130,000 years ago? Even Neandertal Fucks the Creatards

[Regina]

Although the Neanderthals had a large brain, the also had overlarge sensory lobes, specifically visual and olfactory lobes. I do believe they had some elements of culture, but things like missing organized agriculture or staying with the same primitive design for their toolkits even as archaic H. Sapiens was designing more and better tools lead me to think that there's a kernel of truth to the stereotype we hold of them.

I heard the problem was not their brains, which were bigger than ours, but other parts of their bodies: specifically, shoulder joints with a very poor range of motion, and possibly problems with overheating in warmer climes.

This would make sense. Since they were in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, it would make sense that they would have adapted such to the cold climate, that they wouldn't be able to cope going back to Africa where they evolved.

Modern humans definitely had the advantage in some way. It might have even just been an advantage of numbers, given how vanishingly small the genetic input of Neanderthals is into modern Europeans.

I think we need to forget the idea of modern humans "wiping out" Neanderthals though. They weren't wiped out by modern humans, they just bred with and were absorbed into the encroaching modern human population. That is a big deal, because it means Neanderthals had to be very genetically similar to modern humans. It's not too big an assumption to make that they could probably talk as well.