My brother always claims to be smart and he also crowns i by saying that there are no species as smart as us, neither were there any as smart as us in the past. Well, currently, we are the only smart specie on planet earth or let me say there are no other species as intelligent and smart as we are but this wasn't so in the past.
About some 50 thousand years ago, we weren't the only specie walking the planet that was smart. We walked the planet with at least 3 other species inculding Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), and Denisovans. While we can't really say much about Denisovan because they didn't live long enough, we can tell about Homo neanderthalensis. When you search the internet for them, you will see that they look pretty just like us, and it looked like they learned to groom their hair well.
People who found the skull of Neanderthals in the 1840s didn't know how to explain it until the year 1859 when Charles Darwin published the theory of evolution in his book "On the origin of Species". From his book, it was clear that just like every other living thing on earth, we must have evolved from an ancestral specie and scientists looked at Neanderthals as the answer.
I don't know why scientists at the time believed they were dunce but they must have had proves because even people like Ernst Haeckel referred to Neanderthals as Homo stupidus. Some scientist believed that Neanderthals existed as a separate specie without any connection with modern humans.
Neanderthals had big brow ridge on their faces, huge nose, short forearms and shins, and they had big muscles which could be as a result of hunting and other features were adaptation features for living in the cold but when we look at our ancestors who were said to have come from Africa, then they were skinny and their body were built for a warmer atmosphere.
Fossils of Neanderthals showed that they were hunters who hunted wild animals as there were signs of broken bones, and signs of some being blind. These species cared for their sick, and buried their dead just like we did. They had brains, in fact bigger brains than us but they didn't use it as effectively as ours. Research has also shown that we shared the FOXP2 gene with Neanderthals which is essential for language but their speech wouldn't be as clear as ours because the shape of their head gave them the ape sound ability.
About 40 thousand years ago while we were also around, Neanderthals disappeared. Why they disappeared is still yet to be understood, maybe we destroyed them in a war, maybe they were already an endangered specie, and so on, we have not been able to specifically say why this happened but there is one thing that we have in common with the neanderthals and that is gene. Research shows tat 1 in 4 percent of the genes of humans outside sub-Saharan Africa came from Neanderthals, so there is a high chance that we mated and interbred together. So there is a possibility that why we might be the most intelligent specie currently, we weren't the only one walking this path before.
Read More
- https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-neanderthalensis
- https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species-as-us.html
- https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1706426114
- https://www.sapiens.org/biology/the-birth-of-the-neanderthals/
- https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.html
- https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/first-adult-neanderthal-skull.html
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4766443/