Neanderthals were the Most Advanced Humans

I have often complained about people who deny that Neanderhals were humans. Almost every article about them says that "we" outcompeted the Neanderthals and drove them extinct.

However most of the evidence indicates that European Neanderthals had bigger brains and were more advanced than the African homo sapiens.

A new NY Times article sumarizes some of the recent evidence:

Neanderthals, who flourished across Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years before vanishing around 40,000 years ago, had a notable return to the scientific spotlight in 2025.

More than a dozen high-profile scientific studies explored all sorts of aspects of their existence, from their love lives (they probably kissed Homo sapiens) to potential flaws in their red blood cells that may have hastened their decline.

Biology professor Jerry Coyne, an expert on speciation, adds:

For a long time I’ve maintained that Neanderthals, which most anthropologists seem to think are a species different from Homo sapiens, in fact constituted a population that was H. sapiens. That, at least, is a reasonable conclusion if you use the Biological Species Concept, which defines populations as members of the same species if, when they meet under natural conditions in nature, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. And we know that’s true of Neanderthals and “modern” H. sapiens, because we carry some Neanderthal genes (I have some), and that means the two groups hybridized and that the hybrids backcrossed to our ancestors—and were fertile.

DNA evidence shows that Neanderthals and African homo sapiens interbred, with today's non-African humans being descended from both.

His fieldwork in Spain indicates that Neanderthals independently fashioned cave art and jewelry, such as decorated seashells, between 65,000 and 115,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before similar finds linked to Homo sapiens in Africa or their arrival in Europe. ...

A study in Science Direct detailed how Neanderthals in modern-day Serbia were elite hunters, executing daring, commando-style ambushes and dramatic cliff drives to corner wild goats in treacherous terrain. Fifty thousand to 70,000 years ago, in what is now Israel, neighboring Neanderthal groups practiced distinct, culturally transmitted methods for butchering animals, according to research published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. And in a paper in Science Advances, scientists working a site in Germany found that Neanderthals were extracting marrow fat from bones 125,000 years ago, long before early Homo sapiens were doing anything similar. ...

The study, detailed in Science Advances, highlighted three items that showed clear evidence of having been intentionally shaped and used for drawing. One remarkable discovery was a two-inch yellow “crayon” from roughly 42,000 years ago, which microscopic analysis showed had been repeatedly sharpened, indicating that it was likely a valued tool. The implement had clearly been modified through grinding and scraping.

Dr. d’Errico argued that the crayon must be attributed to Neanderthals rather than modern humans: It was found in a site known to have been occupied by Neanderthals, and preceded the era when Homo sapiens were widely accepted to have arrived in that area. Researchers called the artifact a crayon, he said, based on its function and specific wear patterns, which strongly confirmed its use for marking a surface, possibly skin or rock. Tiny signs of friction and applied pressure, not just the object’s shape alone, suggested it had been used as an artistic tool.

Note that even this article calls the Africans "modern humans" to distinguish them from Neanderthals, as if the Neanderthals were not modern or not human. On the contrary, this evidence shows that Neanderthals were more modern and more human than the African homo sapiens.

I used to follow some the evolutionist v creationist debates. The evolutionists would argue that the Neanderthals were a separate species, contradicting the Bible somehow. The creationists argued that the Neanderthals were human, possibly descended from Adam and Eve. It is amusing that the evolutionists turned out to be wrong.

And yet the evolutionists seem to want to cling to the idea that the true humans were the Africa homo sapiens, because they are closer to African apes, and maybe descended from an African Adam and Eve.