5 ms·

One question I have is, why are we so certain that Neanderthals were less intelligent than their human contemporaries? Is it just the speech issue?

SuoDuanDao 6y ago
I think it's a bit of circular reasoning - Sapiens survived contact, Homo's niche is being the intelligent adaptive species, thus Neanderthalensis must have been less intelligent and/or adaptive. Personally, based on the people I know with unusually many neanderthal alleles, I would guess the advantage had more to do with the size of tribes than the intelligence of individuals.
intotheabyss 6y ago
Not quite. Neanderthals were less social than us. They had bigger heads and bigger brains, so arguably, they could have been more intelligent than us. The problem for Neanderthals was that they could only trust and bond with a dozen or so others, whereas humans could thrive in societies as large as hundreds. There's some speculation as to why this is the case, but one reason may be that we were able to gossip about one another and remember more individuals, thus our trust network was bigger, and thus we could coordinate large scale hunts / attacks, and this is potentially why we could have overwhelmed Neanderthals despite their bigger size and bigger brains. I got a lot of this from the book Sapiens, as well as others, so I don't know exactly how 'up-to-date' this information is.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  > Neanderthals were less social than us....they could only trust and bond with a dozen or so others I'm very curious, any justification of this?
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    Not sure about justification, but there's evidence that their brains were focused more on vision and movement. https://www.seeker.com/neanderthals-lacked-social-skills-1767294231.html https://www.seeker.com/neanderthals-lacked-social-skills-176... Although, it appears that Neanderthals were bigger, but shorter than modern humans. I thought they were taller as well, but apparently that's not true
- lawlessone 6y ago
  Good to remember that whales have much larger brains than us but a lot of it is dedicated to running their massive body. And some birds are extremely intelligent despite having apparently small brains.
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    Yes that's true. Proportionally to their size, humans had bigger brains than Neanderthals
nocut12 6y ago
One thing that points to a big difference is art. There's some claimed Neanderthal cave art, but we're talking about things like pigment circles and lines -- nothing on the level of the modern human paintings at Chauvet or Lascaux. There's enough evidence to convince me that Neanderthals decorated things and probably could think symbolically, but I to me, based on the evidence we have at least, it's pretty clear that modern humans went about this stuff differently. I don't know if I think this really means "less intelligent," but I think this does point to some fundamental differences in how they thought. And who knows, maybe we'll find some beautiful Neanderthal cave art that disproves this. Our ideas about Neanderthals have changed a lot over the last few years after all.
- duopixel 6y ago
  The earliest Homo Sapiens remains are from ~200kya while the earliest (crude) Homo Sapiens paintings are from ~75kya. Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira et al are ~20kya.
inglor_cz 6y ago
We cannot be certain, but we know that their stone tools (Mousterian) are very, very conservative. It changed only very slowly over 250 000 years = a hundred times as much time as separates us from Classical Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

I think it's a bit of circular reasoning - Sapiens survived contact, Homo's niche is being the intelligent adaptive species, thus Neanderthalensis must have been less intelligent and/or adaptive. Personally, based on the people I know with unusually many neanderthal alleles, I would guess the advantage had more to do with the size of tribes than the intelligence of individuals.

intotheabyss 6y ago

Not quite. Neanderthals were less social than us. They had bigger heads and bigger brains, so arguably, they could have been more intelligent than us. The problem for Neanderthals was that they could only trust and bond with a dozen or so others, whereas humans could thrive in societies as large as hundreds. There's some speculation as to why this is the case, but one reason may be that we were able to gossip about one another and remember more individuals, thus our trust network was bigger, and thus we could coordinate large scale hunts / attacks, and this is potentially why we could have overwhelmed Neanderthals despite their bigger size and bigger brains. I got a lot of this from the book Sapiens, as well as others, so I don't know exactly how 'up-to-date' this information is.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> Neanderthals were less social than us....they could only trust and bond with a dozen or so others I'm very curious, any justification of this?
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  Not sure about justification, but there's evidence that their brains were focused more on vision and movement. https://www.seeker.com/neanderthals-lacked-social-skills-1767294231.html https://www.seeker.com/neanderthals-lacked-social-skills-176... Although, it appears that Neanderthals were bigger, but shorter than modern humans. I thought they were taller as well, but apparently that's not true
lawlessone 6y ago
Good to remember that whales have much larger brains than us but a lot of it is dedicated to running their massive body. And some birds are extremely intelligent despite having apparently small brains.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  Yes that's true. Proportionally to their size, humans had bigger brains than Neanderthals

nocut12 6y ago

One thing that points to a big difference is art. There's some claimed Neanderthal cave art, but we're talking about things like pigment circles and lines -- nothing on the level of the modern human paintings at Chauvet or Lascaux. There's enough evidence to convince me that Neanderthals decorated things and probably could think symbolically, but I to me, based on the evidence we have at least, it's pretty clear that modern humans went about this stuff differently. I don't know if I think this really means "less intelligent," but I think this does point to some fundamental differences in how they thought. And who knows, maybe we'll find some beautiful Neanderthal cave art that disproves this. Our ideas about Neanderthals have changed a lot over the last few years after all.

duopixel 6y ago
The earliest Homo Sapiens remains are from ~200kya while the earliest (crude) Homo Sapiens paintings are from ~75kya. Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira et al are ~20kya.

inglor_cz 6y ago

We cannot be certain, but we know that their stone tools (Mousterian) are very, very conservative. It changed only very slowly over 250 000 years = a hundred times as much time as separates us from Classical Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian