Books - What are you reading?

makes a compelling case that Neanderthals were ...

I don't have a scientifically based rebuttal, but on the whole I am extremely skeptical of anyone ascribing positive traits to Neaderthals. Seeing as only European whiteys seem to carry their genes, their supposed superiority in northern climates bla bla.. could become just another rallying point for racist knuckleheads.

EDIT: I am not saying the person making interesting claims about Neanderthals is racist, but I am saying they should thread extremely carefully.

It makes a compelling case that Neanderthals were fundamentally a divergent intelligence / consciousness from Sapiens, primarily observed in their Mousterian technology. It also argues strongly that Sapiens eliminated Neanderthals on contact. Quite remarkably it documents that Neanderthals survived in the Arctic circle until ~ 28k years ago, having disappeared from most of Eurasia ~45k years ago. I also learnt that there have only been 40 Neanderthal skeletons discovered, which seems an incredibly small number.

I have every sympathy for his overall approach, which is to try and make conclusions he draws relevant to present times. However, I think he is wrong on some of his conclusions (in particular the idea of a 'divergent intelligence', which is absolute and utter nonsense), and that many of them are rather underdetermined by the evidence, no matter how enthusiastically and persuasively he argues. I think that there is nothing of difference between 'Neanderthals' (descendants of humans who migrated from Africa much earlier before there was, for some reason, a long gap in migration) and later arrivals that can't be explained by two factors--numbers and culture. He denies the latter by claiming the consistency of finds shows that it can't be culture, but I think that's wrong.

'Neanderthals' didn't go 'extinct'--no doubt many were murdered in conflict, as it's humans we're talking about--, but many were simply subsumed into the new, much larger, populations that arrived. There were never many of these early Europeans, and their presence is a small trace in the modern genetic record, but it's there, wherever the relations were on the spectrum from marriage to rape. There will have been areas where the land could support both the old and the new populations, and where relations will have been predominantly civil rather than unfriendly, so that intermingling occurred.

Europe was, at that time, a much more hostile environment for humans than Africa, where humans had made their presence felt for much longer, and the numbers of early Europeans remained very low. This meant less cultural centralisation, lack of contact, lack of travel, and lack of cultural exchange compared to Africa, which I believe saw a human population explosion that caused greatly increased levels of migration owing to people not knowing how to use the land well to support so many, and because of the inevitable environmental damage and wars that will have resulted from this.

'Mousterian' technology wasn't limited to 'Neanderthals', but is found in all sorts of strata over a long period of time. I think that it persisted in Europe for longer is merely evidence of earlier migration.