Neanderthals Quotes

“In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a hominid with a restricted vowel space had little language.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older," "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans--literally morons by comparison with ourselves. Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new "image" of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Mifsud notes that J. D. Evans had graduated from Cambridge in 1949 and that in the early 1950s he was 'in desperate need of a PhD'. The thesis that the future Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of London chose to develop, influenced by the Italian archaeologist Barnarbo Brea, was that the very first human inhabitants of the previously unpeopled Malta had been immigrants from the Neolithic Stentinello culture of Sicily -- a theory that is still part of the conventional academic wisdom about Malta today. In pursuing this thesis, Mifsud suggests, it was not convenient to the young Evans to have to deal with the evidence of the Ghar Dalam teeth that suggested a prior, Palaeolithic, human presence in Malta.
This, then, either as a conscious or unconscious motive, could explain why Evans was so vehement in his attacks on the antiquity of the taurodonts [that could belong to Neanderthals] and so economical with the truth in his published statements about them. He wanted them out of the way -- permanently -- of his own theory about Malta's first inhabitants.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“Thirty thousand years ago there lived 'another human species' - the Neanderthals. Tremendous.
If it is true, it is symbolically more important than the fact that man is descended from the apes. The shadow of this vanished human species weighs heavy on all our anthropology, since our entire concept of evolution privileges the exclusive universality of a single humanity, ours, the one that survived. And what if it were not the only one? Then that's the end of our privilege. If we had to eliminate this twin, this prehistoric double, to ensure our hegemony, if this other species had to disappear, then the rules of the game of being human are no longer the same.
And where does this passion for universality come from, this lust to eliminate every other race? (It is a good bet that if any other race emerged from space, our first aim would be to subjugate or destroy it.) Why is it that in twin forms there always has to be one that dies? Why do we always have to wipe out duality everywhere to establish the monopoly of a species, a race, a subject?
Having said this, it is not certain that we really did win out. What if we were carrying that double within us like a dead twin? And perhaps many others, in a kind of Unconscious, the stubborn heir to all the previous murders. Having achieved the unity of the species, for the greater glory of Homo sapiens, are we not now duplicating ourselves for the worse - in that artificial twinness of the clone, in which the species, denying its origins once and for all, prolongs itself as spectre in an infinite repetition? Over the screen of our consciousness and our Unconscious hovers the shadow of this original crime, the traces of which we shall doubtless never recover.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Contrary to popular belief, history does not repeat itself. The story of our planet was not predetermined, there was no air of inevitability to it, and the story of life does not speak to us of a linear progression from primitive to sophisticate. Instead, its shape has been carved out by the accumulation and loss of information, genetic and cultural, creating the illusion of relentless progress.”
― Clive Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived

“Direct comparison of diet and behaviour between species is strongest between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Ah've heard the Auld People nicht efter nicht ettlin for tae reproduce that soon. Ah didna recognise it richt aff, bit Ah've been thinkin on it aa day an it finally cam tae me. An ancestor o mines, a Shetlan man, made a tune - it's aye a popular fiddle tune - bit he sayed that he heard it, cummin fae unner the grun.' He leukit at Beatrice.
'Fae a Faerie Hill?' she speirt.
'Exackly.”
― Wulf Kurtoglu, Braken Fences