Rethinking Neanderthals
Bruno Maureille unlocks the gate in a chain-link fence, and we walk into the fossil bed past a pile of limestone rubble, the detritus of an earlier dig. We’re 280 miles southwest of Paris, in rolling farm country dotted with long-haired cattle and etched by meandering streams. Maureille, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux, oversees the excavation of this storied site called Les Pradelles, where for three decades researchers have been uncovering, fleck by fleck, the remains of humanity’s most notorious relatives, the Neanderthals.
This article is a bit old. I read somewhere more recently that they found fibers twisted into string, which could mean other textiles were produced by them.
[https://phys.org/news/2020-04-ancient-discovery-neanderthal-life.html](https://phys.org/news/2020-04-ancient-discovery-neanderthal-life.html)
So you’re telling me we wiped out another species and then ret-conned them as the uncivilized aggressors? Idk doesn’t seem like something humans would do..
At first I read ‘Netherlands’ and wondered why the Dutch were so dumb..
can he ollie tho
\> Extremely Intelligent
\> Comparable to the intelligence of modern humans
Which is it?
I have a bump on the back of my skull, supposedly from neanderthal heritage
Robert Sawyer wrote a really awesome trilogy that explores what a modern Neanderthal civilization might have looked like.
[The Neanderthal Parallax](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax)
I don’t think science has any way to establish what early humans were like in terms of relative “intelligence”. We can gather evidence about what they did, what tools they used and soon, but it’s entirely possible that an average human from 50,000 years ago could be raised in modern times to speak, read, write, learn the rules of the road and drive a car. There’s nothing in the scientific method that can tell us different, it’s just prejudice and assumption that make us think we’re smarter than they were.
I’ve watched an interview with Noam Chomsky where he was basically saying the neanderthals did not have developed communication skill like homo sapiens do. I don’t exactly remember his arguments though. It is on youtube for people who are interested.
Too bad for them we were better than them at killing people.