Neanderthal extinction not caused by brutal wipe out

submitted by [deleted] from (bbc.com)

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[–]jet199 6 insightful - 4 fun6 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 4 fun -  (1 child)

Stringer is such a disingenuous idiot.

20 years ago he was telling everyone that Neanderthals were less intelligent and social than chimps and that anyone who disagreed with him was a Nazi. The discourse in the West was so bad because of people like him it was the Chinese who ended up proving that modern humans and neanderthals interbred even though they didn't have those fossil in their region.

Now he's trotting out his "humans had larger social groups" nonsense. He has no way of knowing that. He relies on people wanting neanderthals to be savage in their imagination to push all his theories. The main predictor for group size in apes is brain size. Social problems are hard so the brain gets larger as the numbers of other apes you have to remember and deal with increases. Neanderthals actually had larger brains than humans which therefore means their social groups were larger.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

Well that's an eye opener. I didn't know any of this (exept the bit about brain size and that the evidence is slim for reports like these). Seems also that there was a lot of hominin activity around the mediterranean c. 150,000 years ago that only gets periodic mention, but some of what they were capable of predates the same assessments associated with supposedly more capable hominin 40,000 years ago.

[–]IkeConn 4 insightful - 5 fun4 insightful - 4 fun5 insightful - 5 fun -  (1 child)

When I was in the US Army I saw some neanderthal ape man looking fuckers in there. One guy even had a snout. Yes, a snout. He was one monkey looking fucker.

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 5 fun5 insightful - 4 fun6 insightful - 5 fun -  (0 children)

Excellent, must have been a great honor. Jet199 says they have bigger brains.

[–]Tiwaking 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I thought all the Neanderthal's moved to Brazil ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Only the sexy Neanderthals, apparently