RE: How do we know that Neanderthal skeletons are Neanderthal skeletons?
October 1, 2022 at 7:02 pm
I don't think that any expert is claiming that violence on the part of HS was highly organized. Fact is that small villages of groups of several hundred human beings in Western Europe predate the city states of Sumer and Jericho by 10,000 years, which means that some level of organizational skills predate that all the way back to the discovery of fire some 2 Mya. If people were smart enough to build wooden huts in an organized fashion, they will likely smart enough to "gang up" on similar, but different, looking rivials who were living in the nearby valley. After all, why produce things when you can simply steal it, killing your neighbors in the process? As some HS men felt sexual attraction to HN women, it is likely that those encounters were not consensual; who, after all, wants to have sex with some strange man who has just murdered your husband? As we did not descend from HN, their DNA got in (most of) us somehow.
