New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal 505
ThinkComp writes "In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus that has held for decades, recent research suggests that the traditional conception of Neanderthals being "stupider" than Homo sapiens may in fact be misleading. As articles about the research findings state, 'early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.' The data used in the study is available on-line along with a visual description of the process used."
Whew! (Score:2, Interesting)
I still think white people are basically a cross between homo sapiens and neanderthals. Like, somewhere along the way, super strong neanderthal dudes came in, grabbed the homo sapiens women, and thus, white people were born. I think there's no other possible explanation for our horrific sense of fashion and penchant for shiny metal objects. I'm just about to tell my wife, that, I can't help my need for a quad motherboard and a 400 hp sportscar... I'm just genetically doomed because of my neanderthal genes.
Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF? We've known for this for at least thirty years now; that the earliest modern humans had tool kits that did not vary in any great way from Neandertals. In fact, it's one of the great puzzles of evolution that modern human behavior did not arise until a long time after modern humans (anatomically, at least) had evolved. For chrissakes, just look at the Levant where modern humans and Neandertals shared the same territories for thousands of years, with little to tell them apart other than their skeletons.
Re:Developing stone tools... (Score:5, Interesting)
I see an error on thier logic.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Interesting)
The intelligence of Neanderthals is not necessarily the driving force of their ability to compete with homosapien. They could have been equally as smart or even smarter on an individual basis. However their collective intelligence, the ability to operate in larger groups, rather than extended family groups, means the while individually they might have been smarter and stronger they ended up being outnumber on the field of conflict.
Also homosapiens were likely to have been more vengeful and fielded a larger group to pursue and Neanderthals after a hunting party skirmishes, which initially the Neanderthals might have won and collected their prize of long pig only to be latter pursued by a far larger group combative homospaiens.
So the difference is not in the individual intelligence but in the social collective intelligence, the group that worked together, that shared an extended tribal awareness and, that were willing to sacrifice themselves, their time and effort in support of the future goals of the group proved to be far more successfully as a group. Pretty much the same as it is today. The societies where the individuals are only out to gain as much as they can for themselves regardless of the harm to the group create more unsuccessful society than those a care, share and are willing to work for the collective good. The ratio between the greedy few and the more aware majority define the nature modern societies more so than the individual intelligence of it's members.
And...? (Score:1, Interesting)
Blades may not have signified a sharper cutting tool, but rather a more advanced way of imagining that cutting tool.
Aesthetics and how something is crafted is just as important as how effective it is at doing its job. That's what makes the homo sapiens more intelligent than their Neanderthalic counterparts.
I imagine an ancient homo sapien would pay a pretty Sumerian coin for a fancy dagger.
Lack of commerce and trade caused by "being different" and holding to mindless traditions (Creating weapons the old "flake" way). That's the kind of mindset which probably killed off Neanderthals, not whether or not they could hunt and gather with the tools they had.
Re:Debunk? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
Furthermore, it's been a very long time since there was any scientific consensus about the "stupid Neanderthal" anyway. As another poster said, popular culture != science. The American Museum of Natural History has a now decades-old depiction of a Neanderthal in a suit & tie as part of an exhibit debunking the old popular-science depiction of Neanderthals as unsavoury brutes.
I recently read one of the more interesting ideas about how Neanderthals' brains differs from ours; this idea is due to Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind as described in Britain BC by Francis Pryor. Basically, his idea from interpreting Neanderthal art and tools is that they were no less intelligent but more "domain specific" than we are; they could excel at specialized tasks but fail to seize upon those very important cross-disciplinary insights involving multiple disparate fields of endeavour, which provide the basis for all our inventions.
In Britain BC, Pryor paints a picture of Neanderthals as a bunch of obsessive and overspecialized collectors. In reading about these somewhat Aspergian-sounding traits, I remember thinking that these guys would probably have made great coders! (Though maybe not project managers.)
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Interesting)
From your answer, I conclude that the term "pop culture" isn't quite the right term. I'd use "scientists' preconceived ideas". Among such ideas are:
* Dinosaurs were like today's lizards. This was a common belief 2 centuries ago.
* T-Rex was the king of dinosaurs, a terrible hunter. New evidence suggest it was more like the king of scavengers.
* Stomach ulcers could not possibly be caused by a bacteria. The discovery of the H. Pilori set them wrong.
* There couldn't be anything like black holes. And it was Einstein who believed this.
* There are 9 planets orbiting the sun. Turns out Pluto isn't even a planet.
See, precisely the point of science is that new theories can replace old theories (and even beliefs). But calling preconceived ideas "pop culture" is stretching it a bit too much. Unless you want to start a debate about Pirates vs. Ninjas :)
Perhaps the brain continued evolving (Score:3, Interesting)
In human fossils we see the skull and hence can deduce the size of the brain , but we've no idea the structure the brain itself had in peoples from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Its perfectly possible that they may have looked the same as us on the outside but mentally weren't quite there because our brains continued evolving (which doesn't necessarily mean getting bigger) after our bodies had stopped.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:4, Interesting)
Quit being so judgemental. How sentient creatures choose to lead their lives has no bearing with how smart they are. As it happens, members of homo sapiens has been able to lead useful productive lives despite not having too much upstairs [reuters.com], so to speak.
