Normally, I have a great deal of respect for The Guardian, certainly more than any other newspaper. I think they missed the mark on this article, though.
Smart Neanderthal
Not through a lack of reporting. A lack of reporting can almost be assumed, since we’re talking about Neanderthals and none of them have been interviewed for 40,000 years, at least. We don’t have journalism. We have speculations from scientists. Which is better than science from speculators. But it’s not good enough.
The crux of the article was that Neanderthals were just as intelligent as Homo Sapiens. Oh, yeah? We’re alive, they’re dead, so Q.E.D. Of course, they might have been bright in some ways. Perhaps they were amazing musicians, we don’t know. They may have had a rich and complex oral literature. And we don’t know exactly how they died.
But if there was fighting between Humans and Neanderthals (as I suspect there was, it’s the way of the animal world) we either developed better weapons earlier, outstrategized them, or both. Because we were smarter.
Certainly, it is a shame. Human art would be richer, and our lives on Earth infinitely more interesting , if we had the influence of another intelligent species to interact with. How much have we lost, with the genocide of the Tasmans, and the Incas, and the Aztecs, and the North American Indians, and so many more? And this was a whole different species.
It seems to me that they died out a few thousand years after Homo Sap discovered the joys of farming, which may have been a factor. While the hunter-gatherers could keep up in good times, when the cold hit, they were fucked. Human beings had already invented four walls and discovered the warmth to be had from sleeping in close quarters with cows and goats. Smellier, but smarter.
Maybe it’s because, as I read in one article, they lived in small groups so had a more limited gene pool. Not real smart, right there.
This article didn’t go into any of that, though. It just pointed out that there was no proof they were dumber. Which is true. There are a million possible reasons why they died and we lived which have nothing to do with intelligence. Epidemic, for one. O.K., maybe not a million, but some. But proving that we can’t prove they were dumber isn’t the same as proving that they weren’t.
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