Science
& Culture Corner
Our Old Neighbors Not So Dumb
Our early ancestors lived in interesting times. Although never did they run with the dinosaurs, they indeed fought with animals no longer existing. Nights especially must have been fearful in the midst of marauding giant mammoth and hungry saber-toothed tigers. The night howls of lion prides too must have precursored sleepless nights.
But not wild animals only, were neighbors to humans. For some ten thousand years those who would become us, the Cro-Magnons, occupied much the same territory as did the Neanderthals. Although populations were sparse and land area was vast, across Europe and parts of Asia (neither were in the Americas) contact, however infrequent, was nevertheless unavoidable.
How such contacts were conducted we shall never know precisely, but anthropologists are confident that they would have included an array of avoidance, warfare, and trading at various times and locations. Ultimately though, competition for finite resources would serve to affect them as a function of natural selection.
The Cro-Magnons were an earlier form of us just as we are a later form of those who built the Egyptian pyramids and those who first plied the seas. The persistent notion that they were bumbling idiots has been discarded by all those privy to the evidence. Whereas our technology as we approach the 21st century is far beyond that of the pyramid builders, it does not imply their intelligence was measurably less. Likewise, that of Cro-Magnon cannot be taken as measurably less than in the Egyptian era which followed.
The Neanderthal species was also clever; their brain size (some 1700cc) exceeded ours today. Admittedly, the size of an animal's brain is not directly proportional to its intelligence, but there is correlation. Certainly, larger brains cannot imply less intelligence!
Both species, by artifactal record, had tool technologies and developed cultures. Neanderthal was huskier with thicker bones and muscles, while Cro-Magnon seems to have been better at construction of fine tools such as spear points. In any case, neither lacked intelligence in the human sense. Either difference might serve as advantage against the other.
The last Neanderthal perished circa 25,000 years ago. Today the earth offers no intelligent human-like creatures against which to compete. We are all the same species and busy enough competing against each other.
Might their mysterious demise have also been very nearly ours too? Whatever calamity befell them may too have befallen our ancestorsÉ except that some of ours must have survived. Questions about warfare and disease immunity difference hold little weight because their demise, we believe, took some ten thousand years to occur.
I believe what did them in may have been certain differences (too long for this article) involving delays in the return of menstruation subsequent to pregnancy in Neanderthal females. Were this aggravated by the birthing of hybrid children (and there is one set of bones that appears to be a hybrid. See JT May, 99) the whole population mechanics can break down. When this happens, the population decreases as deaths outnumber births. This is because while pregnancy with a hybrid blocks the menstrual cycle for years, the hybrids cannot go on to themselves produce children. It is one of nature's laws: Cross-specie hybrids (e.g., horse and donkey mate to create a sterile mule) are always sterile.
And so, though indeed it may have been contact with human neighbors that ultimately ended the long legacy of Neanderthal, it was not because they were dumbÉand but for fortune, it might have been us!
by Angel
Stephens
angel_stephens@hotmail.com
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