Were there significant differences between Neanderthals and us?

Adam Benton, on Evoanth recently posted an interesting article "How similar were Neanderthals and humans?" which looked at the evidence and while there are definite differences it is not clear how significant they are -in deciding why they became extinct and we did not.

I responded:

It might be worth thinking about later encounters – when the Europeans discovered America and Australia. The Europeans came off best because they had the stronger cultural communal knowledge base, which enabled them to build more powerful weapons. It might be a complete accident of history that the discovery of how to make iron happened on one side of the Atlantic rather than the other.

Could we have done better than the Neanderthals because we had a better cultural knowledge base which gave us more advanced technology and allowed us to work together in larger groups, perhaps with some people beginning to take on specialist roles. At the time that language was first appearing the key to having a better cultural knowledge base would be having a more powerful language. Thus it may be that when modern humans first met with Neanderthals we collectively “knew more” – so we came off best – just as Europeans came off better in America and Australia – because they had better technology.

If we look at language as a self-modifying tool there were almost certainly some key “inventions” – such as being able to differentiate between the past, present and future, counting, etc.  Perhaps it was just an accident of history that one of our species, rather than a Neanderthal, made the first key technical advances which allowed language to develop and that Neanderthal brains were just as capable in that respect as our own.

Evolution, human intelligence & religiously inspired killings

The recent "Question of the Week" on the Richard Dawkins Foundation Web Site asked the question

“Is there an evolutionary explanation as to why some groups seem more particularly prone to take life and give their own lives in defense of their religion?”

I submitted the following response, in line with the evolutionary model of human intelligence I am developing on this blog.

Wednesday Science Limerick - The Language Enigma

The Tower of Babel

We use our intelligent brain
To speak phrases – both bright and mundane
Are we really so clever
That despite all endeavour
Its real workings we’ll never explain.

When I started this blog I drew attention to the black hole in brain research and have referred to the subject on various occasions since. Now a paper How Could Language Have Evolved published at the end of August by Johan J. Bolhuis, Ian Tattersall, Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick which demonstrates that, at least as far as the origins of language are concerned, they agree that there is a significant problem. Their abstract begins:

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language “phenotype.” 

My views on the subject suggest that they have been busy digging a very deep hole in the wrong place.  I am just getting things back together after a month's holiday entertaining a visitor from Australia but hope to have a post describing where they should have been digging by the end of the week.

How Humans invented Natural Language and why Animals don’t have it

Each species will balanced the use of resources between activities such as feeding, breeding, avoiding predators, and learning how to optimise these resources by using the brain. There are many different evolutionary strategies. For instance some fish lay millions of eggs while humans have small numbers of young and use their brain to maximise the survival of each youngster. However we can be certain that no animal evolves an organ bigger than it needs, and if conditions change an organ will shrink if it is bigger than necessary. This will apply to every organ and function and no species will not evolve a brain bigger than it needs.