https://image1.slideserve.com/1988980/hyoid-bone-l.jpg

I think we can all agree that human beings are a very strange and unique species, intelligent, competitive, ingenious, treacherous and deadly if existentially threatened.

“Homo sapiens, the species to which all modern human beings belong. Homo sapiens is one of several species grouped into the genus Homo, but it is the only one that is not extinct.”

I think this whole discussion about IQ and intelligence is missing the main attribute that distinguishes homo sapien from its predecessors: The ability to make tools and re-shape his environment for his own benefit, a thinking ability I suspect is directly tied to homo sapien’s sophisticated language skills related to abstract thought.

It is this skill that is unique. Experiments have shown apes and chimpanzees have it to a very slight extent, as does this new evidence show the Neanderthal’s had it to the same extent. In both cases, it wasn’t passed on to others, and did not inspire other tool improvisations and adaptions.

With modern humans, such improvisations are natural, continuous, and uncontrollable. If anything, it is why we are so impossible to control, and why we fight so hard for freedom. It is part of our nature to try new things, and any time someone tries to stop us we rebel, and often do so violently.

2/3rds of the population have an IQ roughly between 85-115.
95% of the population is between 70-130.
99.7% of the population is between 55-145
0.30% of the population is below 54 or above 141

There is a point being overlooked here, while Neanderthals were more human like what is being missed here is the ability to think in complex abstract terms.

And I believe that the Neanderthal does to some degree fit this requirement. To some degree.

We are all animals based in DNA / biology and live in that reality but homo sapiens as I suspect Neanderthals also live in an intellectualized reality where they can think in abstract terms I.E. fire, art, spirituality thinking conceptually in a way that results in technology and complex culture and society structures focused on fulfilling the prime directive.

(What is the prime directive: Successfully reproduce)

Lower animals successfully reproduce but lack the complexity of the intellectualized second reality reality.

Neanderthal brains were as I understand it larger per volume compared to homo sapiens, but homo sapiens brain structure apparently was more adapted / wired to the complex abstract conceptual intellectualized second reality reality.

YOU in real terms live fully in two realities, your biological / DNA reality and your intellectualized reality and that is what makes you a human being. And I do not believe that Neanderthals had that full ability and capacity and that is why they no longer are here.

But if placed on the modern IQ scale They would be viewed as mentally defective.

Modern lefties are trying to imply that neanderthals were only a point or two less than modern man.
Every article you read on some new evidence implies they are just like modern man.

As for modern humans being smart how many of us have seen the videos of collage kids not being able to name three countries or three continents.
Individually we are stupid but as a group we look pretty smart.

all that being said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”
We went from Kittyhawk to the Moon in a very short time, but we’re still just animals’ all the way down.
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“I Act as if God Exists”
Peterson / Akira (2018)
https://youtu.be/SG7mKcIVvQQ
(6:44)

All modern nature documentaries looked as if Rifenstahl made them…showing everything we never wanted to know about some snail or other, using their favorite word “encroachment,” then reducing all of humanities endeavors to two images of a smokestack or a landfill.

Now, if all I ever filmed was some wombat eating and defecating–I could make it look pretty wasteful too.

Well, no. animals do not need to be as smart as humans in order to have survival skills.

IQ, intelligence quotient, is not really intelligence, it is a score given for a specific kind of intelligence test. This test really only measures whatever it is that this test measures. No one is really sure, but people that we consider to be smart tend to get higher scores, so we think that it measures intelligence.

In addition, it is relative to the age cohort that takes the test. An IQ of 100 for a 6th grader is not the same as an IQ of 100 for a 12th grader (high school senior, for non-American readers). We assume that the 6th graders will be just as smart as the current 12th graders, when they get to the 12th grade.

An intelligence test for a bear or wolf would necessarily be somewhat different, but the average would still be 100, and again would have to apply to bears or wolves of the same age.

So, what would be the average IQ of the Neanderthal? 100, of course, for any given age group.

Were Neanderthals smarter than us? Probably not. Are we smarter than Neanderthals? I certainly hope so! If we have not developed better brains over the course of 400,000 years, then we are not doing it right? Are we smarter than Cro-Magnon man of 35,000 years ago? Again, I hope so.

Were Bronze Age and Iron Age man of Asia and Europe smarter than the Stone Age man of Africa, the Americas, and Australia? Well, that is a good question. We do know that the Egyptians had copper tools 4,000 years ago, when they were building the pyramids at Giza. They also had a written language, which is why we know so much about them.

