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Comment by op03 | Hacker News Reader

Take curiosity. If everyone in the village is highly curious and off exploring the jungle with tigers, everyone in the village, sooner or later, dies.

On the other hand if everyone in the village sees tigers behind every bush and stays put within the safe confines of village walls, no one in the village learns how to tame or hunt the tiger.

A Tiger here being a placeholder for any threat/unknown the group faces, requiring talents as yet not known to the group.

If you do find a village that has managed to Not fall victim to both those scenarios think about what it tells you about the distribution of curious/non-curious within the village.

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This. I remember there being articles about Neandertals having almost no curious explorers, being very catious, whereas homo sapiens skeletons found in swamps, with deadly mushrooms in their stomach and whatnot. So even though Neandertals had a more advanced brain during their time compared to the homo sapien competitor, they died because they did not make it, maybe because they did not take enough risk.

>So even though Neandertals had a more advanced brain

I'm aware that it's accepted Neandertals might've been as capable in many areas of survival, however I'm not aware that it's been accepted they had more advanced brains. Got a source?

I remember hearing somewhere, one source I remember [1], that despite their intelligence, they tended to rove in smaller tribes partly perhaps due to less inter-communication skills, which may've led to a disadvantage in warfare.

Or perhaps, my own thoughts, the 'loner genes', for lack of a better term, iterated more throughout the Neaderthal ancestry which led to smaller tribes. Another guess, maybe forested Eurasia, which may act as natural barriers compared to more open African plains caused a selection for smaller groups or gave way to human genetics that naturally selected for smaller groups. Of course, take it all with a grain of salt.

1. https://www.history.com/news/neanderthals-likely-lived-in-sm...

We know they had a larger brain volume than us, even when correcting for overall body size. That much is an established fact. What that means, if anything, regarding their behavior & abilities is strictly, and highly, speculative.

(Still lots of fun to think about. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be something along the lines of greater neoteny in h. Sapiens sapiens. For an analogy, compare dogs and wolves. Wolves have larger brains, but dogs have a greater ability to read social cues.)

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