Humans - The Most Peaceful Creatures (Score:5, Interesting)
No, we really are not that violent, and we are getting more peaceful as time drags on. As a human, the chances of dying in war are very small. In fact, your chances of dying a violent death have been rapidly plummeting as time has moved on. Even our most horrific industrial wars kill vastly fewer people as a percentage of the population than simple day to day tribal conflict.
If you want to compare us against animals, we really don't rate that high. Society wide genocide is pretty common for insects. Other primates are at least as aggressive as us and suffer far more violent deaths. Many animals suffer pretty grievous loses to violent conflict over mating.
The only thing humans have going for them when it comes to the mass slaughter is that we have absolutely blasted our internal social limits on empathy. As a human, you are hard wired to live in a society no big than roughly 400 people. That is the limit of how many faces you can keep track of at a time, a pretty well documented limit of purely egalitarian human societies. Egalitarian tribal societies that get that big inevitably split. Through various methods of division of labor and hierarchies we have slowly been bumping up the size of a viable society. We are now to the point where a few hundred million is a perfectly reasonable size for a society.
France is a great example. This is a society of 60 million people. In general, they feel that they share a common bond and they feel empathy for each other. In general, they trust each other more than they trust others, and they think of each others needs over outsiders. True, one Frenchmen doesnâ(TM)t have as tight of a bond as his fellow country men as two men in a 100 unit tribal society, but it is close enough where they are a clearly distinct society. Just a couple of weeks ago 10 Frenchmen were killed in war (in Afghanistan). That is 0.000016% of the population. Despite this, it was a big deal in France. People acted like their social order had just taken not worthy losses and reacted accordingly.
Hell, take a step back and look at something more âoehorrificâ. 9/11 killed roughly 3000 people. That is 0.001% of the US population. That is 1 in every 100,000 people in the US died. We are talking about a miniscule number of people as compared to the society as a whole, yet despite this, Americans took the losses psychologically like family members had died.
My point is this; our murdering of fellow man has not increased. It has actually dropped, and dropped by a substantial amount. Further, compared to nearly all other species, as a human you are vastly less likely to suffer a violent death. The only thing that makes humans unique, is our empathy. Human empathy has grown and increased to the point where we care about millions and millions of people, rather than three or four around us. In our growing empathy, our old brains hardwired for societies less than 400 people have not kept up. As a result we think that the loss of 1 person in a tribe of 400 is less of a tragedy than the loss of 3000 people in a society of 300 million.
To put it more succinctly, your old monkey brain is fooling you. Humans are remarkably peaceful creature who get more peaceful with time, your old monkey brain just canâ(TM)t grasp that.
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, nothing in science is ever entirely conclusive -- everything is tentative.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps. It could equally well be explained as the Neanderthals being less aggressive. That's not group or individual intelligence.
Considering how close we've come to extinction, the choice between us and them probably came down to us being luckier than they were. They went extinct and we squeaked by.
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:4, Interesting)
Homo Sapiens almost went extinct [slashdot.org] at the same time as the Neanderthals.
Re:Humans - The Most Peaceful Creatures (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps our tendency towards violence is still just as strong, but is satisfied by action movies and media?
If somebody from the 50's saw what we had on T.V. in contrast to what they had, they'd probably be pretty shocked. Can you really say that we are less violent, since we're engaging in violence as observers? I could argue that it's making us even more violent.
Re:Developing stone tools... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with this theory is that prior to around 70k years ago (in some locales, possibly earlier), there's little evidence of any fundamental differences in social behavior. Of course, for bother Neandertals and moderns, we only have their remains, some tools, a few burials and the like to judge by, but when we compare these to sites that we know positively are from modern humans (both anatomically and behaviorally), the differences are clear. Prior to the great leap forward in whatever it was that made modern humans human in the way we are, there just didn't seem to be the same capacity for innovation, symbolic thinking, preplanning and culture. Neandertals and anatomically modern humans before this key evolutionary step showed only the rudiments of those key behaviors we find in every extant human population, whether Khoisan or Swedish, Australian Aborigine or Japanese Anu.
I suspect that the major innovation was some neural rewiring that was responsible for the rise of fully modern languages. I have little doubt that proto-languages had been around for a good chunk of Homo's history (maybe even earlier, and there's a good deal of evidence that other Hominidae like chimps and gorillas possess some proto-linguistic abilities), a fully evolved language is another entirely.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:2, Interesting)
There are so many different things that can affect intelligence and cognition: neurotransmitter transport, blood supply, extent of dendritic branching (basically affects the number of connections between neurons), rate of plasticity of the neurons and brain, motivation, emotions, etc. The central nervous system is very complex and no one thing will ever completely explain function.
Re:The difference (Score:1, Interesting)
Homo sapiens is not a plural. "sapiens" is Latin for "wise". (Plural would be homines sapientes, but I'm not sure if taxonomic names of species should be pluralized that way.)