Now, let's get back to the intelligence of the Neanderthal. More and more evidence is coming to light showing that they were, in fact, not dumb brutes. There is evidence of them performing basic surgery, including amputation. They found a dead Neanderthal from 50,000 years ago, that had his arm amputated and not only survived but lived for years afterword. Let's think about what that implies...the understanding of the need for the surgery, the possibility of it, the knowledge of how to do it, the tools needed (including at the very least a tourniquet), and the understanding of post surgery care. That seems amazing for 50,000 years ago. It seems amazing, BECAUSE we have been under the assumption that they were dumb brutes.  We have plenty of evidence to the contrary now...and I think much of it proves they were smarter.

As out of my lane as me giving thoughts on this may seem...I can say this with all confidence- I know a hell of a lot more about the process of making art, than an archeologist. And by the way, I may just be an illustrator/comedian, but I don't have to routinely change my assertions of the date of something by 100,000 years. And I didn't have to just recently throw out everything I previously said because someone found a new skull of some form of human that I assumed didn't exist. And in regards to the evidence that is art and not bones, (which is what we will be looking at) I am in fact expertly qualified to analyze it...

First off, that cave painting up there was not done by an amateur. Could YOU do that? From memory? with no reference picture? That is as good a  "sketch" as anyone now would do. Proportionally correct, a level of detail higher than needed to simply to get the point across. Decisions were made on which details are important and which are not. (Horns, hoofs, male or female could be considered vital, but the shading and different colored hair on the same animal are details for the sake of artistry) And it's on a cave/rock wall, by torch light. I couldn't do that...not on the first try.( and that point is going to become an important).

Impressive but not blowing your mind? How about this one....


Chauvet Cave 

Seems like a bit of a mess, but get a load of this... one of the people who was researching it used an actual torch for light and realized that with the flickering of the flame THE F*CKING IMAGES MOVED...like old school animation. They figured out how to create optical illusions. Have a different opinion on the brainpower of the Neanderthals yet?

Then there is this pic, for scale...

The size of that means...now we're talking about need to build scaffolding to stand on, for the express purpose of making an image. The artist would need help cutting that wood to size, assembling it, moving it. He'd probably need help gathering enough minerals or whatever else he used to make that much paint.  As well as needing several torches and whatever fuel the torches use (animal fat, pre-dried wood, ect)  Most importantly, he'd need to eat. Meaning the other Neanderthals would have to be on board with him getting food that he hadn't hunted or gathered himself. and/or not steal what he saved up, for however long it took him to paint this. 

This is a several day long project, from start for finish. I've painted murals before. You spend as much time going up and down and moving ladders as you do actually paining.

This was to some extent a group effort, not to hunt or conquer...but to make something pretty. A group effort to help one person do something for the rest of them, that had nothing to do with survival.  That ain't going to happen unless the group is confident and excited for him to do it, based on what they had previously seen him do. Bringing us to another important point- based on my own extensive experience in analyzing illustrations, this cave wall was all done by one person. I have no doubt in my mind that those strokes of lines are all by the same hand, to me they are as obvious and as a signature.

As far as line work goes, mistakes are as much a trademark of any specific person as skill is.  With any individual human the hand/eye coordination in drawing is very constant in its errors. There are angles, curves, flaws in line thickness here that are absolutely all done by the same hand. I'll walk you through just a couple examples...





A-That line from back leg up through the butt, consistent...like someone writing the letter M with sharp angles as as opposed to round bumps.

B- has trouble with the upper butt going into the curve of the back

C- that horn curve/bend is the same. Even though he f*cked up on the one on the left, the stroke is the same.

D- Makes a weird lumpy- leg into ankle shape. This is interesting because it's an interpretation. It's an instance ( all artists have this bad habit) of drawing what you think something looks like and not what you actually see.  The stroke he uses for A is how the leg actually works, and how he draws D is him going "eh...something like this, I think". Every artist as some aspect of something where they just go "meh looks right". And every artist has a different "aspect of something" where they do that.

E- that neck to chin line is oddly thick and lumpy because he's trying to do it with one stroke. AND by the way, we should stop assuming a stick was used. I'm not saying they had brushes or that I know what tool was used, but I can tell you it was something that flexed, because the line width changes on big curves (hump on the back underbelly) and on lines where you'd be pulling down (the chins), and that doesn't happen with a stiff/ridged tool.

F- You don't need to be very observant to see that the mouths are the same in a weird almost cartoony way and the eye placement is consistent.

