Intellectually inferior humans caused Neanderthals to go extinct

[lennypartiv]

Ah, so there are people who are inferior. Liberals take note. Hopefully there is more research on this.

---Intellectually inferior humans caused Neanderthals to go extinct---

'Intellectually inferior' humans caused Neanderthals to go extinct, a new book claims

Neanderthals' extinction is one of the biggest mysteries about the species. In "The Naked Neanderthal," Ludovic Slimak says humans were the cause.

www.businessinsider.com

 

[whitehall]

Neanderthals apparently didn't die off on their own. In fact it seems that they were able to mate with humans and produce neo-human offspring. Today it seems that the neanderthal gene exists in the human species. Neanderthals were apparently able to hunt and gather and exist for centuries but they were killed off by smarter humans.

 

[Seymour Flops]

It was the Neanderthals who were intellectually inferior, and it led to their extinction.

This article is typical of the poetic, rather than scientific, speculations on early Humans. People who may well be gifted writers, but know little about anthropology, come up with this type pseudo-science.

Example:

Humans' superior weapons​

Scientists have found relatively few weapons belonging to Neanderthals, Slimak wrote. However, Neanderthals were “excellent artisans,” making tools with “a creativity that is beyond us.”

But this creativity was not enough to outwit humans’ regimented weapon making, which ultimately led to Neanderthals' extinction, according to Slimak.

That's because the “modern humans who colonized Europe produced weapons that were both more numerous and more effective,” he wrote.

The Neaderthals' weapons were fewer and less effective because they were not as good as modern humans at designing and manufacturing them. This indicates less intellect nor more. Their creativity is not 'beyond us," the creativity of modern humans was beyond them, and they paid the price.

I would respond to the evidence of superior creativity in toolmaking on the part of Neanderthals, but the author presents none.

Humans’ insistence on standardization led to uniform flints, and Neanderthals’ originality couldn’t compete.

Standardization makes manufacturing more efficient. Modern humans indeed standardized not only their weapons, but their tools as well. A projectile point that an early human culture produced easily identifies which of the cultures produced it due to that standardization.

Projectile point - Wikipedia

Standardization to enhance production is itself an original idea that did not occur to the Neanderthals. Or if it did, they did not have the intellectual capacity to put it into practice.

This may seem like quite a rant about a pretty silly article. But it is exactly that kind of pseudo-anthropology that some people read and accept as revealed truth and attack anyone who doubts it.