# Neanderthal Questions **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 21, 2004, 10:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340 "2004-05-21T10:41:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![easy\_e](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/eb8c5e/32.png) [@easy\_e](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/easy_e)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2004, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340/41 "2004-05-24T03:32:56Z")
> [@Jonathan Chance](#): > > One more for the fiction lovers… > > Harry Turtledove’s _A Different Flesh_ postulates a world in which the original asian peoples never crossed the Bering land bridge so neanderthals survived to the present day. The book is a series of short stories regarding the interaction of humans and neanderthals following the discovery of the new world by Europeans and up to the present day. Umm, the Neandertals never made it to North America. Or is that artistic license. One of my favorite non-fiction books is **The Neandertal Enigma** by James Shreeve. He talks to a lot of the experts in the field–you get some interesting anecdotes (a Harvard grad student who spent his time knapping stone tools, usually from rocks he had hidden around Harvard grounds, and hurling stone-tipped spears in dead deer carcasses to examine the damage done to the spear-tips when hitting flesh and bone) and information on “modern humans” including the flowering of art in the Upper Paleolithic and some surprisingly old bone harpoons found in Africa. The writing is great–my copy has tons of lines and paragraphs underlined simply because I liked those particular passages. I highly recommend it. ---
**Author:** ![scm1001](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c4cdca/32.png) [@scm1001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scm1001)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2004, 10:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340/42 "2004-05-24T10:11:16Z")
> [@chorpler](#): > > Would the “one odd find” be the flute that I’ve heard about? yes, presumed flute ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2004, 11:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340/43 "2004-05-24T11:23:48Z")
> [@Jonathan Chance](#): > > Harry Turtledove’s _A Different Flesh_ postulates a world in which the original asian peoples never crossed the Bering land bridge so neanderthals survived to the present day. Just to nitpick, but in “A Different Flesh”, it’s Homo erectus that survived to the present day. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2004, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340/44 "2004-05-24T12:54:01Z")
> [@Drizzt Do'Urden](#): > > 1. I seem to remember reading somewhere that neanderthal remains could have been partially responsible for the Jötun myths in Scandinavia. Any truth here? Others have covered the first three questions pretty well, so I wanted to give some attention to this one. It is possible that Neanderthal fossils could have inspired myths about giants, trolls, dwarves, elves, etc. I’m also familiar with some scholarly speculation that fossilized dinosaurs, mammoths, or other large animals could have inspired myths about dragons and other giant monsters. However, it seems unlikely to me that we could ever prove such a thing even if we could prove that ancient Scandanavians had uncovered Neanderthal remains. We don’t know what the earliest forms of the Jötun myths were like. All we have is the versions that were eventually recorded. Since myths change over time, it’s hard to know if some resemblance between a mythical being and a real one means that the latter inspired the former (Neanderthal remains caused people to begin to believe in Jötun), the latter influenced the former (Neanderthal remains were taken as evidence of Jötun already believed to exist), or if the resemblance is entirely coincidental. That said, I’m not sure if pre-modern people would have thought that Neanderthal bones were anything unusual. Just a century ago many people believed that Neanderthal remains were really just the remains of deformed H. sapiens, and some creationists still believe this. An interesting variant I’ve heard on this basic idea is that it wasn’t Neanderthal _bones_ that inspired myths about fantastic creatures, but the Neanderthals _themselves_. Neanderthals and H. sapiens were contemporaries for a long time. We know that well before recorded history our distant ancestors told stories about plants, animals, and celestial bodies. Early H. sapiens were probably the same, so it doesn’t seem farfetched to assume that they had stories to about Neanderthals. But we can never know what these stories were like or even if they continued to be told for very long after the extinction of the Neanderthals, so we cannot know if they were the basis for any of the myths that would eventually be recorded thousands and thousands of years later. ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2004, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340/45 "2004-05-24T13:38:54Z")
Lemur866: > [@](#): > > So they likely thought much differently than us Does that mean they used Apple computers? ---
**Author:** ![Algernon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a183cd/32.png) [@Algernon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Algernon)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2004, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340/46 "2004-05-24T13:42:48Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > The other point to note is that ‘3 times larger than the variation within H. sapiens’ still means that neanderthals are more closely related to us than two tribes of chimpmazees are to each other. Fascinating. I didn’t know this. Consider me less ignorant now than I was five minutes ago. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neanderthal-questions/246340.md?page=2)