I’m not sure that’s a statement that can be put forward with evidence. I know there’s this opinion that Neanderthals had no symbolic thought but I think that’s a very hard thing to prove. The cave art at la Roche cotay (sp?) is thought to be Neanderthal, as is some in a cave in Malaga and there’s what seem to be a necklace made from eagle talons in Croatia.
Having said that the above things are thought to be Neanderthal mainly due to age, and it’s now becoming clear that early human history isn’t quite what has been pushed with the OOA theory, so actual human humans may be older than previously assumed. The flower burials at shanidar may actually be bees and burying the dead in branches, so new evidence comes to light all the time.
I don’t think we can say why Neanderthals and denisovans aren’t around any more conclusively. There are lots of lines of thought that are interesting but it’s very hard to pin any of them down as definitely, or even very probable. The climate was harsh and the populations weren’t big, and times were brutal. Chance drift of numbers from predation, death, dislodging etc are as much an explanation as any, even though they’re duller.
Very interesting subject though. Hard to find good summary material because everyone involved has their own pet theories
I dismiss a lot of 'evidence' put forward by archaeologists because they're the most corrupt bastards in any form of science.
Five years ago I was arguing that out OOA timeline was off by hundreds of thousands of years and that Africa wasn't our origin, it was probably A Pacific Island or Antarctica.
Within that five years, our OOA timeline shifted from 150,000 years ago to 350,000 then recently to 1,000,000 years ago. So now archaeologists have to come up with a reason why we sat on our arses for 1 million years, then aggressively expanded all over the globe within a tenth of that time.
The neanderthals and other Homonids were bred out, starved out and wiped out during the great flood. But! Archaelogists refuse to accept the great flood, thus ignoring the high probability that we survived thanks to our cognitive abilities and understood better than the rest what was happening and were able to escape for the most part.
The cognitive part of our brain; the 'Human' brain is unique to us.
While Neanderthals had a larger skull and a higher capacity for intelligence, they didn't have that cognition that put us at the top of the food chain from day 1.
There are aggressive pack animals. Some primates are very territorial, others not at all. Any homonid that threatened humans would have been target number one to be decimated and wiped out because we are territorial aggressors. There is evidence we lived with neanderthals but they would have been akin to dogs to us; friendly, helpful and subservient.
I believe that Earth was hit with a few catastrophic events in short order (10,000's thousand years) ending around 200,000 years ago. These catastrophes wiped out our closest relatives and allowed us to survive, while wiping the slate clean of myriad homids unable to see the sea levels rising as a bad thing.
Now of course
if any of that were true, how could the scientific community admit that we werent kangz, we didn't come Africa, our origins are elsewhere - I can't imagine them having to admit we wuz abboz n shieet or Antarctician in origin, especially in the current political climate.
That the pyramids are ackshually 30,000+ years old as evidence suggests and that we are able to build them because we had an extra 900,000 years worth of experience before we did so.
How could archaelogists who have argued tooth and nail for 100 years not to believe your lying eyes - tectonic plates were seen as science fiction in the 1960's, admit that Gobleki Tepe and the sorrounding Tepes show evidence of a world-wide organisation of human tribes coming together to share knowledge?
I could go on, but I have sperged enough. Apologies for the long-form waffle, I just know, on an instinctual level, that our history is been hidden from us and that the last honest discoveries were the British Empire's journey into Africa, including all of their findings, from around 1800-1920, roughly. Since the war, things have been getting covered up, sometimes literally with concrete, more and more.
