Upon reading online blog posts on ancient humans, I came across an interesting blog post from Anthropology Magazine, titled “What if Neanderthals Had Outlived Homo Sapiens?” which is written by Penny Spikins, an author of the Sapiens blog.
This article was interesting because it presented hypothetical situations of what would happen if Neanderthals still existed to this day. The article highlights the difference between the success of the Homo-Sapien species and the downfall of the Neanderthals.
Hypothetical situAtions
Penny Spikins explains that if Neanderthals were alive to this day, they would live a completely different lifestyle from today’s Homo Sapiens. She explained that modern homo-sapiens were only able to overpopulate the earth, develop complex societies, and build huge cities because of human cooperation skills. On the other hand, Neanderthals usually lived in close-knit societies with one another and were wary of foreign tribes. This means that modern Neanderthals are unlikely to build giant cities with populations of millions.
The differences between the Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens are a highly likely reason why we survived today. One reason was that our Homo Sapiens species were more likely to share ideas with one another compared to the Neanderthals. This led to the survival of the Homo-Sapiens species because they were able to survive the changing climate.
Here is my personal take on the Neanderthals. Because of the differing natures of Neanderthals, Neanderthals wouldn’t have developed the same complex societies as Homo sapiens have. However, if Homo-Sapiens and Neanderthals were to coexist, then Neanderthals would likely be fearful of Homo-Sapiens.