![]() To war is human – and Neanderthals were very like us. Archaeology reveals ancient fortresses and battles, and sites of prehistoric massacres going back millennia. Our oldest writings are filled with war stories. War isn’t a modern invention, but an ancient, fundamental part of our humanity. Warfare is an intrinsic part of being human. If so, Neanderthals will have inherited these same tendencies towards cooperative aggression. This implies that cooperative aggression evolved in the common ancestor of chimps and ourselves, 7 million years ago. Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from rival bands, a behavior strikingly like human warfare. Territorial conflicts are also intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. This territoriality has deep roots in humans. Lion prides expand their populations- until the conflict with other prides. Neanderthals faced the same problem if other species didn’t control their numbers, the conflict would have. These predators, sitting atop the food chain, have few predators of their own, so overpopulation drives conflict over hunting grounds. Like lions, wolves, and Homo sapiens, Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters. Predatory land mammals are territorial, especially pack-hunters. Far from peaceful, Neanderthals were likely skilled fighters and dangerous warriors, rivaled only by modern humans. If so, maybe humanity’s ills – especially our territoriality, violence, wars – aren’t innate, but modern inventions.īiology and paleontology paint a darker picture. It’s tempting to see them in idyllic terms, living peacefully with nature and each other, like Adam and Eve in the Garden. Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves – who we were, and who we might have become. They weren’t our ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel. The other struck out overland, into Asia, then Europe, becoming Homo neanderthalensis – the Neanderthals. One group stayed in Africa, evolving into us. Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. ![]()
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