Neanderthals

The Neanderthals had a bigger brain than modern humans.

Adil the Kazakh believes that Neanderthals had red hair.

Some people today have a few genes from other species, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

There are still many things we don't know about the Neanderthals.

There are still many things we don't know about Neanderthals.

"Arnie, why did the Neanderthals become extinct?" "Matt, no one knows for sure. My own guess is that it might have been a terrible disease that wiped them out."

"Matt, did you know that Neanderthals had a larger cranium than modern humans?" "Arnie, were they smarter than us, then?" "Anthropologists don't know for sure..."

If you like anthropology, maybe the document "To what extent did Neanderthals and modern humans interact?" would interest you.

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.

Scientists from the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in Saint Petersburg did the research. They proposed that huge volcanic explosions caused the Neanderthals to die out in Western Europe. As evidence, they point to the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia.