Neanderthals were not 'stupid,' says new research

[raccoon]

LONDON (AFP) - Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to new research Tuesday showing their stone tools were as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.

The findings by a team of scientists at British and US universities challenge the assumption that the ancestors of people living today drove Neanderthals into extinction by producing better tools.

The research could lead to a fresh search for explanations about why Neanderthals vanished from Europe around 28,000 years ago, after living alongside modern humans for some 10,000 years.

"Technologically speaking, there is no clear advantage of one tool over the other. When we think of Neanderthals, we need to stop thinking in terms of 'stupid' or 'less advanced' and more in terms of 'different,'" Eren said.

Other studies have claimed that Neanderthals may have died out because they struggled with changing conditions brought by increasingly cold temperatures, failing to adapt their hunting methods when species such as mammoth and bison fled south and a once-forested Europe changed into a sparsely vegetated landscape during the last Ice Age.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080826/ts_afp/scienceresearchneanderthalbritainus


Or maybe homo sapiens killed them off…..

[tblue]

1. Now, Republicans, on the other hand......

[mzmolly]

2. Darn, there goes one of my nicknames for Republicans.

;)

[raccoon]

3. Please don't insult the Neanderthals. nt

[mzmolly]

17. Damn liberals getting PC on me again.

:P

[mike_c]

4. what a terrible thing to say about our closest hominid relatives!

Even the noble pig suffers by comparison to republicans. Maybe ticks are a better choice....

[Cleita]

8. I call them cockroaches.

Cockroaches have no redeeming qualities.

[mike_c]

19. LOL-- I'm an entomologist...

...so I could actually offer a list of "redeeming qualities" that ennoble the lowly cockroach. 'Course they're still cockroaches in the end....

[Cleita]

26. Oh don't ruin it for me. Then I would have an

ethical problem killing them.

[mzmolly]

32. Heh.

:rofl:

[mzmolly]

31. How about head lice?

You know, blood sucking parasites and all? ;)

[dbonds]

5. So Geico is right?

[snooper2]

6. not stupid...

just not as smart :rofl:

[Auggie]

7. Genetics? Disease?

Could be a myriad of factors

[Bright Eyes]

9. I always knew they weren't stupid.

They dress too well.

[theoldman]

10. One of my theories is that modern man may have brought a

disease that wiped out the Neanderthals. Think of how long we lived close to chimpanzees before we caught HIV from them. If you don't have sex it takes longer to spread a virus.

[Xithras]

16. Probably not. Remember, there weren't a lot of them in the first place.

Humans and neanderthals lived in the same geographic region for nearly 15,000 years, and there's increasingly evidence of at least some communication between them. What you have to remember, though, is that neanderthals lived in very small and highly isolated groups. The entire population of neanderthals at their height was under 10,000 individuals and that population stretched from the Spain to Siberia. That's a LOT of empty space, and a fairly small and dispersed breeding population.

A better explanation is that humans simply isolated the neanderthals to the point that they couldn't breed any longer. Humans were, and still are, very territorial creatures. Those vast empty spaces between the neanderthal sites would have been filled in by modern humans, who probably would have seen neanderthals crossing their territory as an incursion of sorts. This would have isolated the neanderthal communities from each other, limited breeding opportunities, and created severe and debilitating population crashes.

Couple that with the climactic changes that destroyed the neanderthals traditional hunting environments and rendered their methods useless, and you have a recipe for disaster.

The math also wasn't in their favor. With a starting population of only around 10,000 and 15,000 years of cohabitation, humans would have only needed to kill off one or two neanderthals a year to gradually reduce their population and wipe them out. I really doubt that there was any large scale warfare or any organized efforts to get rid of them, but with hundreds of thousands of new humans pouring into millions of square miles of Eurasian countryside, it's hard to believe that there weren't at lease SOME conflicts between them over hunting grounds and territory. Over a 15,000 year span, it would only take a few such incidents per year to drive them to extinction.

[Fumesucker]

21. I seem to recall reading though

That genetic analysis shows that modern humans have been through a "genetic choke point" where there were only a few hundred individuals at most and possibly as few as just dozens.

Homo sap was fairly thin on the ground for a long time too.

[Xithras]

22. True, but we didn't have active competition at the time.

The conflict between homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens comes from the fact that they occupied the same ecological niche, hunted the same animals, and put territorial pressure on each other. The Toba chokepoint theory reduced our population about 70,000 years ago, killing all homo sapiens outside of Africa. That same incident should have harmed the neanderthals too, and in fact we see a crash in the asian populations of neanderthals at roughly the same time. Several people have put forward the idea that the asian neanderthals survived Toba, but that their numbers were so reduced that their populations were never able to really recover. Neanderthal children grew faster than human children and were fully grown by 15, but their average life expectancy was only 20 years. That's not a lot of time to breed and expand the population.

In contrast, ancient humans reached full biological maturity at 17-20 just as they do today, but are capable of breeding at 12-14. Even back in those days, the average human lifespan was 33, and many lived to the ripe old age of 40.

What's this mean to our discussion? Following the Toba eruption, both human and neanderthal populations would have taken a big hit and been reduced to phenomenally small numbers. Homo Sapiens in Africa would have recovered fairly quickly since a breeding pair might have up to a 20 year window to generate many offspring. One man and woman, without birth control, can have a LOT of kids. More importantly, the population would have recovered in Africa where no ecological competitors would have been pressuring them.

