Born to party...

... known to nap.

Is spatial containment really a transitive relation?

I think containment within containment is a mathematical abstraction. For example: 

"The water is contained in the bottle and the bottle is in the room. Therefore the water is in the room."

You want to comment that for the water to be "in" the room could mean one of several things - in the bottle, as a spray in the air, as a puddle on the floor, etc. In each case you have to stop and think: yeah that is "in" the room. Because "in" is an abstraction covering these kinds of diversity.

Update: But even without appeals to general properties of being "in", language does not support the transitivity of water in a bottle also being in a room. The bottle is in the room, Period. Everything else is a technicality not an intuition. To think of the water as being "in" the room requires removing the bottle.  

Update: I am going to keep worrying at this. I think containment is a natural intuition but "in" is an abstraction that is defined to include contained containment. You say the water is contained in the bottle but you do not say the water is contained in the room. So really, since you can define "in" as a sequence of containments, what is wrong with that?

A bovine faun

 Part-way along.

Chatelperronian you say? That's a relief

So we saw that bladelet from Nevada compared to the Neanderthal one from La Ferrassie in France:

 

It bothered me that La Ferrassie was called "Mousterian" and that that meant a deep age. I was not too comfortable thinking the place in Nevada had material from 200K years ago. BUT, I went to look more carefully at the website where I found the picture La Ferrassie - Neanderthal rock shelter. The bladelet on the right comes from what they call the Chatelperronian layer - which typically dates to 45K to 40K years ago. That makes much more sense. People travelling up the Colorado River 40K years ago fits well. I suppose those Neanderthals did not survive.

Update: Too bad there are no Neanderthal skeletons in the US. Oh wait....there are. And plenty of their genes too!