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Neanderthals’ big eyes made them less intelligent? Really?

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David DeWitt

Following up on the controversy over recent finds of Neanderthal art (which these missing links weren’t supposed to be able to do, remember?), it’s interesting to note the theories about why they were supposed to be less intelligent than the rest of us.

One is that big eyes caused their demise (because “more of their brains were devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing”), so they were dumber than us small-eyed, shifty types.

Seriously, these are the theories of desperation, akin to the “Twinkies” defense at a murder trial. The Twinkies defense effaces the fact that there is no obvious causal connection between Twinkies and murder (compared with the obvious causal connection between deep resentment and murder, the connection the defense lawyer clearly hoped people would pay less attention to). Similarly, the “big eyes” explanation for Neanderthals’ (supposed) lesser intelligence doesn’t follow any general pattern like “the bigger the eyes, the lesser the intelligence,” that might be observed across many groups of life forms.

Some have pointed out that primates engage in a great deal of social networking and that Neanderthals might have had less brain capacity left over for that. That is hard to be sure of because how much brain capacity is even required for social networking is uncertain. Cattle and bees do a lot of networking, but the former are not considered very intelligent and bees seem to have outsourced their individual intelligence to some kind of colony brain.

Human social networking requires individual intelligence because the other humans with whom one is networking are intelligent. But that merely returns us to our starting point: Did Neanderthals not have the intelligence that would enable them to, say, interact with modern humans?

Many sources say that they did indeed “intermingle.” Some modern humans are said to have Neanderthal gene sequences to this day, and some experts even opine that that is how the Neanderthals came to disappear as a separate group.

Liberty University neuroscientist David A. DeWitt has this to say about the matter:

As a neuroscientist, I find the conclusions regarding “poor social networking” in Neanderthals far-fetched. Even if it is the case that the eyes and optic nerves are larger, you cannot draw conclusions about how much of the brain would be involved in visual processing and how much would be allocated toward other cognitive functions. The best way to do this is to stick electrodes in the brain and we don’t have any Neanderthals around to do that with.

You could also do functional MRI, but again, these require living Neanderthals to test. The brain is extremely plastic so you can’t have much certainty on how much brain space is allocated to particular functions. It is further complicated by neuronal and synaptic density differences, glial cells etc.

We have evidence of Neanderthals making musical instruments, burying their dead with rituals, using jewelry, and caring for their injured. These provide strong evidence of complex social networks. Further, FOXP2, a gene that is involved to language is identical in modern humans and Neanderthals. Moreover, the Neanderthal genome sequence demonstrated interbreeding with modern humans.

Svente Paabo, who sequenced the Neanderthal genome, has noted, “There are probably more paleontologists than there are important fossils in the world,” so we have a lot more speculation than evidence right now.

Thus we obviously haven’t anywhere near begun to unravel the whole story yet.  But we ought to begin by assuming that evidence of culture is real.

Incidentally, claims that Neanderthals were merely “imitating” current humans (and therefore weren’t really intelligent) are vacuous. If they were doing what is described, they weren’t imitating, in the sense that a parrot “talks,” they were appropriating—the way the Irish learned English and then began to make heavy inroads into the career- and prize-friendly world of English literature.

Similarly, Canadian explorers appropriated the birchbark canoe and the toboggan from the North American Aboriginal peoples.  And the Aboriginal peoples in turn appropriated horsemanship and produced breeds of saddle horses. Native animals didn’t do any of that because they couldn’t, because they lack the intelligence.

So even if the Neanderthals were appropriating current human culture, that requires the existence of a comparable intelligence in a way that mere imitation does not.

Comments
IOt also presumes that intelligence is found in brain parts. What if man was created in Gods image and had a soul thart leaves the body upon death and its thinking is unaffected by leaving the brain behind?! How can a Christian believe intelligence has anything to do with our brain?? Its just a middleman between us and our body. The only thing in our brain that is of the material wotld and connected to our soul is the memory. tHis is the one thing that can break down. This is the only thing that goes wrong in human thinking issues. Including babies. Big eyes takes uo smartspace??? Prove it!!Robert Byers
May 25, 2013
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Well Gregory, your cartoon version of IDism may not qualify as 'science'. But then again only you, and perhaps some anti-IDists, care about that cartoon version. Or should I call it the Cartoon Version. ;)Joe
May 24, 2013
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"It is called a science only out of courtesy." - News Thanks for that, News, the first time 'science' was mentioned in the thread. An ironic dig at calling IDism 'science.' ;)Gregory
May 24, 2013
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It's the "Little Red Riding Hood Hypothesis": "My, what big eyes you have!" "The better to see you with."Joe
May 24, 2013
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I’m constantly amazed at how evolutionists change their minds about, well, everything. This is how Neanderthals were viewed years ago: The Neanderthal man was at one time regarded as “prehistoric,” an ancestor of modern man in the evolution scale, but note what the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1946, page 764, Volume 14) says: “Neanderthal man cannot be regarded as an ancestor of modern man. Neanderthal man and men of the modern type . . . must be looked upon as descendants of a common ancestor.”
By far and away the most common view has always been that Neanderthals are not a "link" in the chain of evolution leading to humans (despite the OP's description of them as a "missing link") but rather a side branch. That was the most common view in the 19th century, the mid-20th century (as your quote indicates) and today. The problem is they overlap both modern humans, and those believed to be ancestors of modern humans, such as H. heidelbergensis and H. erectus. The only sense in which they can be viewed as ancestors is, after they split, they again interbred to some extent with modern humans, such as the cro-mags, before going extinct.goodusername
May 24, 2013
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It is called a science only out of courtesy.News
May 24, 2013
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I'm constantly amazed at how evolutionists change their minds about, well, everything. This is how Neanderthals were viewed years ago: The Neanderthal man was at one time regarded as “prehistoric,” an ancestor of modern man in the evolution scale, but note what the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1946, page 764, Volume 14) says: “Neanderthal man cannot be regarded as an ancestor of modern man. Neanderthal man and men of the modern type . . . must be looked upon as descendants of a common ancestor.” Of those who are called “Cro-Magnon” a university professor stated: “The Cro-Magnon race . . . are conservatively appraised as on a par with the finest stock today intellectually and physically.” (from Creation, Not Evolution, by A. Baker). And again from the same book: Another scientist reported: “These men represent in many ways the finest type the world has ever seen.” So-called “prehistoric” men exist only in the imagination of those who choose to ignore the facts, because no evidence derived in the entire history of archaeology has sustained the speculations of evolution.Barb
May 24, 2013
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