So Close Yet So Far: Who Were the Neanderthals?

Abstract

The relatively recently extinct Neanderthals have long been known to differ from living Homo sapiens in a host of osteological characteristics. Yet many paleoanthropologists continue to view them as a bizarre variant of Homo sapiens, if only because they possessed brains that are of modern human size. Still, many congeneric primates of similar brain size belong to different species. And a recent reconstruction of an entire Neanderthal skeleton shows a significantly different postcranial aspect from Homo sapiens. Most strikingly expressed in the rib cage and pelvis, these differences would certainly have expressed themselves in gait, and these two hominids would have presented a very different affect as living entities on the landscape. Multiple lines of evidence, including molecular data, thus now converge on the conclusion that the lineages leading to Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens diverged well over half a million years ago, and that the former was entirely displaced following the invasion of Europe by Homo sapiens some 40 thousand years ago, with no significant biological intermixing between the two. Clearly, large brains are not synonymous with the unique symbolic way in which modern Homo sapiens process information about the world around them.