On the other hand, Australia, Africa and the Americas are fairly temperate, and there was less reason to invent better tools and better methods of gaining food than there was for the Asians and Europeans who lived in the more inclement climates. So even if they were just as smart, there was little incentive to be inventive rather than enjoy their prolonged times in their Gardens of Eden.

Why are modern humans advancing so quickly? Because we are better able to communicate worldwide and to rapidly take advantage of advancements made half way around the world.

Why are Americans advancing so much faster than other places in the world? We aren’t smarter than those people in other places, because we come from all those other places. We advance faster because we are free to do so. We are free to and willing to try new things, including to do the impossible. It is why we are the entrepreneurial leader of the world. Elon Musk found investors willing to finance him in innovating things that just ten years ago were thought impractical, uneconomical, and even impossible. We don’t need an obelisk of intelligence to do it, we do it because we can, because we are free to do it.

The U.K. is not such a place. The U.K. is where launch companies go to die. The U.K. does not just assist humans to an early death, they put space companies to death. Virgin Orbit was going to make Britons feel good about their space program by launching a British spacecraft from British airspace, but instead British delays and overregulation put them out of business. What a difference a little too much regulation makes.

The message of the Statue of Liberty was intended to be a beacon to spread freedom around the world, not to call the huddled masses to our shore, and I wonder what the world would have been like if the eight billion people of the world were as free to try the impossible as we ⅓ billion Americans are. I’m sure that Russia would still have an amazing space program, India’s would now be close to rivaling Russias, and America’s space program would still be trying to catch up to Russias. And Virgin Orbit would be a British company, ramping up just like Rocket Lab is doing. Oh, and Rocket Lab would be a New Zealand company.

Huh. Maybe humans aren’t as smart as we think we are.

Bears, wolves and all other animals do it fine. Did they really have to be just as smart as modern human average. 100IQ.

They just had to be smart enough to move to the warm places. Which herd animals would show them how. If they just followed the herd animals they would have been just fine.

By just staying in a clan or pack any knowledge would have been passed around making any individual seen smarter.
Just like now, as a group they would look really smart, but as individuals not so much.

Our Military will not take you unless your equivalent-IQ is 80 or above. (based on the military aptitude test.)

Neanderthal IQ?
–Difficult to assign a number; inferences made due to the varied everyday survival skills required in the Truly Wild, point to “50-100.” Ability to manipulate objects & visual-spatial reasoning were felt to be on par with modern humans. (‘performance IQ,’)
Our ancestors weren’t “stupid,” they lacked knowledge and were hampered by their limited abilities to transmit acquired knowledge into the future. (“verbal IQ.”)

They must be just as smart as modern humans.

On a modern IQ scale just how smart were Neanderthals?
Remember that a modern IQ of 70 is functionally able to work in modern society perfectly fine.
An IQ of 40 can still do some complex tasks and learn. But language suffers.

Once again, Lee S amazes. He condemns us for having different opinions than his while claiming to defend our right of free expression, all in the same sentence. Here, rather than feeling that disagreement is scolding or hatred, he feels that disagreement is racism. He also continues to assume he knows how we live, feel, and think, that we have never left our country to experience any cultures other than our own small one.

He knows all about our culture, because he once visited some friends in Virginia (or one of the Carolinas, or something). One small mountain community showed him all he needs to know about every American everywhere. We don’t have the money to travel, like his poor American friends, and mountain folk are the exact same as plains folk and city folk, and we definitely don’t ever get immigrants who bring in their own cultures like they do where he lives.

(Unfortunately, we are suffering from a Somali culture of robbing the government for all they can, and being called racist there, too, for wanting our laws followed and not sympathizing with folk who are getting fancy things and posh travel from money we intended to spend on the poor and unfortunate. Of course, Lee also does not approve of the means that we prefer for supporting our poor, because for him only a marxist governmental system is adequate for that job. Individuals donating to private organizations that do a better job of making sure the donations help the poor rather than the corrupt is not good enough for Lee.)

The most interesting of all is that he complains about us discussing political topics, especially after he has himself brought up the topic. In this thread, however, he jumped into a political discussion, specifically how leftist-marxist woke-ism is destroying scientific studies, then he turns it from a topic of science to one of racism. Interestingly, Neanderthals actually are a different race, even by Lee’s own definition, which he informed us of, a few years ago, claiming that we were using the word “race” wrong, because we are all members of the human race.

