Neanderthal Misconceptions We Need to Stop Believing

Описание: In this video I am going to look into the list of misconceptions surrounding the Neanderthals and have all these misconceptions cleared up in one easy to share video!
The first misconception is that Neanderthals were dumb cave dwelling brutes.
There is more than sufficient evidence at this point in time that Neanderthals were intelligent, not just a little bit intelligent but equally as smart as us, modern humans.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what Neanderthals looked like, this has several reasons.
Like for instance the first reconstruction and thus depiction of a Neanderthal was created by French Palaeontologist Marcellin Boule in 1911.
This reconstruction was created after the discovery of the remains of a Neanderthal male at La Chapelle-aux Saints 1 cave.
The remains were approximately 60,000 years old and the Neanderthal male was estimated to be around 40 years of age.
You can see that the reconstruction depicts the Neanderthal male to be slouched, hunched, with bent knees, a straight lumbar spine, large protruding skull and brutish.
Because the curvature of the lumbar spine was missing in this Neanderthal individual it was immediately believed that all Neanderthals would have the same straight spine and terrible posture that was hunched back and therefore It was believed that Neanderthals were semi-bipedal.
Therefore the researchers back in the day believed that Neanderthals hadn’t fully evolved much like we did from the Great apes that we all came from.
Marcellin Boule then went on to further characterize the species of the Neanderthals as primitive creatures, creatures that had no similarities and relations to the anatomy of Homo sapiens, modern humans.
But what he didn’t realize at the time when he made this reconstruction is the fact that the skeletal remains that he was reconstructing belonged to an old male Neanderthal, and most likely one with a spinal deformity as it now seems that the shape of his particular spine was extremely uncommon among the Neanderthals.
The deformity came from the fact that this particular Neanderthal male had osteoarthritis, this is when the cartilage in the joints wear down in a more rapid rate or have been worn off completely, the lack of cartilage can cause the bone of the joint to thicken and move less smoothly.
So after we have discovered more and more Neanderthal skeletal remains we can clearly see that their anatomy is very similar to that of us modern humans, that they stood upright, no bent knees and fully bipedal.


#NeanderthalMyths #NeanderthalMisconceptions #NeanderthalTruth

Music: Adrian von ziegler
Sources: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...
https://time.com/5904203/neanderthals...
https://historyofyesterday.com/the-co...
https://www.inverse.com/article/53560...
https://www.ancient-origins.net/human...

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