>>I won't go so far as to say time is THE answer, but it sure looks to me that it is a far more realistic altrnative than asking questions.
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>It could be.
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>To me time is just a result of asking questions.
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>But as I said to Dragan, perhaps it wasn't simply asking questions, but asking the right questions.
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>The line of questioning that would lead up to time would inevitably include questions/answers dealing with "change" and "cause and effect" which, with a bit of imagination, is only a hop, skip, and jump away from free will. Perhaps this level of self awareness, keeping in mind whether free will exists or not is irrelevant to the suggestion that we have free will, is the ignition of an explosion?
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>>By the way, I think the jury is still out as to whether Neanderthals and their cousins were actually wiped off the map. There seems to be growing evidence that they may have merged.
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>That doesn't make much sense to me, from an evolutionary stand point. Any articles or web pages you can point me to?

My Googling prowess is limited, but here's something to start with:
"Did Cro-Magnon Outsmart Neandertals, Or Both Outsmart Scientists? 10/26/2001
An article in the Oct 25 Nature makes it clear that there are almost as many opinions about human evolution as there are paleoanthropologists. Neandertals used to be pictured as brutish transitional forms in the human ancestral tree, and smarter Cro-Magnons survived because of their superior brains. But the picture today is not so simple. Points of dispute include: did Neandertals go extinct, or just merge into modern man? Were they as smart as Cro-Magnon? Did the Cro-Magnon invade and destroy them, or intermarry with them? Why are carbon-14 measurements so inconsistent? Who made the artifacts and stone tools? Although there have been new archaeological finds recently, paleoanthropologists are still far from answers, the article explains."

My point about time concepts being the driver of "culture" (art/weapons/etc) is that lots and lots of questions were asked all the time, but it was those relating to the "management" of time that resulted in things that afforded culture to develop.

cheers