Neanderthal genius

I’ve been thinking about a review I recently read in the New York Times of a book called How to Think like a Neanderthal. The book attempts to reconstruct, from available evidence, how Neanderthals might have thought about things.

One thing I learned from the review is that Neanderthals developed a very impressive technology to make the spears they used for hunting — both a way to create the sharp-edged spear-head, and a way to lash that spear-head to a wooden shaft (which is not so simple to do, given the materials available at the time).

Another thing I learned is that even though homo neanderthalensis spent quite a lot of years in proximity to humans (the Cro-Magnons), Neanderthal culture never adapted their human neighbors’ far better spear-making technology. If they had, their chances for species survival would have been much better.

Which leads me to conjecture that Neanderthals, in general, were not able to learn new technologies, whereas some particular Neanderthals, were capable of not only learning new technologies, but inventing them. In other words, Neanderthals had the equivalent of super-geniuses, so advanced that they could invent new technologies, even though their friends and neighbors were not even capable of imitating new technologies.

It would have been cool to meet one of those people.