biologista wrote:
If neanderthals heads were too big to fit through the birthing canal, how the hell did they ever achieve a high enough population for us to know about them.
The dynamics of their skulls and body shape served as a handicap to the higher birthrates of Homo Sapiens.
I was clearly not saying that it precluded births, or existence of the species, a point easily discernible. How you came to that conclusion I do not know.
Much of what we think of as 'scientific knowledge' is not fact. Just because a science journal says something or someone advances a theory does not make it fact.
We can not know how Neanderthals interacted, hunted, or anything about their culture. We can not know if the competed, cooperated, or both with Homo Sapiens.
What we do know for certain is that they had larger heads than ours, and that these large heads effected the birth process, lowering their birthrate in comparison with that of Homo Sapiens who had smaller heads on average than Neanderthal.
That does not mean Neanderthal were any less intelligent than us, it does not mean we were more intelligent than they. Such a notion is not based on any verifiable data, while skeletons from Neanderthal confirming the head diamter/birth rate problem is verifiable.
If I wanted to speculate I could say Neanderthal were far more intelligent, but their birth rate problem doomed them as they were literally out birthed by lesser homo. I won't make any parallels with today about this because it is just speculation.
The amount of grade school logic on this board, on scientific matters, IE what teacher says is always right mentality is absurd. Most of what we know about Neanderthal is theory. Don't use theory to make an argument about anything.
My points use fact, there is a clear correlation between brain size and intelligence in the animal kingdom, and most strikingly among genus of homo.
Again, with the points on Neanderthal, use verifiable fact; their heads were larger, so large in fact that it lowered birth rates. If I wanted to make a speculation: Perhaps this is similar to why smart people today have lower birth rates than less intelligent people.
Hypothesis: does this condemn mankind to perpetual stupidity? I don't know, look at our politicians, pop culture, MSNBC/FOX dialectic, number of individuals on welfare, etc. for an answer.
Is intelligence rewarded in humanity? Or greed, stupidity, neediness? Which cultures and subcultures advance these notions? I don't know, why don't you answer these questions on your own.