In contrast, a homo neandertalensis breeding pair (they were probably more monogamous than humans) got, on average, a FIVE year breeding window. Since it took 15 years for those offspring to fully grow, that means the average neanderthal did NOT live long enough to become a grandparent...or to even see their child reach adulthood (many did, but on average they didn't). It was probably rare for neanderthals to have more than two or three children before they died. Think about that for a second. One neanderthal breeding pair was only able to generate 2-3 offspring before death, and there was very little overlap between generations. That makes for a near zero population growth level...and a negative growth level if infant mortality took any substantial portion of those offspring.

By the time humans once again came into permanent post-Toba contact with neanderthals, the populations of homo sapiens were not only stable but were expanding rapidly. If our knowledge of neanderthal reproductive issues is correct, then neanderthals would have still been struggling to rebuild their population at the same time. Where humans were able to re-establish themselves with no real competition, neanderthals didn't have that luxury.

[Fumesucker]

33. Thanks, that was an interesting explanation. n/t

[Fumesucker]

11. Homo neandthalensis had a larger brain

Than homo sapiens sapiens.

http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vwsu/gened/learn-modules/top_longfor/phychar/culture-humans-2two.html

The Neanderthal skull, second from right, has a brain size of 1500 cc, which is actually larger than the brains of most modern humans. The average for ourselves, Homo sapiens sapiens, is around 1400 cc.

[Hannah Bell]

34. so? women on average have smaller brains than men r/t body size.

doesn't mean they're dumber. there's no straight-line relation between brain size (relative to body) & intelligence.

[Fumesucker]

36. Every single other species of the genus Homo

Has a brain significantly smaller than Homo sap.

A large brain is major evolutionary disadvantage if it does not bestow increased intelligence, large brains require a great deal of energy to grow/maintain and also cause major problems in childbirth.

[guitar man]

12. of course they weren't

If they're intelligent enough to order the roast duck with mango salsa, they've got a lot of so-called homo-sapiens beat. ;)

[H2O Man]

13. Old research, too.

"Might the brain growth exhibited by Neanderthal man have been in the parietal and occipital lobes, and the major brain growth of our ancestors in the frontal and temporal lobes? Is it possible that the Neanderthals developed quite a different mentality than ours, and that our superior linguistic and anticipatory skills enabled us to destroy utterly our husky and intelligent cousins?"
-- Carl Sagan; The Dragons of Eden; page 107

[Uncle Joe]

28. I believe that was the case as well, Neanderthals social life was more clannish,

sort of like the corporate media, they became inbred and lost touch with the changing world.

Neanderthals were hunter gatherers long after the more social Cro-Magnon picked up on agriculture, as hunting and gathering can't supply as many calories, Neanderthals population dwindled. Cro-Magnon flourished because of the ability of agriculture to sustain a larger population.

Also Cro-Magnons came to see Neanderthals as a threat, because Neanderthals would never shave their backs or report the news with any degree of integrity.

[fudge stripe cookays]

14. They were tough mofos, that's for sure....

I read a National Geographic a few years ago all about them.

Evidently, they grouped together to try to take down the prehistoric cattle and spear them. Many of the fossils they've found have horrific injuries-- compound fractures that had healed over. They compared the injuries to that of modern day rodeo riders and rodeo clowns.

That had to be a tough life.

[SteelPenguin]

15. Reminds me of a story I read once

Primitive tribe. compassionate, friendly caring people. Helping others, nuturing the environment they lived in, working in harmony with the animals and plants around them. Exploring art and music together in friendship. Then at the end of the story, a band of humans comes over the hill and obliterates them as we learn they themselves weren't human, kills them all, burns their village to their ground, and takes all their food.

[L. Coyote]

18. So does all the old research!

[WhiteTara]

20. my thought

[niyad]

23. always knew it was the cro-magnons, not the neanderthals.

[Blue_Tires]

24. so simple a caveman can do it....

[TexasObserver]

25. They were virtually unchanged for tens of thousands of years.

Their religion was ancestor worship.

Women had no status at all.

They were strong and engaged in fierce attacks upon other clans.

They seemed to lack the more artistic and verbal range of the Cro Magnon, who appears to have thought circles around Neanderthal, in spite of the latter's slightly larger brain.

The lengthy rule of Neanderthal and their sudden replacement by Cro Magnon is one of the most curious phenomenon of the existence of humanoids on the planet.

[Disturbed]

27. Another theory: They were carnivores.

When the meat supply diminished they did not adapt to eating other types of food. They died out because of that & because the Cro Magnons, who adapted to the conditions, in competition for territory,wore them down.

[raccoon]

35. Sounds like a great many homo sapiens societies in that way,

"Women had no status at all."

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

29. Of course not anyone who's ever watched Unfrozen Caveman lawyer

knows how brilliant they could be.

[misanthrope]

30. I'm always amused by those who believe...

...contemporary man is "smarter" than their ancestors. I maintain that a great deal of modern homo sapiens is actually less fit in a lot of ways because of the way we have suspended natural selection and pressures that force us to be more resourceful.

Sure, your average Joe can flip on a light switch, but can he make it from scratch? Hell, can he even explain the scientific principles that govern it? Not likely. We live our lives standing on the shoulders of giants and believe we are gargantuan ourselves.

[Hubert Flottz]

37. Well they did vote for George Bush twice!