Neanderthals were more advanced than us. THEY were one of the megalithic cultures of the remote past

Op, the following creatures have a brain bigger than a human's:

Elephants
sperm whales (biggest brain in the animal kingdom)
gray whales
blue whales
orcas
humpback whales
bottlenose dolphins
most of the other big whales and dolphins

Brain size alone in no way supports the first sentence of your thread title.

Take a look at humans today. Are you really that surprised? They may look at a human today, and go stupid humans.

Originally posted by Snoopy1978
Op, the following creatures have a brain bigger than a human's:

Elephants
sperm whales (biggest brain in the animal kingdom)
gray whales
blue whales
orcas
humpback whales
bottlenose dolphins
most of the other big whales and dolphins

Brain size alone in no way supports the first sentence of your thread title.

I think the OP meant that humans and their prehuman ancestors/contemporaries are encephalized, meaning they had a larger brain size in proportion to body size.

Can you please source your claims?

It seems you made up a lot of your "facts."

Because the source I found says:

. Among humans, however, the internal organization of the brain is more important for cognitive abilities than its absolute size is.

not to mention they say the brains were the same size.

This theory is a bit irrational. If you'd like a theory that is someone like this, but is proposed on more factual evidence and research, then you should look up the work of Doctor Zecharia Sitchen.


www.sitchin.com...

Thats what I believe too. A past cycle, and disaster or whatever took that down, but what they're calling Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon are not primitives.

en.wikipedia.org...

Apparently Cro-Magnon were similar to the French.

Even if Neanderthols were much much stronger than modern humans, incredible tools, machines, or some other techniques are required to build large megalithic stone structures. Not straight manpower, er Neandertholpower.

Also if they were so intelligent then they would have defenitely used a written language to pass down what they had known so at least a couple of generations would have been able to carry foward what they had learned. This may or may not have happened, I am not well versed enough to know.

reply to post by MONST3R


Sitchin has been proven wrong.

I would imagine our success as modern human beings is due to the right combination of intelligence, physical traits, and old-fashioned evil bloodthirstiness. If the Neanderthals had larger brains than we did you must imagine it was for a purpose. Maybe they were quite intellectual but "set in their ways" and our aggressiveness overwhelmed them. In short say humans had an Evil Index of 10 and an Intellectual Index of 5, and the Neanderthals had an Evil Index of 5 and an Intellectual Index of 9. Maybe they were smarter than we but we were meaner. It's survival of the fittest. But one wonders what thoughts they thought with those big brains? Another idea I rolled about in my head was that we did live with them side-by-side, but at some point we decided (for whatever reason) we needed to exterminate them all. And so we did.

Originally posted by zedVSzardoz

Could it be possible that we survived an extinction level event that killed off the Neanderthal population which was the more advanced form of sentient life on earth at the time? It is entirely possible for a biological threat to kill off our entire species and leave only primates to take our place. I propose a similar scenario. Not necessarily a viral threat that killed off the Neanderthals, but a combination of factors. Perhaps they were reduced to what they UNDERSTOOD to be a insufficiently diverse population to survive, so they chose to interbreed with the slightly inferior homo sapiens.

I have an idea... some overzealous neanderthal decided that they needed a slave race, so at their technological peak they genetically modified themselves to produce a series of workers "bees," aka homo erectus, which were segregated from society. Then some other overzealous neanderthal decided it wasn't "politically correct" to treat those poor homo erectus like thinking animals and developed a new world order platform that guilted all the other neanderthals into integration via multiculturalism. After this happened, during the "greed driven phase" where less than 1% of the neanderthals owned 75% of the world's wealth, the neanderthals poluted the planet through rampant production, consumerism and social programming. Eventually, their banking system collapsed after the other 99% of the neanderthals took up arms to eliminate the 1%. But it was too late and the consistent destruction of the environment by the 1% brought on an early ice-age which killed off the neanderthals, leaving only a couple of thousand homo erectus in the tropics, who were busy making frozen "Parquali Daquiries" and knock-off T-shirts for their masters to the north.

