Kyle Jarrard has a piece at The Huffington Post on changing attitudes about Neandertal competence:
No more can we say that old Neanderthal — prototype of shaggy man with absolutely zero smarts — didn’t know what he was doing. And no more can we deny it: They were not a little bit like us but a lot. As Professor David Frayer, Neanderthal expert at the University of Kansas, puts it, with not a little hint of told-you-so scientific glee, “Seemingly with every new journal issue, the gap between Neanderthal and modern human behavior closes.”
Bringing the Neanderthals in from the cold and the dark is the new thing in anthropology. In the last five years alone, Frayer explains, evidence has emerged of Neanderthal skills in “seafaring, use of ochre, intentional burials, feather-ornament-pigment procurement, ritual behavior, modern-like food preparation, distribution of raw materials between regions, complex site structures and dietary diversity.” That is a mouthful of crafts and cultural know-how that, ever since the first Neanderthal skull was discovered in Germany in 1856, probably no one would have ever dreamed of linking to these much-laughed-at, oft-spurned creatures.
Genetics is not the only field producing new kinds of evidence through technological innovation.
Frayer notes that “much of the optic that viewed Neanderthals as incompetent ‘non-ancestors’ was based on negative evidence. That is, because evidence for complex behavior was not found by early-to-mid-20th-century excavation techniques, Neanderthals were labeled as dummies. But the excavation techniques then were poor and the early archaeologists were not looking for this kind of evidence anyway. Unfortunately, for the most part we cannot go back to the sites and get the missing information.”
