Neanderthal

The Neanderthal was named after theologian Joachim Neander.

It is the 15th of March of 2015, at a pizzeria on Lulu Island. Adil the Kazakh and I discuss the multilingual and multicultural landscape of South Asia, centuries ago, when there were many kingdoms in the region. Farsi was an elitist language, he says. His Kazakh is a Turkic language in Central Asia. I dutifully and gleefully inform him about PIE, Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of many Caucasoids today. The origin in theory is Southern Russia near the Black Sea, more than 6000 years ago. PIE was the great-great-grandfather of languages like Spanish, English, German, Welsh, Hindi, Greek, and many others today. Adil and I discuss about some modern humans who have genes from other species, like the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Scientists know that the brain size of the Neanderthal was bigger than the modern human's.

Unless you’re African, your skin probably carries traces of your Neanderthal forebears.

I'm a Neanderthal.

The capacity of the Neanderthal skull was 10% larger than that of modern humans.

[…]In short, many assessments conclude that East Asians have more Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans, who have more Neanderthal ancestry than people in the Middle East.

These injuries may reflect the rigors of hunting with the Neanderthals' limited repertoire of weapons; the Neanderthals never seem to have developed projectiles, so they would have to have gotten more or less on top of their prey in order to kill them.