History repeats ;-)

Cheers - Dave

Neanderthals were more advanced than us

BS , show me one that can do a 360 tail whip on a bmx bike, then ill believe you 8oP

more advanced than us, still dont think so, if we were to bring them back drop them off in any remote part of the world would they survive.. you bet ya they would, if there was food ect ect.

the real question would be could they intergrate with current society and survive? i dont think so, they would act out kill someone /something and lapd, nypd, ect ect would put a bullet in his head heh.

and although larger brains do tend to"allow" more room for brain matter to be used doesnt specifically mean it was, sperm whale has largest brain in the world, they are still our food ^^

but i dont subscribe that ancient man was pathetic by any means. i wouldnt be surprised at all to find out cavemen had boats and traded on large scale. in germany a couple years back they think they found spear shafts and spear heads ready to be tied up , estimated 250+-400k years old. if we were making spears what else were we making at the time.

But how big was the neanderthal lunate sulcus? Brain size doesnt necessarily correlate to intelligence. The lunate sulcus, a part of the brain that controls visual imagery had to shrink over time to make room for a larger neocortex allowing more complex thought.

Great Post, very thought provoking...

As all the ancient legions and myths were often oral stories/legends etc before being written....

What if the "Sons of Gods with Daughters of Man" actually meant that the "Older" (eg Neanderthal) Man (eg Gods), captured/bought/traded/pillaged whatever, with Early dumb Homo Sapiens and used the women as an addition to their gene pool....
In other words, not by accident, but made a determined effort to mate with these lowly HS to Improve Their gene pool.......so a more advanced Homo Sapien, and maybe better looking Neanderthal , could prevail, or simply to have sex with another species.

All ancient Homo Sapien cultures took women of other tribes to improve the bloodline, not to mention the survival of the strongest.
This is why we have the diversity of today.

A power thing, a control thing...considering Neanderthal are up to 300,000 years old, what was supposedly going on in Africa at that time? Monkey Love?....And has it Definitively been established that Homo Sapiens originated in Africa, and not out of Africa and then returned to Africa??. Scientist play the "Yes we Know" but they really dont, its all theory.

Perhaps the Neanderthals didnt die out, they Morphed into the Europeans/Mid East people of the past 30,000+ years......

Consider at 30,000 years ago, when Neanderthal is "Suppose" to have theoretically disappeared, there were Humans already in established cultures, in Australia, East Asia and the Americas.

There is a lot more to the human story than the accepted, there were Monkeys in Africa, then they walked upright, then all man came from Africa.

Im Sure the East Asian Orangutan and Gigantopithecus (AND Bigfoot/Yeti/Yowie) would have something to say about that.

well thanks for the responses.

For everyone asking for sources, I DID provide a study done on all of the great apes and by and far the ones with larger brains were found to be more intelligent correlating the larger brain size to body size belief.

It is really all up in the air, BUT if the organizational properties of the brain was the only determining factor, then as I said before, A GOLD FISH would be smarter than a dolphin....

Size has everything to do with it. I do think there is a relation. I even mentioned Einstein´s brain which was studied. The parts of his brain that handle mathematical skills, and spacial cognition and spatial perception /motion were much larger than normal. His brain had many anomalies.

please look to my response here on the first and second page

reply to post by zedVSzardoz

and
reply to post by zedVSzardoz


as far as the rest. PROOF? are you kidding me? From the comfort of my PC I am going to dig up evidence of this theory and then PROVE it?

sorry, you are just asking WAY too much. What i can do is continue to argue my THEORY and mitigate any questions we may have as best as I can.

Some one asked why there is no technological evidence? Have you seen that discover show called something like 100 years without humans?

Basically in a couple hundred years you would be hard pressed to find anything bigger than a soccer ball. Give more time and you would only find things like statues and other artificial structures we made out of natural materials or REALLY pure metal.

so, you take into account and endless progression of humans living and dying along side the ruins of what ever civilization was left. they would need building materials and nick-knacks themselves and so eventually only the largest unmovable structures would remain.

Some one mentioned Zechariah Stichin and another said he has been "disproved"
Well, not exactly. I did VERY quickly summarize the lost book of Enki according to Stichin. Whether you believe his version of the translations or not, HE DID make some astounding and CORRECT translations that show a direct link of the Sumerian /Babylonian origin stories and those of the bible. HE also was the first to even touch the Sumerian tablets. NO ONE translated them for the general public. Scholars did, but more so out of curiosity.
Stichin may have said "rocket ship" where you or I would see "chariot" but like I said in my summary, sometimes you just need to take SOME creative license to tell a story that transcends TOO MANY ages and cultures for us to wrap our head around it and even follow it chronologically.

