I Knew it

I've often complained that there is a certain amount of speciesism involved in our portrayal of Neanderthals. We've seen continuous paleontological evidence arise of extremely sophisticated Neanderthal behaviour.  From making tar anaerobically, to tanning hides, to making flutes, all the way to burying their dead, Neanderthals did things that are so cultural and complex, that it is ludicrous to think that they didn't talk.

If you doubt the sophistication of Neanderthals, you only have to watch a demonstration of the Levallois core shaping technique they used for making stone tools. Few people can master it, even after reading the instructions or even being taught by a modern stone knapping expert. Look how complex it is.

Now comes all but certain proof that Neanderthals likely spoke as well as we do. Ever since the Neanderthal genome project came along, paleontology pundits have been predicting that the Neanderthals would not exhibit the two human mutations for the foxp2 gene, the gene most widely associated with speech. I knew they would find the modern gene, even though researchers appeared confident Neanderthals would not have it. 

The foxp2 gene in primates appears to be supremely important, such that it rarely mutates. Even in its prior form, it appeared to confer significant survival advantages. Only the changes' ability to enable human language appears to be behind why humans could have a different version of the gene.

And we now know the Neanderthals had the same version of the gene that we do.

http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/science/story.html?id=61d14715-25bb-4755-b96b-d0acd0cecb74

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303282,00.html

Although researchers caution that this is only part of the story, I think it is time for much of that debate to pass now. There's always been strong evidence of Neanderthal speech, ever since the discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid, showing that Neanderthal throats were constructed much like ours. Even the ancestors of Neanderthals, Homo Heidelbergensis, show evidence of speech, in that their hearing was, like ours, adapted for the audio frequencies in which speech occurs.

There are many reasons the Neanderthals could have died out, without having to continue the old assertions about them being dumb and mute. Some of these reasons are so obvious, that I cannot figure out why they aren't taken more seriously than the now non-existent linguistic advantage argument.

Neanderthals were not, for instance, adapted to long distance travel the way we are. Even as out of shape as we are today, most of us are capable of walking 40 to 50 kilometers a day, with nothing more than a couple of bottles of water and a sandwich packed with us. Neanderthals could not do this - they were built for ambush, able to perform short feats of incredible strength. A tribe of Neanderthals could stab and wrestle an elk to the ground in close quarters, and the fact that they are commonly found with rodeo rider injuries suggests that this is exactly what they did. This made them great hunters; for large game, possibly even slightly better than we are. But it came at the cost of making them poor social networkers, due to their inability to go far.

We on the other hand developed physical abilities related to social networking. Long distance travel is important if you are more than going out and meeting your neighbours, but sending ambassadors to foreign lands. And there is significant evidence that this is just what we did - our ancestors are often found with stone tools quarried from rocks that are not native to their territory. This never happens with Neanderthals, because they just couldn't travel that far.

The ability to develop networks of far-flung friends who could help you survive a famine or drought was probably what set us apart, and allowed us to survive. When Neanderthals ran out of game, they had nowhere to go for help.

We did.

But it is time to put to rest the idea that Neanderthals died out because they were more inept than us. We now know that Neanderthals were large-brained people who could talk, probably as well as we do. We may like to think they died out because we are smart, and they were dumb, but the evidence increasingly disproves this.