These are just a couple of side by side shots, I won't bore you (though I was going to) with tracking the consistencies through the whole mural. The bottom line is, this was all done by one person. Most likely a right handed person by the way, for whatever that is worth.

 It's done by one person and, these were not first drafts. That Neanderthal did not wander up to that cave wall and go to town having never attempted to draw an animal. Aside from the skill, the habits/consistency in flaws, as are present, only develop after drawing stuff for some time. One person having time to learn to draw, and one person doing the whole thing suggests they had the ability to recognize one of them having more ability in a certain area than the rest of them. Abstract non-survival type skills had been recognized by this group and been seen as valuable. No one would help him with all this if they hadn't seen him draw anything before and weren't excited about him doing the project.

Thus, he was picked from the group to do it, or got the group to combine their efforts to help him. They'd seen him draw before. In the dirt...maybe. But more likely, given what else we've seen they were capable of, onto some other medium. Peeled tree bark, or animal skins maybe. There's a lot of things they could have been drawing on, that deteriorate into dust after a few thousand years and ain't in the cave when the British museum rolls in 30,000 years later. But it existed or those cave paintings would not, period.  Meaning, they had the means to put information on a transportable medium that could be passed down to other generations...and that is the cheat code of advancing as a civilization.

There is something missing amongst cave art of this period, that is also evidence that they were drawing on things that did not survive the passage of time.

Porn.

Where's the porn? As far back as you can go in history there's nudies. Nude statues, phallic symbols carved into walls, or sculpted into dolls. It's everywhere.



So, they made porn...as sure as you and I are breathing in and out, there where Neanderthals drawing boobies.  But not on the community cave walls. They made it on something more discreet, transportable, that wasn't in constant view of the entire community. Which belies a culture with some concept of decorum. That is fairly important, when you are trying to suss out the level of intellect and culture they might have had.

 And the fact that none of the rest of them later vandalized these cave paintings, nor tried to contribute their own paint covered stick efforts to it post production, also implies an amount of decorum and culture and self awareness...beyond how strong or fast one might be.

Back to not having reference pictures. It's possible he practiced drawing animals they killed that were lying around, or even had some dragged into the cave. But there is another possibility...which would also explain them being able to map out the stars. Humans are primates, Neanderthals are primates, and chimpanzees are primates. There is a lot about the Neanderthals we don't know, but we know about us, and we know a lot about chimpanzees.  For instance, we know that their visual memory is off the charts compared to ours. 

They've done a lot of cognitive of tests on chimps. Like showing them a screen shot of a bunch of random numbers, for one second... and seeing if they can reproduce it with a touchscreen.  They can, like magic. Modern humans have the capacity to remember number sequences of 7-9 digits if they have a solid amount of time to drill it into their brains. Chimps, are over double that with only seeing it for one second.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTgeLEWr614

Here's the studies-

Eidetic Memory: Chimpanzees have been observed to possess eidetic memory, a rare ability in humans, where they can recall visual information with exceptional accuracy and detail. (Matsuzawa et al., 2001)Pattern Recognition: Chimpanzees can quickly recognize and recall complex patterns, such as numerical sequences, with remarkable speed and accuracy.

(Matsuzawa et al., 2001)Visual Working Memory: Chimpanzees demonstrate superior visual working memory, allowing them to hold and manipulate visual information in their minds for a longer period than humans. (Inoue & Matsuzawa, 2007)

It's possible (I would say likely) that Neanderthals also had this ability and it either didn't stick when they bread with humans and/or our level of skill in such areas eroded along the way as we needed such skills less and less. Could be they were at the level of chimps or even higher, in visual recall. If that was the case, it would explain how one can, over the course of a single lifetime, notice the movements of the stars to the point you not only notice a pattern but all the patterns.  Handy knowledge to pass down on an animal skin to others who are going out on a trip in search of better hunting land, or other groups of Neanderthals, and don't have compass to guide them home.  

And as long as we are theorizing that the Neanderthals had some of the advantages primates have ... "gorillas and orangutans can see in low light conditions better than humans, and they have a wider field of vision. Great apes also have better night vision and wider field of vision compared to humans". So..on top of the off the charts visual recall, other primates also have a broader range of vision (which helps seeing the whole sky), and see better at night (when the stars are out)

Back to the art as evidence of advancement...here's some early homo sapien paintings.

Compared to the Neanderthal paintings...this all looks like sh*t. 

