I actually have high expectations for neanderthal intelligence. By that of course, i do mean baseline intelligence without the cultural supercharging we are exposed to. Everything else points to a successful hunting band society well adapted to deal with the Pleistocene. What they did not have is the 150 person village, likely because they did well enough without.
Once the human village showed up simple absorption was inevitable by sheer weight of numbers. A human war band could drive of the handful of men and capture the women far more often that the other way around. We even had something happen like that to an Altai wild women in living memory. Her children are hybrids and her grandchildren will breed back into our general population.
Mankind's global success with the village has allowed mankind to absorb all primitive cousins. We have a handful of hold outs out there but the truth is that their absorption is inevitable. It will not even take long now because there is no isolation anymore, even contrived. .
Research finds Neanderthals were more thoughtful than we once imagined
Maybe it’s their famously protruding brow
ridge or perhaps it’s the now-discredited notion that they were
primitive scavengers too dumb to use language or symbolism, but somehow
Neanderthals picked up a reputation as brutish, dim and mannerless
cretins.
Yet the latest research on the
history and habits of Neanderthals suggests that such portrayals of them
are entirely undeserved. It turns out that Neanderthals were capable
hunters who used tools and probably had some semblance of culture, and
the DNA record shows that if you trace your ancestry to Europe or Asia,
chances are very good that you have some Neanderthal DNA in your own genome.
The
bad rap began when the first Neanderthal skull was discovered around
1850 in Germany, says Paola Villa, an archaeologist at the University of
Colorado. “The morphological features of these skulls — big eyebrows,
no chin — led to the idea that they were very different from us, and
therefore inferior,” she says. While the majority of archaeologists no
longer believe this, she says, the idea that Neanderthals were inferior,
brutish or stupid remains in popular culture.
Neanderthals
first appeared in Europe and western Asia between 300,000 and 400,000
years ago. They are our closest (extinct) relative, and their species
survived until 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they vanish from the
fossil record, says Svante Paabo, director of the Max Planck Institute
of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and author of “Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes.”
Why these relatives of ours thrived for so long and then ended their
long, successful run about the same time that modern humans began to
spread remains a point of debate and speculation.
The research team used only a total of 400 milligrams of bone powder for their analysis. (Frank Vinken)
Researcher Tomislav Maricic inspects a Neandertal bone fragment in the ultra-clean room. (Frank Vinken)
One theory holds that Neanderthals went extinct because they were inferior to the modern humans they encountered. But in a paper published in PLOS One
last year, Villa and Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden
University in the Netherlands, conclude that a comparison of
Neanderthals and modern humans simply doesn’t support what they call the
“modern superiority complex,” or the notion that Neanderthal were
inherently inferior to the modern humans who overlapped with them.
Compared
with humans today, Neanderthals were shorter, stockier and heavier
built, with bigger bulges on their bones where muscles attach. But
there’s no reason to think that they were dumb, Villa says. Their brains
were actually slightly larger than ours, and archaeological sites have
turned up evidence that Neanderthals used personal ornaments
including bird feathers, claws and shells smeared with ochre. The use
of such ornaments supports the idea that Neanderthals were capable of
symbolism and abstract thought, Villa says.
Some of them may have
been artists. In September, a research team working in Gibraltar (a
British colony at the southern end of Spain) published a description of a
rock engraving found in a cave that they say is the first known example
of Neanderthal art.
The engraving consists of multiple crossed lines that were created, the
researchers write, “by repeatedly and carefully passing a pointed
lithic [stone] tool into the grooves, excluding the possibility of an
unintentional or utilitarian origin.” The engraving, the researchers
say, demonstrates a Neanderthal capacity for abstract thought and
expression.
They
also appear to have buried their dead. In a study published in the
Proceedings of the National Academies of Science last January,
researchers document evidence from the La Chapelle-aux-Saints
archaeological site in France showing a Neanderthal burial site.
Twisted
fibers found on stone tools at another French site suggest that
Neanderthals knew how to make string or cordage, and six stone
arrowheads recovered there imply that they also used complex projectile
techniques — tasks that would require advanced thinking.
Starting
about 200,000 years ago, Villa says, European Neanderthals used tools
made with pitch, a glue material that doesn’t occur naturally but must
be synthesized from tree bark. Modern experiments show that producing
pitch with the resources available to Neanderthals requires a high
degree of technical knowledge.
Once thought to be scavengers
incapable of hunting, they actually were accomplished big-game stalkers
who thrived by hunting a wide range of animals in a variety of
environments, the latest research shows.
Along with the idea that
they were scavengers came the notion that Neanderthals ate a very
limited diet, consisting mostly of large or medium-size mammals —
dietary constraints that would have left them less adaptable to changes
in the environment than early modern humans. But research simply doesn’t
bear this out.
Luca Fiorenza,
a palaeoanthropologist at the University of New England in Australia,
has examined the teeth of Neanderthal fossils found in Italy and found
evidence that they were consuming shellfish, seeds and probably wild
plants.
The advent of advanced DNA technology has added a rich
new layer to our understanding of Neanderthals and their relationship to
us. In 2010, Paabo, who heads the Neanderthal Genome Project, and a large group of colleagues published the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, and in early 2014 another research team presented genome sequences from DNA extracted from the toe bone of a Neanderthal fossil found in Siberia.
Svante Paabo speaks with researcher Marco de la Rasilla at the El Sidron Cave in Asturias, Spain, where Neanderthal remains have been found. (Courtesy of El Sidron Research Team)
“Neanderthals are the
closest evolutionary relatives to present-day people,” Paabo says, and
the DNA evidence shows that some of our ancestors didn’t just overlap in
time with the Neanderthals, they also bred with them.
“It’s
quite clear that Neanderthals have mixed with modern humans,” Paabo
says, contributing on the order of 1 to 2 percent of the DNA found in
people living today who trace their roots to Europe or Asia. “We now
have a quite good date for when this mixing happened — somewhere between
50,000 and 60,000 years ago — right about the time that modern humans
expand out of the Middle East and Africa to colonize the rest of the
world,” he says.
In March, a team that included Paabo published further DNA findings suggesting that human-Neanderthal intermixing may
have decreased fertility in male Neanderthals, perhaps contributing to
their disappearance. Given the timing, it seems reasonable to guess that
Neanderthal’s extinction may have had something to do with the arrival
of modern humans, Paabo says, but it’s not clear whether modern humans
killed them off or simply outdid them in the competition for habitat.
Some
people have theorized that modern humans displaced Neanderthals because
they were somehow innately superior, but the evidence simply doesn’t
bear this out, Villa says. The two species’ dietary habits and
behavioral traits were not as dissimilar as originally thought. Most
likely, there were probably multiple causes of the Neanderthals’
disappearance, she says. “People are beginning to accept the idea that
Neanderthals became extinct, but not fully and completely, and the
process took some millennia — it was not instantaneous.”
One thing is clear: Neanderthals never entirely vanished. “They live on a little bit in people today,” Paabo says.
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