He has said that he likes the technical and space topics, but then he gets upset when he reads the comments and discovered that there are people who dare to disagree with his own politics or worldview. This time, however, he expresses that he cannot continue to use (whether that means read or comment on) this site, because disagreement has no place in his worldview.

Oh, and pzatchok, you weren’t called just a racist. You were also called an idiot. We all were.

https://youtube.com/shorts/_c82g6L9m3Y?si=hBPlGIqrRXGFUOi8

And I know plenty on the Liberal Left, Democrats, on the extreme Left even that are really good and well-meaning people, LeeS included.

And I point out one more time that those in the Public Realm who apply their sense of truth and morality to those in the Political Realm and their underlying agenda in the political pursuit of power and control is part of a self-imposed self-created truth and morally model based “A” reality that is incongruous and in fact counter to that desired morality and truth.

But at some point in time there must a light bulb of Objective truth be realized that illuminates reality as it is and not as one wants it to be.

And I will use the current Socialist / Liberal / Leftist delusion being rolled out in NYC as an example. There is the A.I. version, something new and powerful confusing and distracting the human mind, and then there is my version.

https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/the-rise-of-collectivism-zohran-mamdani-s-vision-for-new-york-city

https://nypost.com/2026/01/02/opinion/how-woke-politics-defeats-science-slamming-the-door-on-discovery/

You just cannot make some things up, or can you? Data and Objective science V The woke “Anti colonialism” mind virus.

“Hidden away in an obscure notice in a federal register is a throwaway line that could rewrite human history.”

*LeeS: “I honestly don’t think there is any “woke” agenda regarding Neanderthals, only a justifiable redrawing of them as much less of grunting cavemen and of more of a relatively advanced species.”

“And the updated regulations “require deference to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.”

In practice, it means that even DNA evidence counts for nothing if a tribe says otherwise.

NAGPRA was meant to be a compromise between indigenous communities and scientists.

It aimed to return clearly connected human remains to their modern descendants, while leaving researchers free to study unaffiliated remains.

About 92% of such identifiably linked remains had been returned before 2022.

But an alliance of indigenous activists and progressive academics has pushed an unstoppable “everything back” movement, overturning NAGPRA’s original intent.”

To assume that is sort of bigoted. Verging on racist to even think modern people are intellectually different to a measurable amount.
Here we are talking about evolution and people a few million years ago and he assumes we are talking about people today.

Maybe not. The girl taught him how to start a fire rather than just preserve it. Presumably, her tribe and others knew this trade secret (tribe secret?) and were teaching it to their children — and obviously others.

In the movie.

However, I suspect that the chances of it being “the work of one particularly smart Neanderthal” is small. I suspect that this Neanderthal tribe, too, had been passing the secret through the generations, and we humans (modern homo sapiens) just happened to come across this one preserved campsite, one of many sites of the time, most of which were not preserved through the eons.

As Robert alluded to, and to quote Tom Wilkinson’s CEO character, Howard Tully, in the movie Duplicity:

“Someone made fire. Someone was first. I don’t mean the idiot who found a burning stick and kept it going. I mean the fellow who could make fire. And until that knowledge was stolen, that fellow was the most powerful person on the planet. And it means something to be first. To be most. It means a great deal. It means you have an opportunity to reproduce with the highest frequency and with the most desirable partners. It means your offspring have the greatest chance of survival and a better opportunity to make their own fire.”

So, with a Darwinian type philosophy like that, if the tribe’s secret is shared with other Neanderthals or stolen by them, then Neanderthal man as a species had the greatest chance of survival and a better chance to pass along the secret to the entire species, beating out Cro-Magnon man, when he came along, about 35,000 years ago. Which happened about the time that Neanderthal man disappeared. Poor Neanderthal.

If Neanderthals had the advantage, then did they lose it by having fire stolen from them by those Cro-Magnons? Did they make the mistake of giving the secret to Cro-Magnon?

But perhaps more important, with Neanderthal having the secret for ten times longer than Cro-Magnon, why were they unable to advance other technologies the way Cro-Magnon did in one tenth the time that fire was in Neanderthals hands? Was Cro-Magnon man just a little bit smarter than Neanderthal, and so found metals and a way to escape the Stone Age and invent the Bronze Age, which happened about 5,000 years ago?

If so, why was it that the Bronze Age was only in Europe and parts of Asia? Africa, the Americas, and Australia failed to invent better metals, such as bronze.
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pzatchok asked: “Was I just called a racist?”