It is basically what the ancient Sumerians believed and there is a clear link from those stories to the akkadian and the bible. Moses was a citizen of the Babylonian city of UR. He took his nomadic people who lived VERY DIFFERENTLY than him and taught them everything he learned while living in the then known civilized world, which included THESE origin stories.

Maybe they didn't say "rocket ship" but they most certainly meant SKY or SPACE:...and they knew of PLANETS....ect.

Their gods were incarnate...and intermingled with them. They also MADE THEM from a primitive beast of the field that kind of looked like them by infusing it with their essence. "made in Gods image", "made in the image of elohim", (elohim *maybe being plural referring to GODS or a God people, and not just God as a single God which was a term developed MUCH later among the Semitic people."made with the essence of the gods"

Anyways, I knew it that close minded people would shoot this down, and more so when I try to explain our mythology which speaks to this DIRECTLY in almost all cultures across the globe. YOU would have to be blind as a bat NOT to see a connection. Even by your own standards of an isolated world which JUST got its act together and had us idiots climb down from trees a few thousand years ago.....

There is just SOO much supporting evidence to an alternate and much older version of events for human history, that you just can not deny it any more.

I dont blame academia for not being all knowing and just "knowing" this. BUT I do blame the perpetuation of ignorance out of laziness or spite.....

There MAY be more than what we know to the worlds history. We COULD be missing HUGE parts of the story. We only just started looking really in the last couple hundred years, and only in the last DECADES have had tools worthy of such a task.

Sooooo.....?, keep an open mind huh? Most of what we know now came form people in Whigs who thought you soul was trying to leave your nose when you sneezed and would bless you so it would get tucked back in you....or other such nonsense and superstition.....they did good,, but were VERY limited...lets just see OK?

Originally posted by TheComte
reply to post by MONST3R

 

Sitchin has been proven wrong.

Not only wrong but silly!

post by zedVSzardoz
HE also was the first to even touch the Sumerian tablets. NO ONE translated them for the general public. Scholars did, but more so out of curiosity.

Sorry wrong again Sitchin isn't a source or a reference he's a negative influence in any scientific discussion, he couldn't read Akkadian nor Sumerian - he just made stuff up. He didn't translate anything. In his time frame a century more of work had been done on translation and it was available to the public if they wanted to buy books or go to academic libraries

reply to post by gort51


yup

That is why I think academia is so resistant to pushing back the dates of construction of things like the pyramids or even complex society forming because they then have to start crediting OTHER forms of man for their construction and development. We also dont like to see us as anything other than the pinnacle of evolution.

If you go too far back, we were not even there, so WHO built what then? It is easy to call us all crazy and throw us ancient alien shows on TLC...but the physical evidence IS there. The water erosion on the temple complexes where vegetation only existed HUNDREDS of thousands of years ago, or more...

You then have to consider the interest in keeping our version of history as it is. The entire country of Egypt, and its government do not want to lose the credit of their Pyramids and temples to another people. Same for the Aztecs and the government of Mexico, or the Maya, ect. ALL nomadic people that TELL of wandering into cities gifted by the gods, or made by the gods which they found and decided to inhabit and expand on after the Gods taught them all this great knowledge.

There is much more to everything, and considering how little we know of just about EVERYTHING in the universe, we need to pool resources and sources and see where they take us. We have little to work with as is, WHY NOT look to mythology and oral tradition for clues?

reply to post by Hanslune


I dont really want to focus on Stichin since this isnt an Ancient alein theory, I just threw him in here to refer to the only translation I knew was complete and easily available of ancient Sumerian origin stories which tell a similar story that SCHOLARS accept as true. They dont say rocket ship, but tell of the Annuanki and a similar version of events.,gods making man, interbreeding, ect...THEY DO NOT SAY he just made things up and that he couldnt even read it. They disagree with his choice of words........anyways...

