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 responsible for storing groups of concepts, and our species gained the capacity to think and communicate using metaphor, while ideas and words remained isolated in the Neanderthal brain. This key difference ‘transformed the language, thought, and culture of our species, creating a deep divide with the Neanderthals’.
Not so different
Looking at brain and skull shape alone highlights the differences between archaic and modern humans, but a Cambridge-based team of archaeologists has reconstructed the face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman as part of an effort to demonstrate that the species was not the ‘brutish and unsophisticated’ hominin of popular imagination.
