I have a thing for Neanderthals. The idea that there were these actual Others out there once, living side by side with Homo sapiens, people but not humans… it just floors me with how crazy that is. I guess it should come as no surprise that I am equally peeved by depictions of Neanderthals as brutish and stupid. They had bigger brains than Homo sapiens, by about 10%, after all. Now, while the size of your brain doesn’t correlate to intelligence when you compare individuals, it is a fast and loose rule you can use between species. That said, Neanderthals also had bigger bodies than humans, so that 10% might just be running the physical side of things. Fair enough. The point is, they had big, developed brains. So what were they like? How were they different than humans?
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