Thanks to movies and a series of insurance ads, we tend to think of the extinct hominids known as Neanderthals as hairy, stooped, club-wielding caveman. Modern science knows a lot more about Neanderthals now, but the old stereotypes persist. You may be surprised at how like us the Neanderthals really were. Link -via Unique Daily
(image credit: Reconstruction by Kennis & Kennis/Photograph by Joe McNally, National Geographic)
Sofar, Neanderthal people were more succesful than modern humans as far as surviving through time goes. And about their culture we don't know zilch- a few artifacts, okay. Yet they had several hundreds of thousands of years to develop their oral history and culture, their language, their songs, their prayers, their stories, their chants and their ways of doing things. Those are all gone.
it wouldn't surprise me if they eventually did find neanderthal/cro-magnon hybrids, but i really have to wonder if we were close enough to produce viable offspring. they've found the bones of a child who looks like he could have been a mix of both- but with only one example, we can't really say for sure.
it would be kind of nice in a way to think that they blended with us, but so far they haven't found any evidence to support that.
since they look pretty close to us, i wonder if cro-magnon even knew they were a different species of people, or if they just thought they were a different band/tribe.
i wish one would show up frozen like all those mammoths in siberia so we could learn more about them. seems like there should be more than a few like that, right?