Saturday Science: Smarter Than We Thought

It seems Neanderthals weren't so dumb after all.

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, make the case that the available evidence does not support the opinion that Neanderthals were less advanced than anatomically modern humans. Their paper was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there," said Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. "What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true."

The article goes on to detail some of what we have learned about the Neanderthals' ability to hunt cooperatively, use the terrain to their advantage, and evidence of symbolic thought. This article doesn't mention, however, some of the strongest evidence for the latter. See this article on the burial site at Shanidar Cave for more info on that aspect.

Solecki’s pioneering studies of the Shanidar skeletons and their burials suggested complex socialization skills. From pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves, Solecki hypothesized that flowers had been buried with the Neanderthal dead—until then, such burials had been associated only with Cro-Magnons, the earliest known H. sapiens in Europe. “Someone in the last Ice Age,” Solecki wrote, “must have ranged the mountainside in the mournful task of collecting flowers for the dead.” Furthermore, Solecki continued, “It seems logical to us today that pretty things like flowers should be placed with the cherished dead, but to find flowers in a Neanderthal burial that took place about 60,000 years ago is another matter.” Skeletons showed evidence of injuries tended and healed—indications that the sick and wounded had been cared for. Solecki’s attitude toward them was encapsulated in the title of his 1971 book, Shanidar: The First Flower People.

Ongoing studies of Neanderthal skeletons unearthed in Iraq during the 1950s suggest the existence of a more complex social structure than previously thought.  (Karen Carr)

So next time you're tempted to call someone a Neanderthal, think twice -- they may be smarter than you.