“That’s why I’m all so smart - and died out? You don't know, huh?.."
Here are the ones on! No matter how much the official theories sang about the "superiority of a person who won the competition against other species and branches", a little doubt about this always crept in … After all, many facts, at least, testified that if the Neanderthals were inferior to the "sapiens", then it was quite insignificant … But so that ?! However, new facts have come to light, and they weigh heavily against the ancestors of our species …
First, as it turned out, the Neanderthals invented the bone ironing knife for dressing and processing animal skins much earlier than our ancestors.
Shannon McFerron from the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) with a group of archaeologists carried out excavations in southern France, in mountain caves a hundred kilometers from Bordeaux. In two of them, Abri Peyronie and Pesch-de-Laz, scientists discovered several fragments of bone tools, which differed in an unusual shape and did not resemble the typical "Neanderthal" tools.
Having collected a sufficient number of fragments, scientists restored the tool and determined its role in the life of Neanderthals by analyzing the pattern of microcracks and scratches on its surface. It turned out that this tool was a so-called ironer - a special bone knife that is still used today for dressing hides. The age of these Neanderthal knives is 50 thousand years!
“These bone tools are one of the most compelling evidence that Neanderthals developed their own tools that were previously associated with our ancestors. They often used bone in their tools, making scrapers, choppers, and even hammers. Our discovery shows that Neanderthals were aware of the difference between bone and stone and tried to use its flexibility and pliability to create tools that could not be made from pebbles,”the study authors said.
But that's not all! Peter Hayes of Leiden University (Netherlands) and his colleagues also found that Neanderthals were much more "advanced" than Cro-Magnons in making fires. They used a special chemical preparation - a kind of "high-tech" of the Stone Age! Neanderthals ground up manganese dioxide and used the resulting powder to light a fire. It is worth noting that the "Sapiens" had nothing like this …
But it was still necessary to somehow reach that a small amount of this powder (magnesium dioxide, "cubes" of a dark mineral that were constantly found before at the sites of Neanderthals; traces of this substance can be found on the walls of almost any Neanderthal cave - it was previously assumed that it helped in drawing) greatly facilitates lighting a fire with the help of those tools and techniques that were available to Neanderthals 40-50 thousand years ago!
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To summarize, the Neanderthals were much smarter than previously thought. And, alas, they were superior in this respect to our ancestors, Cro-Magnons …
But in this case, the question remains: if the Neanderthals were smarter than us, then why did they die out, and not us?..
One of the working versions is because we were chosen by the "gods" as their "voluntary-compulsory" assistants. The Neanderthals, for some reason, did not interest them, the "gods", as they say, were put on a person …
Let us recall that traces of genetic interference in our species (the so-called "bottleneck", a significant decrease in the number of the species with qualitative changes) are observed in a period of about 70-80 thousand years ago.
