Early humans: interbreeding and international travel

Metaphorical thinking Our Neanderthal cousins may now be extinct, but they are rarely out of the news. Writing in The Conversation, archaeologist Steven Mithen tackles the perennial question of why Homo sapiens flourished while Neanderthals died out by examining the differences between the brain cavities of the two species. He concludes that Neanderthals had a relatively large occipital lobe, devoting more brain matter to visual-processing, and a relatively small and differently shaped cerebellum, the neuron-packed part of the brain that is used for language-processing and speech. As we evolved, our brains developed neural networks that linked up the different clusters that are respons