"Mastery in the skill of drawing" sez the "experts".  Experts in digging up old crap. Note the connotation by the "expert" in the panel on the right. "Dancing" they sez.  He pulled that notion out of his ass. It's a static image. They are walking...maybe. Maybe they just drew one figure for everyone in their tribe. There is zero reason to claim this is a dance. And assuming anything about it based on another painting by some other tribe far away, who TF knows how many years apart, is ASININE.

"experts"

I'm an expert in illustrations and I refer to them as sh*ty. And actually, this one...



...I refer to as bullsh*t.

Yeah...sorry there Thorg, but you were not riding an adult mammoth (horns).  Any cave man that managed to ride a mammoth would would be too busy swimming in cave women to draw on a wall. That guy would have a full dance card, I assure you. I guess it's possible this was drawn by the guy who could make fire, having time on his hands now that the mammoth rider is getting all the ladies.

In any case, these common early human examples were done on the first try, by whoever decided to rub the ashes onto the stick. Any one of you with no practice could do that as well or better. And it is relatively small, so requires no ladder/scaffolding, or even a large rock to stand on. No extensive amount of time was put in that would limit time needed to find food. No group effort or consensus was needed. So, who pray tell, do you think was smarter and more advanced? and who pray tell, having no math, units of measurement, or telescope to aid them, do you think charted the stars?  Neanderthals or humans? 

In order to chart the stars at all you have to notice and give importance to details...and convey that information onto a physical medium fairly accurately. You tell me which group seemed capable of that...



I mean...give me a break. It's not even close.

Why didn't Neanderthals have the wheel or why didn't they make this or do that or build blah blah blah? maybe they did and we haven't found it because all evidence has disintegrated, also maybe they didn't have...enough aggression/ambition. Maybe they, apart from when taking care of basic needs for survival i.e. hunting, were calm and docile.

Smarts alone do not always equal giant leaps in technology, actually usually it doesn't. It's usually something... else.





We don't see much evidence of large conflicts of any sort until homo sapiens started interacting...and then we have crap load of it. Battle fields, mass graves, the whole bit. Ya take a little of being intelligent and knowing how to operate as a team from column A (Neanderthals) and a little aggression from column B (homo sapiens) and pesto chango next thing you know you have a nuclear bomb.

The difference between ambition and aggression is a debate for another time. I'd say that ambition is aggression with a complex purpose.

Maybe the Neanderthals for all their intellect had no ambition. Some of the most intelligent people I know aren't interested in setting the world on fire or have any particular ambitions at all.  And while intellect does weight heavily on the results of one's ambition, the two can exist separately.

And where does ambition come from? Being that early species of humans were still humans, the hybrid offspring of Neanderthals and man probably didn't have a fantastic go of it...being that they had characteristics that could make them outcast in they eyes of either side of the gene pool.  Maybe ambition in it's core, at it's earliest seeds, came from wanting to prove they belong, or have value, or just simply "screw you guys anyway, watch what I can do." and it all started rolling from there.

I'd bet if we sussed out all the greatest advancements in mankind, they each came from individuals who's personalities were of that type disposition. Anyways...I'm getting off the point. Way off the point actually considering this is an email update, THEORETICALLY, about a comic book series. of which I could only find one comic related to this topic...

To the conspiracy theorists beyond the level I am at, who believe there have been many civilizations in the past that were wiped off the face of the earth by one force or another, that managed to pass some knowledge along. That could very well be, but who says those civilizations were homo sapiens? 

The tangible evidence in front of us is that we were dumber and only became smarter and more technologically advanced after breeding with Neanderthals. 50,000 to 20,000 years ago Neanderthals were engaging in complex group projects, for no other purpose than to make something visually pleasing...which is a dispositions that goes hand in hand with them breeding themselves right out of existence by doing the bulk of their procreating with more visually attractive, but dumber homo sapiens.  

There does seem to be a lack of curiosity involved in archeology, that some go so far as to deem "covering things up". But the "why" they'd cover anything up is always a question. Like what actual social unrest could occur if it Atlantis was discovered and they had electricity, or whatever?

...If I am correct, perhaps it is PERSONAL unease with the possibilities, which is hindering putting two and two together.  Because the evidence leads to the conclusion that the Neanderthals had cognitive abilities beyond that of early man and all we as a species brought to the table was being good looking and angry.  Not something you'd want to try get grant to prove, or broadcast it if you did.

You can email me the invitation to claim my noble prize.