Probably, yes, along with everyone else here. Lee S said it, so it must be true.

Lee S: Once again, your insistence that no such bias can possibly exist — typical of the entire left — means it almost certainly will creep in, because no one is watching out for it. Thus, the healthy skepticism you see by the commenters here.

Moreover, this inability to recognize and admit your biases is the main reason such distrust has grown. Leftist academia won’t admit error, and keeps faking data, and lying, and pushing woke ideology and global warming in the most ridiculous of places. (See my post just earlier today about that Danish lunar orbiter).

So while you keep calling this skepticism “right wing parodolia” [sic], we keep discovering our skepticism was warranted, as indicated by this list below:

Suicide is also not a requirement of the Constitution.

No one here on BTB is racist.

https://youtube.com/shorts/SS50Hsu2ycA?si=NHPSMWq6sEGz_Ul6

The Liberal now Leftists really does make your brain hurt with their intellectualized reality.

@Bob and everyone else…

In recent years there has been found evidence that Neanderthals had a grasp upon art, jewellery, tool making, and now, perhaps fire.

These are facts.

I subscribe to several scientific journals, and have not once detected any political or ideological leaning in the reporting … I see what you guys are reading into this… ” It’s a leftist plot to push forward the idea that everyone is equal “… Well… Believe me. You are suffering from right wing paradolia… No one is saying anything other than Neanderthal folk had a modicum of civilization in there culture.

There are a lot of recently discovered hominids with no evidence of any modern traits… These reports are not right wing, just reports of facts.

Along with astronomy, paleontology is my other scientific love. I especially enjoy the evolution of this bizarre race we find ourselves in, and I don’t find it hard to believe that the closest species to our own that we know of had similar skills. This is not left wing propaganda, it’s not propaganda at all… It’s science.

(For what it’s worth, I am not US loony left, I am a level headed, fairly intelligent, socialist leaning realist… If I caught out media trying to twist discovery for political reasons I would absolutely call them out. )

https://youtube.com/shorts/m1Fx4tKtQdc?si=aazkT2ZhgmUOyd9C

When does Liberal compassion become suicide?

When it is married to the U.N. Agenda 2030 and the Globalist Socialist agenda.

Q: Why do most all Somalis look alike and why are their general average IQ 67?

LeeS: For your consideration: https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/sweden-has-essentially-legalized-rape

Lee S: Your comment here perfectly demonstrates why science has become debased with politics. You, an admitted lefty, want us to ignore the possibility that political biases might be entering into this archeological research, insisting it can’t possibly exist and for anyone to even suggest it makes them a “tinfoil hat” conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that good scientists must never dismiss the possibility that their biases (political or otherwise) are influencing their work, or else their work will become corrupted. It is a question that must be asked, not dismissed.

Academia is dominated by lefties like you. That political bias infuses everything they do, because it is a bubble they live in that prevents them from seeing other perspectives. Like you however they insist it can’t possibly be there, which means they aren’t questioning their conclusions as aggressively as any scientist should.

Nor are you. Instead, they (and you) dismiss it, and so, their work becomes poisoned.

As I say, this is why science has been so badly corrupted, especially in the soft sciences like archeology and anthropology.

(Until Ed Whitten dies, we are going to continue to blow billions of $$ on worthless string-theory. Same sorta thing goes on in every profession.)

-Having been trained in behavioral psych-ology, and mocked as ‘crazies,’ for decades, we of course know we were always right and everyone else was just slinging psychobabble. (sarcasm alert) Wait long enough, and suddenly the preferred and demonstrably effective applied-behavior-analysis (ABA) becomes a significant non-drug treatment thing for autism.

As Cotour has often said, “First we Eat, then Civilization…”

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Median “IQ” in Somalia is 67.
Low-IQ, Low-Trust, High-Fraud, Tribal.

“The lowest AFQT “Armed Forces Qualification Test” score generally accepted for entry into the U.S. military is a score of 31 out of 99. This corresponds roughly to an estimated IQ score of around 83.

Tinfoil hat time!

The reporting of advances in archeology is neither right or left. It is simply reporting of advances in archeology.

The fact of the matter is that relatively recent discoveries show that Neanderthal society was more advanced and complex than previously thought. This is a fact. Facts have no political bias.

As a “lefty” I have seen nothing trying to make political hay from reporting on Neanderthal finds. Anyone that sees differently needs to consider that they are projecting their fears onto an innocuous subject, and perhaps go find a different hill to die upon.