Neanderthals caught and cooked large crabs in Portugal. The end of the article calls this evidence against the belief that we were significantly smarter than Neanderthals. they did have larger brains than ours, after all. I suspect Homo sapiens might just have been meaner.
They also were able to kill the occasional elephant with heavy cooperation, suggesting they lived together in larger groups than we have previously thought.
2 comments:
There's a recent publication on early hominins using stone tools ~3M years ago to butcher hippos, pushing back earliest known tool use by about 600,000 years.
Money quote from the summary article:
“A hippopotamus is like a giant leather sack,” he adds. “It’s full of stuff you could eat, but without stone tools, you can’t get at it.”
Hopefully this will show up outside the paywall, while the full article may require subscription access.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00386-6
If intelligence is defined as the ability to understand what works pragmatically in the world and adapt accordingly, smarter and meaner turn out to be equivalent terms here.
Post a Comment