At Home with Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals (2020)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> The Sapiens advantage probably lay in large-scale cooperation.
The most popular theory at the moment is, as far as I know, that Sapiens were simply lucky, i.e. some mutations took place that made the cerebellum in Sapiens slightly larger and that made Sapiens more social.
This makes me wonder from time to time what "we" would have looked/acted like in 2021 if neanderthals, who were physically stronger and had larger skulls, were the ones with those mutations.
There's a fun trilogy from Robert J. Sawyer about that :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26400750
And then I saw your comment which answered my question!
If there were more sapiens than Neanderthals, one would expect the Neanderthals to interbreed and fade away.
Relative ‘superiority’ and mutations and the like don’t even come into it... if a Neanderthal thinks it’s cool to have an exotic sapient chick, or vice versa, the ‘race’ will disappear in a few generations. I don’t see many pure-bred Mayans in Mexico these days. (Or, for that matter, pure-bred Spaniards.) The Neanderthals certainly had some odd skeletal features... but, if one were objective, you can find similar variety amongst skeletons (particularly skulls) of modern humans. I don’t mean feature similar to Neanderthals; rather, I mean a level of variety that is similar in degree to the differences between Neanderthal bones and the ‘average’ modern.
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