[ExI] Neanderthals weren't exterminated - they were assimilated

[BillK]

In the past few decades, however, anthropological discoveries have
contradicted those stereotypical views. Neanderthals actually had
slightly larger brains than modern humans! Moreover, they were
accomplished big game hunters, crafted advanced tools, ritualistically
buried their dead, and utilized language and symbols.

<http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/05/did_humans_kill_off_the_neanderthals.html>

According to archaeologists Paola Villa and Wil Roebroeks, these
recent discoveries counter the notion that human superiority somehow
led to the demise of the Neanderthals. They state their case in the
form of a systematic review of archaeological records, published in
the online open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The extinction and competition hypotheses for the demise of the
Neanderthals, notably suggested by interdisciplinary scientist and
author Jared Diamond, hinge on the idea that humans were more advanced
than Neanderthals. Commonly claimed are the following: that humans had
more communicative abilities, were more efficient hunters, had
superior weaponry, ate a broader diet, and had more extensive social
networks.

But the archaeological record doesn't back any of those claims, the
authors found.

According to Villa and Roebroeks, the best explanation now is familiar
to anyone who's acquainted with the Borg, a ruthless collective of
cybernetic beings from Star Trek. Neanderthals were assimilated... by
us. That's right: Humanity is the Borg.

In 2010, scientists discovered that between one and four percent of
the DNA of modern humans living outside of Africa is derived from
Neanderthals, providing clear evidence that the two species were
interbreeding to some extent tens of thousands of years ago. In
January of this year, Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey of the
University of Washington published a paper in Science that
corroborated those results. They found that a fifth of Neanderthals'
genetic code lives on within our species as a whole.

<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0096424>


BillK