Misconceptions About Neanderthals

1. Marilyn Terrell
   June 24th, 2009 at 11:01 am

   Great story, but the credit for the photo above should read: "Reconstruction by Kennis & Kennis/Photograph by Joe McNally, National Geographic."

   The photo came from a National Geo story about Neanderthals published last October: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/neanderthals/hall-text

   Here's a video about how Kennis & Kennis built the red-haired Neanderthal model, whom they nicknamed Wilma after the Flintstones' character:

   http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/video/player#/?titleID=1832348827

2. healthylivinggal83
   June 24th, 2009 at 11:13 am

   Interesting article my friend!!!

3. Jaycatt
   June 24th, 2009 at 11:44 am

   One of my favorite book series deals with Neanderthal societies in a parallel universe, that I highly recommend, by Jack Sawyer. It's a trilogy consisting of "Hominids", "Humans", and "Hybrids".

4. jb
   June 24th, 2009 at 12:09 pm

   So easy a caveman can do it!

   http://www.beabetterproducer.com

5. Persephone
   June 24th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

   They claim we don't share DNA with Neanderthals, but I look at some of my neighbors and wonder.

6. Matt
   June 24th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

   Those who say that Neanderthals were killed off by an increasingly unstable climate have never looked at the oxygen isotope stages. They survived wild fluctuations in climate for thousands of years before they died out. We Humans have experience two glacials and two interglacia periods during our 200 thousand year existence, and we are still here. Neanderthals were around long before we were.

7. Idil
   June 24th, 2009 at 1:30 pm

   "in 1983, scientists found a Neanderthal hyoid bone at a cave in Israel (the hyoid bone is part of the vocal mechanism) which was identical to that of modern humans. This means that their capacity for speech (at least physically) is the same as our own."

   if neanderthals and modern humans coexisted at a time, then how do they know that this hyoid bone belonged to a neanderthal and not a homo sapien?

8. Chris Johnston
   June 24th, 2009 at 1:43 pm

   "One of my favorite book series deals with Neanderthal societies in a parallel universe, that I highly recommend, by Jack Sawyer. It’s a trilogy consisting of “Hominids”, “Humans”, and “Hybrids”."

   Sorry Jaycatt, but the author is Robert J. Sawyer, not Jack.
   But I agree, the books are astounding!

9. DaveL
   June 24th, 2009 at 2:27 pm

   I've often wondered if homosapiens out competed the neanderthals simply by being bigger douche bags (genetically speaking) and what the world would be like if they had advanced rather than us.

10. angstrom
    June 24th, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    The odd thing about Neanderthals is that their brain was up to 20% larger than our brains

    Prof RALPH HOLLOWAY: The first thing that really grabs your attention I think is its size, it's much bigger, and significantly so than the normal modern human homo sapien's brain.

    NARRATOR: Measuring the volume of our Neanderthal's brain shows it to be twenty percent bigger than the average for a modern human.

    BBC program transcript
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/neanderthal_trans.s html

11. Flux
    June 24th, 2009 at 3:43 pm

    Homo sapiens is a highly brutal, aggressive, scheming, invasive species. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that we're responsible to every large mammal & Hominid extinction that occurred in the Quaternary period (timeline) in our thirst for domination of the planet. Neanderthals probably disappeared, because Humans made them disappear.

12. wat.
    June 24th, 2009 at 5:24 pm

    Ah, but did neanderthals save on their car insurance by switching to Geico, or was their pride too great? That, is the real question.

13. zav
    June 24th, 2009 at 6:17 pm

    Matt, DaveL. It is obvious that we stick to what we are good at.

14. supercars
    June 24th, 2009 at 11:10 pm

    you know I thought that guy was Heath ledger

15. health
    June 25th, 2009 at 12:11 am

    What does Haley Joel Osment have to do with cave men?

16. Robolasse
    June 25th, 2009 at 1:37 am

    Homo Sapiens first holocaust.

17. emmiline
    June 26th, 2009 at 2:31 am

    i honestly think it was a mixture of things that ended them. they probably coexisted with some of us (as in cro-magnons anyway), and warred or were wiped out by other cro-magnons.
    it wouldn't surprise me if they eventually did find neanderthal/cro-magnon hybrids, but i really have to wonder if we were close enough to produce viable offspring. they've found the bones of a child who looks like he could have been a mix of both- but with only one example, we can't really say for sure.
    it would be kind of nice in a way to think that they blended with us, but so far they haven't found any evidence to support that.
    since they look pretty close to us, i wonder if cro-magnon even knew they were a different species of people, or if they just thought they were a different band/tribe.
    i wish one would show up frozen like all those mammoths in siberia so we could learn more about them. seems like there should be more than a few like that, right?

18. Foreigner1
    June 26th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

    There are still folks who think that redhaired people show some last Neanderthal characteristics. I think that the last word is not spoken even if dna-surches have shown there is no Neanderthal trace in modern humans. I guess they still overlook something.

    Sofar, Neanderthal people were more succesful than modern humans as far as surviving through time goes. And about their culture we don't know zilch- a few artifacts, okay. Yet they had several hundreds of thousands of years to develop their oral history and culture, their language, their songs, their prayers, their stories, their chants and their ways of doing things. Those are all gone.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT