Neanderthals are not our ancestors, they were a different branch from a common ancestor. Kind of like modern day Bonobos and Chimpansees.
Hegar@fedia.io 4 days ago
Garbage clickbait headline 😮💨.
"Some time before sapiens seems to have expanded into this particular area" is not at all the same as "long before humans existed".
Neanderthals are literally our ancestors, they have everything we think of as human.
There was a now debunked idea that symbolic thought emerged in europe ~40kya. The explosion of symbolic art we see then is in part because of preservation factors and how well studied europe is.
It's fairly well established that non-sapiens humans were capable of symbolic thought. No one is surprised that neanderthals made cool art.
zout@fedia.io 4 days ago
Hegar@fedia.io 4 days ago
All humans alive today carry neanderthal dna, meaning we all have neanderthal ancestors.
I believe the current understanding is that sapiens and neanderthals were like lions and tigers - we are able to produce viable offspring, but not always and maybe only with a neanderthal father, not mother.
We are a different branch from a common ancestor but they are also our ancestors.
grue@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Arguably every species in the Homo genus has “everything we think of as human,” because otherwise they’d be in Australopithecus or Paranthropus instead.
Hegar@fedia.io 4 days ago
Anatomically, for sure, but cognitively and behaviourally it's harder to prove.
For example did early homo have grammar? Many think the expansion of erectus, esp. over water, implies complex language but that's hardly certain and there's a lot of homo before erectus.
angrystego@lemmy.world 4 days ago
There must be a no homo joke in there somewhere.
I’ll see myself out.
grue@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m just sayin’, if they’re not like us they don’t belong in the “like us” genus.