NOT the thread subject.

i'll just toss this out there as the thought has occurred to me. is i possible that the very "Aryan" traits that the Germans under Hitler sought. were actually the traits of "neanderthal"? hair and eye colour were a part of it, but they also seemed rather interested in things like skull/cranium shape/dimensions and the like.

also is it possible that part of Hitler's persecution of the Jews, was based from that. it seems to me there was a lot of claiming about the Jews "corruption" of the Aryan bloodline. which could even possibly tie into things like orders in the old testament for the Jews to wipe out man, woman and children of certain areas/cities? could those orders be specifically targeting "neanderthals", and those that had interbred with them? it's seems that the Nazis had a thing for anchiant history as the sent out teams around the world to do digs and stuff, looking for artifacts and connections with the "Aryan race". is this a far fetched line of thinking?

Deuteronomy 7:1-2:

"... the seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them."

Joshua 6:21:

"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword."

not too mention of course the "giants" that were involved in the land of Canaan
numbers 13:25-31
25 (13-26) And they that went to spy out the land returned after forty days, having gone round all the country, 26 (13-27) And came to Moses and Aaron and to all the assembly of the children of Israel to the desert of Pharan, which is in Cades. And speaking to them and to all the multitude, they shewed them the fruits of the land: 27 (13-28) And they related and said: We came into the land to which thou sentest us, which in very deed floweth with milk and honey as may be known by these fruits: 28 (13-29) But it hath very strong inhabitants, and the cities are great and walled. We saw there the race of Enac. 29 (13-30) Amalec dwelleth in the south, the Hethite and the Jebusite and the Amorrhite in the mountains: but the Chanaanite abideth by the sea and near the streams of the Jordan. 30 (13-31) In the mean time Caleb, to still the murmuring of the people that rose against Moses, said: Let us go up and possess the land, for we shall be able to conquer it. 31 (13-32) But the others, that had been with him, said: No, we are not able to go up to this people, because they are stronger than we.

Originally posted by zedVSzardoz

Neanderthals had larger brains. Their brains were the same size when infants as human infants but were much larger as adults than homo- sapiens.

Larger brains almost always correlate to larger intellects and capacity for learning.

edit on 21-1-2013 by zedVSzardoz because: (no reason given)

That was great thought, and I have always thought that neanderthals were more advanced than is currently accepted. However, you point out the size of their brains as being a reason they should have survived, what if it was the reason for the demise instead? I know it sounds illogical, but just consider this for a moment.

So, if we really stop and think about the fact that survival would have depended on raw "savagery", then it should be safe to assume that the larger brain is not really neccesary. In fact, it could have been the reason for their downfall. Now, I am pretty sure that the brain uses the most amount of energy above any other organ, correct? So, if the neanderthals were wasting all of their energy on their larger brains, it would seem to be a waste in the enviroment they lived in. I believe that if their energy was preserved for more essential tasks, involving different organs and muscles. Perhaps the smaller size of a homo sapien's brain was the thing that allowed them to survive the harsh ice age. While the neanderthals were wasting all this energy on their brains, the homo sapien's energy was reserved for other essential functions that would be neccesary during an ice age, such as temperature regulation.

I dunno, it was just a thought that crossed my mind, I could be way off. In any case, I cant really say that brain size equates to intelligence. Or at least it doesnt seem that way when you consider the intelligence of animals with their brain size. Once again, I could be wrong, but it is just my 2 cents.

Anyways, that was pretty well put together, and I enjoyed pondering the thought. Thanks, star and flag for you.

ETA: Here is a site showing the various weights of different brains for reference.

Average Brain Weights.

reply to post by Renegade2283


nah thats a good point.

The larger brain would be useless if it did in fact provide a keener intellect if what was really needed was to rely on brute strength. Also I keep thinking that their culture degraded severely. Think how little is left of our own civilized nature when forced to live with "savages" (I hate that word) for a prolonged period of time. There have been cases of PHD´s going to study tribal culture and immersing themselves in it and losing themselves to the experience, becoming one of the tribe through and through....imagine if it was for life?

There are some really good responses here that have added to the discussion. I think the bible has many clues if we take a different approach to the way we see the characters. we assume us (homo sapiens) to be the main characters in all of them, but we may not.

i am sorry if I havent answered you all. Great responses thus far though....