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Neanderthals were not a Homo Sapien evolutionary step. They were actually our evolutionary rivals, hence why we drove them extinct as our brains basically beat their brawn.
I thought there was some debate about this, how their intelligence may have been on par with or perhaps even better than ours, and that we won out because we breeded them out/killed them all.
No, there’s not much of a debate there. We have preserved bodies and near perfectly preserved brains.
The parts of their brain that regulate aspects such as complex thinking and task completion are much much smaller and less developed then Homo sapiens, while the parts of the brain that regulate better eyesight and hearing are better. That’s why they quickly fell behind in group building, tool production, planning, tactics, and etc. A regular Neanderthal would have leveled out at about the intelligence of a 7-8 year old child, no matter how much you taught them or helped them. That’s what allowed us to outbreed and kill them all.
Yes, we did interbreed with them to a degree, but it was still extremely limited.
Interesting. Perhaps I was giving them the benefit of the doubt in terms of intelligence. In a way buying into the idea that "Human nature" made our ancestors destructive and genocidal to some extent. Reality is probably not anywhere near as extreme.
Pretty much. We were still in extremely early tribal and nomad societies, so there was hardly any concerted effort to exterminate the Neanderthal. They simply could not outcompete their evolutionary cousins in a few mental aspects, and that's all it took for them to wither away over thousands of years.