And, from the "My Ass" desk and 2010:
The three spears, each carved from the trunk of a spruce tree, are 6 feet to more than 7 feet long. They were found with more than 10,000 animal bones, mostly from horses, including many obviously butchered... The spears were obviously made with care. After chopping down an appropriate tree and stripping off the bark and branches, the ancient hunters carved the tip at the base of the trunk, where the wood is hardest. The spears were shaped to be thickest toward the front with a long tapering tail, like modern javelins, which suggests they were meant for throwing rather than jabbing. After all that work "they're not going to throw it at a squirrel in a dark night," said Dennell, who wrote a Nature commentary on the spears. "These people were serious about hunting."
400,000 year old spears found in an German coal mine!
Competitive advantage of modern humans over Neanderthals
Modern humans have assault rifles.
The Athenians of classical times prided themselves on being autochthonous. Maybe DNA tests on ancient bones found in Attica will show if they had Neanderthal ancestry. (It’s very likely considering that most present-day people have some Neanderthal ancestry.)
Add use of fire & brewing beer.
Evidently pc driven diversity wasn’t their strength.
Just imagine if we hadn’t mated with Neanderthals how much smarter we would be.
I think Al Green,the Rat congressman from Texas is a purebred Neanderthal.
My guess is that we outbred them, and slowly outnumbered them.
The original Gorilla glue! :)
“technologies allowed modern humans to hunt more successfully than Neanderthals - giving them a competitive advantage”
THERE it is - that nasty idea of “competitive advantage”. There should have been weapons control laws. That way, we’d still have Neanderthals running rampant, creating no-go zones, crime-ridden communities and such. Oh wait - we DO have those.
Neanderthals went extinct due to their toxic masculinity. ;-)
By the way, Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans. Intuitively, most people assume intelligence has an evolutionary advantage. Maybe not.
Those who are interested in evolutionary theory should check out the research by Donald Hoffman which includes a mathematical proof based on evolutionary game theory that perceiving reality as it is does NOT give an evolutionary advantage. He also supports a theory of reality in which space-time is purely a mental construct. This is not some new age idea or pseudo-science. He is extremely well respected for his scientific work and credentials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY
(A TED Talk.)
The Neanderthals aren’t gone, they’re still here. And the whiter you are, the more Neanderthal that’s in you. We didn’t out-compete them, we cross-bred with them until their phenotype became indistinguishable from ours.
When the white caucasian Trumpist cromagnons killed off the pure, beneficent, Neanders, the stage was set to wipe out natives everywhere and establish a white racist supremist ant-Ginsburg gaggle :)
Modern humans are better looking, so it’s easier to find mates.