The Neanderthal extinction may have led to the rise of early humans, but it was not a lack of wits that lead to the change.
In a new study, published in the journal PLOS One, two researchers found that Neanderthals likely had the same mental aptitude for hunting, language and culture as did the early humans that followed them.
Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Al Jazeera the study disproves a common stereotype that Neanderthals were not intelligent compared to humans that came later.
"We found no data in support of the supposed technological, social and cognitive inferiority of Neanderthals compared to their modern human contemporaries," he said. "The vision of primitive club-wielding brutes who in the end vanished when superior modern humans entered their world has been obsolete for a long time already."
The new study backs up similar ones of late suggesting the Neanderthal extinction was not related to their perceived inability to adapt to climate changes. Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia from about 350,000 BC to 40,000 BC, but vanished when early modern humans migrated from Africa.
Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, said the reason for the Neanderthal's extinction is much more complex. They discovered Neanderthals hunted in groups, bison and trapped mammoths and rhinoceroses. Combined with more findings, the researchers concluded Neanderthals acted and thought similarly to early humans.
"Researchers were comparing Neanderthals not to their contemporaries on other continents but to their successors," Villa said in a news release. "It would be like comparing the performance of Model T Fords, widely used in America and Europe in the early part of the last century, to the performance of a modern-day Ferrari and conclude that Henry Ford was cognitively inferior to Enzo Ferrari."
