It’s strange that I feel like we live in a time where a small but loud group of people might feel personally offended by this: a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests Neanderthals were probably just as intelligent as modern humans.
Neanderthals have long been one of our favorite go-to punchlines. They are our slower, dumber cousins. When Homo sapiens showed up, we immediately started outpacing them with our superior brains and better ideas. And how could we not? Were just so much smarter than them, right?
Apparently, we’re not.
Scientists Say Neanderthals Weren’t Dumb After All
The problem is that we’ve been trying to measure intelligence using fossilized skulls, basically guessing brain performance from the shape of their skulls: a kind of archaeological version of phrenology. Neanderthal skulls are longer and lower than ours, which led some researchers to argue that their brains were structured differently, possibly limiting memory, language, or cognitive flexibility.
The new research suggests otherwise. By comparing brain scans of modern humans with reconstructed Neanderthal brain shapes, scientists found that the differences between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens fall well within the range of variation seen among people alive today. In fact, for most brain regions studied, modern humans differ more from each other than we ever did from Neanderthals.
This is important because brain size and shape are terrible predictors of intelligence within a species. It works out well enough when measuring intelligence among primates. Human brains are bigger than chimpanzee brains, and the gap between them is the difference between swinging in the trees and building skyscrapers. But within humans, those variations don’t translate into meaningful differences in cognitive ability. It turns out, according to the new research, Neanderthals fit within that spectrum.
What’s interesting is that it’s not necessarily a new revelation. Archaeological findings have been hinting at this for years. Neanderthals made tools, created art, built structures, and evidence suggests they likely used a primitive form of language, all of which takes skill, planning, and, obviously, a ton of intelligence, fueled by brains that worked a lot like ours.
This raises the question of why they disappeared if they were so smart? The researchers have a theory. They think the decline of the Neanderthal had more to do with societal structure than with intelligence. They lived in small groups, and those groups were gradually absorbed into expanding Homo sapiens populations little by little over thousands of years.
This is just me guessing here, applying modern logic to ancient people, but maybe that in itself is a sign of intelligence? They saw a more developed species and thought, “These people seem to know what they’re doing; let me hang out with them.”
Should this research become the new commonly accepted wisdom, it means Homo sapiens didn’t muscle out Neanderthals, and Neanderthals didn’t die out because they were too stupid to live. They were smart. Maybe smart enough to know where the wind was blowing and to know what they needed to do to survive.
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