Was Neanderthal shot by a gun type weapon?

ONE day in 1922, near Broken Hill, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a skull was found. When it came to the attention of the British Museum, the curators were pleased.

It was, in fact, a Neanderthal skull, and Neanderthal bones did not exactly come ten-a-penny.

But the Broken Hill skull was special for other reasons. On the left side of the cranium was a small, perfectly round hole. At first it was assumed that it had been made by a spear, or other sharp implement, but further investigation proved that this had not been the case.

When a skull is struck by a relatively low-velocity projectile – such as an arrow, or spear – it produces what are known as radial cracks or striations; that is, minute hairline fractures running away from the place of impact.

As there were no radial fractures on the Neanderthal skull, it was unanimously concluded that the projectile must have had a far, far greater velocity than an arrow or spear. But what?

Another mystery was that the right side of the cranium had, in the words of one anthropologist, “been blown away”. Further research also proved that that the right side of the cranium had been “blown away” from the inside out.

In short, whatever had hit the Broken Hill Neanderthal on the left side of his head had passed through it with such force that it had caused the right side to explode.

Researcher Rene Noorbergen, who investigated the mystery in his excellent book Secrets Of The Lost Races, commented: “This same feature is seen in modern victims of head wounds received from shots from a high-powered rifle.”

Noorbergen’s comments were more than appropriate, for forensic experts who have studied the skull in Berlin have since concluded that, “The cranial damage to Rhodesian Man’s skull could not have been caused by anything but a bullet”.

Compounding the mystery further is the fact that the skull of an ancient aurochs (an extinct type of bison) was found in Russia by the Lena River.

It, too, had been shot in the head, thousands of years previously, but had survived for some time, as the bullet hole had calcified.

This sensational discovery came to the attention of professor Constantin Flerov, curator of Moscow’s Palaeontological Museum of the USSR, who promptly put the skull on display.

Incredible though it sounds, we are faced with quite forceful evidence that, thousands of years ago, someone discharged a bullet into the skull of one of our anthropological cousins and also nearly killed a large mammal by the same method. But how could this be?

One obvious (but very radical) solution is to conclude that, contrary to what we have always understood, ancient man may have been technologically developed to a very high degree. Did a small but advanced civilisation develop the concept of ballistics long before the Chinese?

The problem with this idea is that it is too much of a coincidence. Could two separate societies, separated by thousands of years and a vast cultural gulf, have both invented weapons that just happened to fire small, cylindrical projectiles at high speed?

One colleague suggested to me that the only alternative is the possibility that someone from the future, carrying a firearm, travelled back into the past and engaged in some sort of trans-temporal hunting expedition.

This takes us perilously close to the realms of science fantasy, of course, but the fact is that the hole in the aurochs’ skull got there somehow.

Like it or not, the fact is that someone or something seemed to be using high-velocity bullets thousands of years ago. We don’t know who, we don’t know why and we don’t know how – but it happened.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/opinion/columnists/wraithscape/was-neanderthal-shot-by-a-time-traveller-1-6786186

  


I changed the title as time travel really is too far fetched for me, but how this Neanderthal was killed is very perplexing.

 

NOT BAD going there....

NEANDERTHALS had "gun type" weapons tens-of-thousands of years before the Chinese supposedly invented gunpowder ?!? Based on bullet type wounds in prehistoric skulls found in Rhodesia and Russia..

THOUGH, to be fair - if gunpowder was actually developed around the Siberia/Mongolia regions, let's say, somewhere between 15-->100,000 years ago ~ then, just maybe, it's not improbable that some nomadic tribes wandering down into China some 2-3,000 years ago took their guns and powder with them ?  

::rambo::

Lone Wolf wrote: 

NOT BAD going there....

NEANDERTHALS had "gun type" weapons tens-of-thousands of years before the Chinese supposedly invented gunpowder ?!?

THOUGH, to be fair - if gunpowder was actually developed around the Siberia/Mongolia regions, let's say, somewhere between 15-->100,000 years ago ~ then, just maybe, it's not improbable that some nomadic tribes wandering down into China some 2-3,000 years ago took their guns and powder with them ?   ::rambo::

Interesting Bee, I think this needs far more investigating. To me where we see in ancient Egypt for example there is always the possibility that Technology have been invented and then lost to be reinvented, for example look at the timeline construction of the pyramids. It went from developing the car to within a few hundred years the Formula one sports car to then within a few hundred years losing this to build the Robin Reliant.
In other words going backwards. Take the diorite vessels found at Saqqara, how on earth did they make them?
My view is that humans have been advanced, with an elite, then been destroyed by the masses through harsh rule and then thus technology lost, and thus those who ruled who were advanced were in such small numbers, when eradicated by their own harsh rule, the knowledge was lost
I could be wrong, but there are so many questions that are left which are puzzling!

  

IN the case of ancient Egypt, though, I reckon it could have been more a case of their mathematics and logical thinking reaching a certain level 1-2,000 years BC; being "lost" (apart from a handful of libraries and repositories) for a few centuries leading up to and out of the Dark Ages following the collapse of the Roman Empire; and then being "rediscovered" during the Renaissance/"Age of Discovery" during the 15th and 16th centuries..