The widely-held belief that our early Neanderthal cousins lost out in the competition with modern humans and were pushed to extinction because they weren't as intelligent as us doesn't hold up under scientific scrutiny, researchers say.
Neanderthals living in large areas of Asia and Europe from around 350,000 to 40,000 years ago disappeared when our ancestors, considered "anatomically modern," crossed from Africa into Europe.
Some have held their disappearance was down to intellectual inferiority, which made the come second best to modern humans in things like communications, innovation, hunting ability and the ability to successfully adapt to changing environments.
However, Paola Villa of the University of Colorado at Boulder says all available scientific evidence disputes the assertion Neanderthals were somehow not as advanced as modern humans.
"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there," says Villa, who collaborated on the study with archaeologist Wil Roebroeks at the Netherland's Leiden University. "What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true."
Commonly-held explanations for the disappearance of Neanderthals, all grounded in the assumption of intellectual inferiority, include assertions that complex, symbolic communication was beyond Neanderthal capabilities; that weapons of inferior design hampered their hunting ability; and that their somewhat restricted diet was a disadvantage when it came to competing with modern humans with their much broader food choices.
However, available researcher supports none of these hypotheses, Villa and Roebroeks say.
For example, they note, archaeological evidence of Neanderthal hunting techniques and strategies provide strong evidence they could communicate within a large group, plan actions ahead, and make good use of the surrounding environment.
Research at other Neanderthal archaeological sites suggests their diet was, in fact, diverse in its makeup and the discovery of pigments possibly used for body painting and of ornaments suggests they practiced cultural rituals that would have required symbolic communication.
Another reason Neanderthals may have been considered inferior is that many researchers have been comparing them to modern humans who, in fact, lived during much later periods, when technology was advancing, the study authors say.
"Researchers were comparing Neanderthals not to their contemporaries on other continents but to their successors," Villa says. "It would be like comparing the performance of Model T Fords, widely used in America and Europe in the early part of the last century, to the performance of a modern-day Ferrari and conclude that Henry Ford was cognitively inferior to Enzo Ferrari."
The decline of Neanderthals was much more likely a matter of genetics, researchers say, with Neanderthals interbreeding with modern humans and eventually being absorbed and disappearing as a distinct human group.
