embrace.
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Archaeologists in Italy have discovered a couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, hugging each other.

"It's an extraordinary case," said Elena Menotti, who led the team on their dig near the northern city of Mantova.

"There has not been a double burial found in the Neolithic period, much less two people hugging -- and they really are hugging."

Menotti said she believed the two, almost certainly a man and a woman although that needs to be confirmed, died young because their teeth were mostly intact and not worn down.

"I must say that when we discovered it, we all became very excited. I've been doing this job for 25 years. I've done digs at Pompeii, all the famous sites," she told Reuters.

"But I've never been so moved because this is the discovery of something special."

A laboratory will now try to determine the couple's age at the time of death and how long they had been buried.

[drooperdoo]

I think the people in the embrace are part of Italy's aboriginal stock--from the pre-neolithic period.

I know it was 5,000 years ago--and that fits into the generic "neolithic period". But here's a quote: "There was a big change about 5000 BC when Neolithic (New Stone Age) people arrived in Italy. They seem to have come from Greece, in boats across the ocean, and they already had New Stone Age technology when they arrived."

That's the thing: The Greeks colonized from the south, and these people were in the north. Secondly, the Greeks cremated and these people were buried. Both of these facts imply circumstantially--to me, at least--that they weren't newer neolithic people, but older mesolithic stock.

Source regarding Greek cremation: www.everlifememorials.com/urns/urns-history.htm

As for Etruscans, they cremated, too: www.artlex.com/ArtLex/e/etruscan.html

[imaginarypallies]

your making lemonade with apples, I think it is using Neolithic as a time period (the way NORMAL non race-board anthro-nuts do) same think is done with yayoi and the like.

[drooperdoo]

I know. But when one says "neolithic" it implies something different. People don't just use it as a time-period. They use it as a human-migratory definition. Why? --Because "neolithic" implies new techniques that were pioneered in the Middle East.

The whole world didn't develop these techniques at the same time.

So--even though these new techniques may have arisen in the Levant--people in, say, Iberia or France at the same time didn't share the same customs and technology.

So we can talk of a "neolithic people," but--if one goes by that definition of "people using these new techniques"--then one can only be referring to people in the Near East.

So if I say the "neolithic population" of Europe, most people don't think of it as a calendar time, but an ethnic designation of people from Anatolia who entered Europe with these new customs.

So what I said was--by calendar time--the Italian couple were from the so-called Neolithic period, but I don't believe that they are from that neolithic migration of peoples out of Anatolia into Europe.

In other words, I don't think they were Etruscans or Mycenean Greeks in the Italian peninsula; I think they're the older pre-existing stock.

But what do I know?

[imaginarypallies]

again as with Yayoi and Jomon, Paleolithic and Neolithic are time period markers or "periods" yes they have to do with migrations that occurred in Aforementioned time periods however a person within that time period is neolithic in a sense, even if they are descendants of paleolithic farmers in the area. as it has two definitions the Anthropological one designating the migrants that arrived in said time periods, and the other historical marker(or epoch) designating anyone/anything from the time period irrespective of whether or not they are of the migrant stock. In this definition it can be seen as analogous to other similar "markers" such as Jurassic, Triassic, etc