Cavemen Were Surprisingly Smart

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Image courtesy of Christopher P.E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich, via Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

Sophisticated is not the first adjective that comes to mind when thinking about Neanderthal men. Yet that is exactly what Nature news suggests they were like.

A paper recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Neanderthals imitated H. sapiens. Jean-Jacques Hublin of Max Planck Institute and colleagues report on fossils and ornaments found in the Grotte du Renne cave in central France.

Reporting on the discovery, Nature news suggests that the artefacts Neanderthals made are so complex that similar objects are often attributed to modern humans.

This is just one of the many discoveries (read more here, here and here) that show that Neanderthals were fully human. According to the biblical model, they were descendants of Noah. They mostly lived in Europe during the ice age following the Genesis Flood.


Source:

Switek, Brian. 2012. Neanderthals smart enough to copy humans: Radiocarbon dates hint that human sister species was more sophisticated than previously thought. Nature News (30 October).