Neanderthals were not inferior to modern humans: study

Complex interbreeding, and not the superiority of modern humans, may have been responsible for Neanderthal disappearance 40,000 years ago, a new study has found.
The widely held notion that Neanderthals were dimwitted and that their inferior intelligence allowed them to be driven to extinction by the much brighter ancestors of modern humans is not supported by scientific evidence, according to research from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Neanderthals thrived in a large swath of Europe and Asia between about 350,000 and 40,000 years ago. They disappeared after our ancestors, a group referred to as "anatomically modern humans" crossed into Europe from Africa.

In the past, some researchers have tried to explain the demise of the Neanderthals by suggesting that the newcomers were superior to Neanderthals in key ways, including their ability to hunt, communicate, innovate and adapt to different environments.
But in an extensive review of recent Neanderthal research, CU-Boulder researcher Paola Villa and co-author Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, found that the available evidence does not support the opinion that Neanderthals were less advanced than anatomically modern humans.
"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there. What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true," said Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

Villa and Roebroeks scrutinised the hypotheses that Neanderthals did not use complex, symbolic communication; that they were less efficient hunters who had inferior weapons; and that they had a narrow diet that put them at a competitive disadvantage to anatomically modern humans, who ate a broad range of things.

They found that none of the hypotheses were supported by the available research. For example, evidence from multiple archaeological sites in Europe suggests that Neanderthals hunted as a group, using the landscape to aid them.
Other archaeological evidence unearthed at Neanderthal sites provides reason to believe that Neanderthals did in fact have a diverse diet.

Ornaments have also been collected at Neanderthal sites. Taken together, these findings suggest that Neanderthals had cultural rituals and symbolic communication.
Villa and Roebroeks said that the past misrepresentation of Neanderthals' cognitive ability may be linked to the tendency of researchers to compare Neanderthals, who lived in the Middle Paleolithic, to modern humans living during the more recent Upper Paleolithic period.
"Researchers were comparing Neanderthals not to their contemporaries on other continents but to their successors," Villa said.
The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.