Current Events > Were Neanderthals really the least intelligent early Humans?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Or was that just a media caricature?

The latter. Scientists now think they were smarter than their early human contemporaries.

They likely failed due to being out competed by humans being better at working together in larger numbers as well as their greater mass requiring a lot more energy to keep them going.

It was a media caricature. They actually had bigger brains than us (tho brain size doesn't always mean more intelligent, otherwise we'd have scientist elephants). I think the current understanding was that they were no more or less intelligent than modern humans. They were simply out-competed due to a differing social structure and physicality (they used stabbing spears because their arms didn't have the full rotation to make throwing spears effective, for example).

Cro-Magnon ftw

Some of us have Neanderthal dna. Up to 2%.

not some, all of us (unless literally an aborigine) of us have neanderthal dna.

they weren't out-competed, we interbred (a lot).

as far as intelligence, they make much better jewelry and tools and so must be smarter (most textbooks would say), but I'd argue they were equally as smart as humans.

new research is coming out showing homo sapiens using the same advanced "leaf-shaped" stone tools that supposedly only neanderthal could make.

their culture might have been more advanced, but a human and a neanderthal would learn new skills and intellectual things at an equal rate.

neanderthals required about 4000-5000 calories compared to a human's 1500-2000.

Pikachuchupika posted...

Some of us have Neanderthal dna. Up to 2%.

Neanderthals never went extinct. Horny Sapiens just merged the two subspecies.

We literally outfucked them. They were overall better, but more expensive per unit; comparatively, humans could zerg rush.

We out unga bunga them

Their mistake was trusting us.

They apparently were taught in the 50s and 60s that Neanderthals were little more than animals. My boomer dad thinks they couldn't even talk. I recently had an argument with him about it. The older you are, the less likely you are to understand what Neanderthals were like I guess. Boomers tend to not keep up with developments in research. They still think what they learned in school is the truth

They did not go extinct, they merged with us as the DNA is present in 2% of people. We just had more homo sapiens then neanderthals and we required less food/calories so after so many babies we got more traits of homo sapiens due to there being more babies born.