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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 probl
by 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 agoNot 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 agoGood 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 agoYes that's true. Proportionally to their size, humans had bigger brains than Neanderthals