the nature of prejudice

[sculptor]

I was reading the latest on Kostenki 11
and chanced upon physical reconstructions of potential ancestors
many of whom were sculpted clean shaven and with cut hair
I seriously doubt that a real person from 35kyrs ago would have looked like that.

............
OK
Kostenki 11 is fascinating in it;s own right
It seems to have been the site of a 25kyr old 40 foot diameter building using mammoth bones as the structural elements......
darned interesting

 

[Michael 345]

An international team of archaeologists led by the University of Exeter has discovered a new circular mammoth-bone feature at the Paleolithic site of Kostenki 11 in Eastern Europe.

http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/kostenki-11-mammoth-bone-structure-08240.html

Interesting indeed

 

[iceaura]

and chanced upon physical reconstructions of potential ancestors
many of whom were sculpted clean shaven and with cut hair
I seriously doubt that a real person from 35kyrs ago would have looked like that.

The stone age hunter/gatherers who survived the epidemics carried by initial European explorers are often taken to be our best available source of information or suggestions regarding the appearance of the humans living that long ago.

Many of them are (or were at first contact) clean-shaven (or plucked, often) with cut hair. The preference appears to have been strong enough to have influenced evolution, possibly via a Baldwin Effect founded in a sexual preference feedback - we find large breeding populations of human beings genetically set up to grow much less hair than other populations, and among these populations strong cultural preferences or practices for hairlessness everywhere except the top of the head, even that sometimes restricted to women (to the point that many tribes in the Americas plucked their eyebrows entirely) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect

The circumstance that early world explorers from Europe were both 1) the ancestors of the currently dominant tribes setting cultural norms all over the place, and 2) some of the hairiest people on the planet, genetically

seems to have skewed our perceptions of what is "natural". Afaik there is no record of any human tribe or people who did not cut and style the hair on their heads, and much reduced or eliminated facial hair (by gene or by tool) is close to a planetary norm.