
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art - diodorus
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-it-possible-that-neanderthals-had-a-spiritual-life-
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gadders
You can also listen to a podcast interview with the author here:
[https://play.acast.com/s/dansnowshistoryhit/theneanderthals](https://play.acast.com/s/dansnowshistoryhit/theneanderthals)

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Causality1
One question I have is, why are we so certain that Neanderthals were less
intelligent than their human contemporaries? Is it just the speech issue?

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intotheabyss
Not quite. Neanderthals were less social than us. They had bigger heads and
bigger brains, so arguably, they could have been more intelligent than us. The
problem for Neanderthals was that they could only trust and bond with a dozen
or so others, whereas humans could thrive in societies as large as hundreds.
There's some speculation as to why this is the case, but one reason may be
that we were able to gossip about one another and remember more individuals,
thus our trust network was bigger, and thus we could coordinate large scale
hunts / attacks, and this is potentially why we could have overwhelmed
Neanderthals despite their bigger size and bigger brains. I got a lot of this
from the book Sapiens, as well as others, so I don't know exactly how 'up-to-
date' this information is.

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lawlessone
Good to remember that whales have much larger brains than us but a lot of it
is dedicated to running their massive body.

And some birds are extremely intelligent despite having apparently small
brains.

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intotheabyss
Yes that's true. Proportionally to their size, humans had bigger brains than
Neanderthals

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neonate
[https://archive.is/phwTX](https://archive.is/phwTX)

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duopixel
It seems every article on Neanderthals has to be prefaced with a story of how
we believed that they were brute club-wielding cave dwellers, but this
discovery has changed the way we think about them... Can't journalists find a
different way of spinning this story?

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bsanr2
Unfortunately, anthropological "hierarchalism" driven by race-conscious
notions of personhood has made these regular reminders necessary. We still
haven't completely shed the unscientific caricatures of neanderthals that were
constructed for sociopolitical purposes (and before it was discovered that
most of Europe and Asia [and possibly the rest of humanity] is partially
descended from them).

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feralimal
There's so much that jumps out at me in this article.

It asks - 'Do neanderthals have a spiritual life?'.

Some questions: Do we (in the here and now) have a 'spiritual life'? What does
it mean to have a 'spiritual life'? How could we possible know whether
Neanderthals had one? How do we even know what Neanderthals were even like?
Did they really live for 350,000 years? So much speculation.

The reality is we cannot know anything much beyond our present experience.
History cannot really teach us anything. It is a politicised story - his-story
- the story written by the victors, whoever they are.

All history is an interpretative act. When we look back at the past, it is all
speculation. We are NOT being presented with facts. We find whatever we want
to find in ourselves in the present; we use some artefacts (genuine or false
ones) as a basis for exploring our current situation.

So, IMO, truth has little to do with it, but it can make for an interesting
investigation anyway!

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tokai
Discussions about epistemology becomes very tiresome when shoehorned into
everything.

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feralimal
"Can't we just assume the standard narrative is correct, and work with that?
What harm can it do?"

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gameswithgo
saying we can’t know much about neanderthal spiritual life is probably
correct, but poster went on to claim nothing can be learned from history which
is the sort of obviously nonsense viewpoint people adopt when the lessons of
history don’t agree with what they want to be true, currently

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feralimal
You are right, very little can be learned from history, IMO.

We get a very skewed and biased view of history on anything that matters.

If you want an example, take a look at star forts. These forts are often
beautiful. And they are all over the world - UK, US (the statue of Liberty has
one for its base), Canada, Japan, Russia. They are least 3-400 years old. I
never learnt about these in school. But there they are. Who built them? Why
did they build them like that?

[http://starforts.com/](http://starforts.com/)

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InfiniteRand
That link has a very reasonable theory about the why "The design of the
starfort did away with "dead zones," or areas in which an attacker cannot be
brought under fire, by the use of triangular bastions which command all
approaches."

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feralimal
Yes - but which society created all these similarly designed forts 100s of
years ago, across the world? They weren't thrown up by a small group of
pilgrims - they were brilliantly engineered and took effort to make.

But I didn't learn anything about these castles at school. And we did do
castles in history - it was my favourite thing. So what are we missing or
misunderstanding.

