Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art | Hacker News Reader

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

spectator.co.uk

40 pointsdiodorus25 comments

You can also listen to a podcast interview with the author here: https://play.acast.com/s/dansnowshistoryhit/theneanderthals

One question I have is, why are we so certain that Neanderthals were less intelligent than their human contemporaries? Is it just the speech issue?

I think it's a bit of circular reasoning - Sapiens survived contact, Homo's niche is being the intelligent adaptive species, thus Neanderthalensis must have been less intelligent and/or adaptive.

Personally, based on the people I know with unusually many neanderthal alleles, I would guess the advantage had more to do with the size of tribes than the intelligence of individuals.

Not quite. Neanderthals were less social than us. They had bigger heads and bigger brains, so arguably, they could have been more intelligent than us. The problem for Neanderthals was that they could only trust and bond with a dozen or so others, whereas humans could thrive in societies as large as hundreds. There's some speculation as to why this is the case, but one reason may be that we were able to gossip about one another and remember more individuals, thus our trust network was bigger, and thus we could coordinate large scale hunts / attacks, and this is potentially why we could have overwhelmed Neanderthals despite their bigger size and bigger brains. I got a lot of this from the book Sapiens, as well as others, so I don't know exactly how 'up-to-date' this information is.

> Neanderthals were less social than us....they could only trust and bond with a dozen or so others

I'm very curious, any justification of this?

Not sure about justification, but there's evidence that their brains were focused more on vision and movement.

https://www.seeker.com/neanderthals-lacked-social-skills-176...

Although, it appears that Neanderthals were bigger, but shorter than modern humans. I thought they were taller as well, but apparently that's not true

Good to remember that whales have much larger brains than us but a lot of it is dedicated to running their massive body.

And some birds are extremely intelligent despite having apparently small brains.

Yes that's true. Proportionally to their size, humans had bigger brains than Neanderthals

One thing that points to a big difference is art. There's some claimed Neanderthal cave art, but we're talking about things like pigment circles and lines -- nothing on the level of the modern human paintings at Chauvet or Lascaux.

There's enough evidence to convince me that Neanderthals decorated things and probably could think symbolically, but I to me, based on the evidence we have at least, it's pretty clear that modern humans went about this stuff differently.

I don't know if I think this really means "less intelligent," but I think this does point to some fundamental differences in how they thought. And who knows, maybe we'll find some beautiful Neanderthal cave art that disproves this. Our ideas about Neanderthals have changed a lot over the last few years after all.

The earliest Homo Sapiens remains are from ~200kya while the earliest (crude) Homo Sapiens paintings are from ~75kya. Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira et al are ~20kya.

We cannot be certain, but we know that their stone tools (Mousterian) are very, very conservative. It changed only very slowly over 250 000 years = a hundred times as much time as separates us from Classical Greece.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian

https://archive.is/phwTX

It seems every article on Neanderthals has to be prefaced with a story of how we believed that they were brute club-wielding cave dwellers, but this discovery has changed the way we think about them... Can't journalists find a different way of spinning this story?

Unfortunately, anthropological "hierarchalism" driven by race-conscious notions of personhood has made these regular reminders necessary. We still haven't completely shed the unscientific caricatures of neanderthals that were constructed for sociopolitical purposes (and before it was discovered that most of Europe and Asia [and possibly the rest of humanity] is partially descended from them).

There's so much that jumps out at me in this article.

It asks - 'Do neanderthals have a spiritual life?'.

Some questions: Do we (in the here and now) have a 'spiritual life'? What does it mean to have a 'spiritual life'? How could we possible know whether Neanderthals had one? How do we even know what Neanderthals were even like? Did they really live for 350,000 years? So much speculation.

The reality is we cannot know anything much beyond our present experience. History cannot really teach us anything. It is a politicised story - his-story - the story written by the victors, whoever they are.

All history is an interpretative act. When we look back at the past, it is all speculation. We are NOT being presented with facts. We find whatever we want to find in ourselves in the present; we use some artefacts (genuine or false ones) as a basis for exploring our current situation.

So, IMO, truth has little to do with it, but it can make for an interesting investigation anyway!

Discussions about epistemology becomes very tiresome when shoehorned into everything.

"Can't we just assume the standard narrative is correct, and work with that? What harm can it do?"

saying we can’t know much about neanderthal spiritual life is probably correct, but poster went on to claim nothing can be learned from history which is the sort of obviously nonsense viewpoint people adopt when the lessons of history don’t agree with what they want to be true, currently

You are right, very little can be learned from history, IMO.

We get a very skewed and biased view of history on anything that matters.

If you want an example, take a look at star forts. These forts are often beautiful. And they are all over the world - UK, US (the statue of Liberty has one for its base), Canada, Japan, Russia. They are least 3-400 years old. I never learnt about these in school. But there they are. Who built them? Why did they build them like that?

http://starforts.com/

That link has a very reasonable theory about the why "The design of the starfort did away with "dead zones," or areas in which an attacker cannot be brought under fire, by the use of triangular bastions which command all approaches."

Yes - but which society created all these similarly designed forts 100s of years ago, across the world? They weren't thrown up by a small group of pilgrims - they were brilliantly engineered and took effort to make.

But I didn't learn anything about these castles at school. And we did do castles in history - it was my favourite thing. So what are we missing or misunderstanding.

It's also tiresome when people try to shoehorn big philosophy words they just incorrectly learned to stifle discussion.

OP was pointing out the speculative nature of the article. It's a question about evidence, facts and agenda. Epistemology is a philosophic inquiry into the nature of knowledge. Calling out speculative nature of an article isn't the same as trying to dismiss it with by epistemology.

History is interpretation , yes, but that doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist.

How does one establish the 'fact' that "neanderthals [had] a spiritual life". We just can't. I don't doubt they did but that's my belief not fact.

It’s really not that complicated. Anthropologists study ways that current and ancient humans enacted spiritual beliefs, then see if there is evidence for Neanderthals having similar practices.

The problem with skepticism (and relativism, for that matter) is that it’s entirely unproductive. Yes yes, we can’t really know anything, but that doesn’t change the fact that you need to wake up and experience the world every day, driven in part by a cultural/biological drive to find the ‘truth.’

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