17:05 Jun 30, 2009
Context - de zin met "one-trick pony" is de eerste zin van de tweede paragraaf. Als mogelijke vertaling kwam ik zelf niet verder dan "...niet al te veel in hun mars hadden."
“Neandertals had a Neandertal way of doing things, and it was great as long as they weren’t competing with moderns,” observes archaeologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University. In contrast, Marean says, the moderns, who evolved under tropical conditions in Africa, were able to enter entirely different environments and very quickly come up with creative ways to deal with the novel circumstances they encountered. “The key difference is that Neandertals were just not as advanced cognitively as modern humans,” he asserts.
Marean is not alone in thinking that Neandertals were one-trick ponies. A long-standing view holds that moderns outsmarted the Neandertals with not only their superior tool technology and survival tactics but also their gift of gab, which might have helped them form stronger social networks. The Neandertal dullards, in this view, did not stand a chance against the newcomers. |