Much of what passes for
interpretation here is rather thin on the ground, but what is extremely
important is that we are dealing with a nocturnal hunting life way. That alone explains everything. It was also never hinted at in any of the
material I have seen over the years.
This means that our Neanderthals were
largely designed for small group stalking and hunting at night which is a
generally easy life way. The Sasquatch
or Bigfoot and most other carnivores continue this life way.
Humanity learned instead to build
out in a larger community and operated as both hunters and gatherers in which
plant knowledge was as least important as hunting skills. Coastal fishing would also have encouraged
large populations as we observed in the Pacific Northwest .
The problem then was one of
simple absorption by a larger population.
It may well be that our nocturnal Sasquatch is a human Wildman hybrid,
but it is even likelier that Neanderthal women were directly absorbed by human
villages. The natural weight of numbers
would have disappeared the Neanderthal strain in quite the same way myriad
obscure human strains have since been absorbed.
Neanderthal big eyes ’caused demise’
The Daily Star, Thursday, March 14, 2013, BBC Online
riday, 19 April 2013
The Neanderthal skull (L) has larger eye sockets compared with a modern
human skull (R). Consequently, the now extinct species used more of its brain
to process visual information. Photo: BBC Online
A study of Neanderthal skulls suggests that they became extinct because
they had larger eyes than our species.
As a result, more of their brains were devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in
By contrast, the larger frontal brain regions of Homo sapiens led to the fashioning of warmer clothes and the development of larger social networks.
The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Neanderthals are a closely related species of human that lived in
The research team explored the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of
The humans that stayed in
Eiluned Pearce of
Social networks
Pearce found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets – by an average of 6mm from top to bottom.
Although this seems like a small amount, she said that it was enough for Neanderthals to use significantly more of their brains to process visual information.
“Since Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of the Neanderthal brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking,” she told BBC News.
This is a view backed by Prof Chris Stringer, who was also involved in the research and is an expert in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
“We infer that Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. If you live in a larger group, you need a larger brain in order to process all those extra relationships,” he explained.
The Neanderthals’ more visually-focused brain structure might also have affected their ability to innovate and to adapt to the ice age that was thought to have contributed to their demise.
Neanderthal wraps
There is archaeological evidence, for example, that the Homo sapiens that coexisted with Neanderthals had needles that they used to make tailored clothing. This would have kept them much warmer than the wraps thought to have been worn by Neanderthals.
Prof Stringer said that all these factors together might have given our species a crucial advantage that enabled us to survive.
“Even if you had a small percent better ability to react quickly, to rely on your neighbours to help you survive and to pass on information – all these things together gave the edge to Homo sapiens over Neanderthals, and that may have made a difference to survival.”
The finding runs counter to the idea that Neanderthals were not the stupid, brutish creatures portrayed in
Oxford University’s Prof Robin Dunbar, who supervised the study, said that the team wanted to avoid restoring the stereotypical image of Neanderthals.
“They were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as Homo sapiens,” he told BBC News.
“That difference might have been enough to tip the balance when things were beginning to get tough at the end of the last ice age,” he said.
Up until now, researchers’ knowledge of Neanderthals’ brains has been based on casts of skulls. This has given an indication of brain size and structure, but has not given any real indication of how the Neanderthal brain functioned differently from ours. The latest study is an imaginative approach in trying to address this issue.
Previous research by Pearce has shown that modern humans living at higher latitudes evolved bigger vision areas in the brain to cope with lower light levels. There is no suggestion though that their higher cognitive abilities suffered as a consequence.
Studies on primates have shown that eye size is proportional to the amount of brain space devoted to visual processing. So the researchers made the assumption that this would be true of Neanderthals.
[So it seems that Neanderthals were different from other humans by way of adaptations to night vision, which might even extend to re-evolving an eyeglow associated with night vision, and other adaptations to moving about and hunting at night. This could well include a different kind of gait adapted to creeping around in the dark rather than marching boldly ahead in broad daylight. And the assumption that it brought about their demise is a moot point if they had in fact survived instead.-DD]
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