Hi
I see a lot of contradictory assertions on the size of neanderthals brains relative to humans/homo sapiens. Who is correct?
Wikipedia says humans have bigger brains than Neanderthals. So does a recent Atlantic Magazine artice. Ian Morris’ “Why the West Rules --For Now” states the opposite. Who is correct?
I look forward to your answers.
davidmich
Reported for forum change.
Moved ATMB --> GQ.
The average Neanderthal brain was bigger than a modern human’s (not by much), but there’s a lot of overlap. Also, and probably more importantly, the shape of the Neanderthal brain was different. Theirs was longer and lower.
Some scientists have interpreted this as simply the brain mimicking the skull shape for balance purposes, and recently some have suggested that this means Neanderthals sacrificed some of the “social brain” (in the front) for the “visual brain” in the back, and this is what led to their demise. I find the latter claim to be :dubious:
You’ll also find some debate over what, exactly, happened to the Neanderthals: Did Cro-Magnons (early modern humans) kill them off, did Cro-Magnons out-compete them and drive them to extinction that way, or did Cro-Magnons interbreed with them and create modern Europeans? The answer is that we still don’t really know; it’s an active area of debate in modern paleontology. I don’t know what the current consensus, if there is one, is.
Anyway, we do know Neanderthals weren’t the animalistic brutes popular culture paints them as: They made stone tools, probably other kinds of tools as well, probably made houses using animal bones, buried their dead with flowers, and likely had some kind of language. They even looked more human than not.
Interestingly the brains of Neandertals and anthropologically modern humans (AMHS) were similarly sized at birth but …
Well, we’re pretty sure they did interbreed with us, but we don’t know why they went extinct as a population.
Also, making stone tools is not a sign of non-brutishness. OUr earliest Homo ancestors made stone tools, and they’d probably be considered brutes if we could see them behave. Neanderthals made hafted tools, which is a big step up from cracking two rocks together. Their tool kit was pretty much the same as what we were making in our early millennia as a species.
I first learned that the Neanderthal brain was larger, in cubic capacity, than modern human brains in that great 1953 documentary, The Neanderthal Man, one of those 1950s cheap horror films that corrupted and shaped my youth.
The thing is, this larger capacity was explicitly mentioned in the film as the reason the scientist/hero/monster wants to regress himself, so it was certainly common enough knowledge sixty years ago for a grade-B scriptwriter to latch onto. I was surprised to learn, when I looked it up myself years later, to learn that this nugget (like many appearing in cheap horror flicks) was actually true. I’ve encountered it many times in the years since.
I wouldn’t be surprised at changes in the “accepted knowledge” over the years as science advances, but I never heard this one contradicted before, and I’;m surprised that Wikipedia makes the claim. The Atlantic article is in line with everythimng I’ve ever heard or read.
As has already been pointed out, small differences in adult brain size won’t tell us much about the relative abilities of modern humans and neanderthals.
Wikipedia is usually very good about getting stuff like this right. Can you quote the section that says this? I’d be surprised if someone didn’t correct it.
Jusdt a note, The Neanderthal Man should not be confused with 1958’s Monster on the Campus, another 1950s cheap horror film in which a scientist gets turned into a Neanderthal Man by exposure to something from an aparent atavism. In this case, it was purely accidental, and he wasn’t trying to increase his brain capacity.
Just wanted to make that clear.
From the wikipedia page on Neanderthal Anatomy:
Not sure why they had to say “most likely”, but it certainly doesn’t say H. sapiens have larger brains.
Unnecessary weasel words, IMHO. You can’t say anything for certain because we don’t have an actual neanderthal brain to look at. Still, I think it’s a pretty safe assumption to say that the neanderthal brain filled up the entire brain cavity.
The interesting thing is that when you look at what h.sapien was doing back then and what h.neanderthal was doing at the same time, the differences are pretty subtle. People sometimes like to think of us as the smart ones and them as the stupid cavemen, but that’s not true. H.sapien had religion and buried their dead. So did h.neandethal. Both hunted in organized groups. Both made jewelry and art. The difference is that when you look at things like the jewelry and art, h.sapien stuff is just a bit more complex. This seems to indicate that h.sapien was just a bit smarter. The important thing though is that it wasn’t a drastic difference.
Neanderthal art is pretty controversial, so I wouldn’t say it’s a slam dunk that we know they made art. And it’s not clear that they had jewelry before the encountered us, so maybe they got it from us, or learned it from us.
They didn’t encounter “us”, they interbred with some folks and became “us” if you are of European descent. 
One of the stupid things that comes under consideration is also h sap sewed clothing [bone needles are found in dig sites] and h neander didn’t [no apparent needles] though to be honest, I can’t see why ‘draped’ clothing means less intelligence - Romans, Indian [subcontinent] and Greeks ‘draped’ their clothing [togas, saris, dhotis, chiton and so forth] are draped and pinned and I wouldn’t consider them unintelligent. I see no reason to need to sew if your clothing is comfortable.
As to lack of social abilities, ever hung out with a bunch of Frat guys? Talk about no real social ability and some serious Darwin in action behaviors, you can’t convince me that they are any sort of survival traits … how many teens have managed to darwinize themselves recently?
I know you’re kinda joking, but that’s not the best way to describe the encounter as we know it. There seem to have been a few isolating interbreeding incidents, but mostly the Neanderthals died out. Neanderthals only contribute about 2-3% of the genome of those us descendant from the Modern Humans who came into Neanderthal territory.
I worked with a guy at a library whose forehead shape had to be 25%.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
2-3% is a lot for DNA. We’re only separated from chimps by 1%. And if Neanders and Sapiens already had a lot of DNA in common, that again makes just 2-3% rather significant.