If they were so smart why did they totally disappear? Aliens?
They were just another human group.
When we blow each other to smithereens with Nukes I wonder if that’s what whomever is here will say about us in 50,000 years :)
Obama care.
If they were so smart why did they totally disappear? Aliens?
May be they just got fed up with homo sapiens sapiens and left for a better clime
Neanderthals were doing just fine. But then they said, this healthcare is really great, but wouldn't it be better if it were Free? And thus began their decline into extinction.
They were like us in intelligence and had to be. Their term as humans lasted longer than ours has. They lived in very harsh climatic conditions and hunted large and dangerous prey. They disappeared because we killed them off.
Because their replacements were the world masters of organized violence.
Global warming. Republicans. Plastic straws. Lack of acceptance of transgendered people. Cigarette smoking. Gun violence. Ozone depletion. Not having on-campus Safe Spaces. Genetically modified foods. Restrictive attitudes about binary genders. Nuclear emissions from Fukushima plant. Sexual assaults in High School. Bedbugs. The plastic patch in the Pacific ocean. Being triggered. White nationalists. Fat shaming. Capitalism.
They didn't disappear. They interbred. White Europeans have Neanderthal genes. Black Africans have no Neanderthal DNA.
Because they didn't totally disapppear, they're among the many different ancestors to people currently living on Earth.
Well, were are the Mohican or Pequot Indians? What about the Etruscans? The Lost Tribes of Israel?
People come and go.
DNA tests show that up to 5% of European and Asian peoples’ genes are Neanderthal. So they got absorbed. Maybe made slaves or conquered.
Too many bones and other artifacts have been found to say the Neanderthals didn’t exist. And their genomes have been completely sequenced.
What particularly happened to the last remaining full-blooded Neanderthals we will never know.
I’m rather partial to the dog theory of why homo sapiens prevailed. It says wolves were domesticated well before the conventional wisdom says and the collaboration of two apex predators (homo sapiens and wolves/dogs) made the difference in the competition.
Many believe the world got too easy to live in. They were hardcore characters, designed for a chilly world where they had to fight to survive. When things got easy, they stuck to a very K-selected breeding program, producing a few children and investing heavily in them, while more r-hominids, producing more offspring swept over their range and just out-bred, and interbred, with them.
You can be the best hominid in the world, but if you only have one child, and you have to outcompete wave after wave of thousands of smaller, faster breeding, less robust spear-chuckers, your days will be numbered.