Neaderthal what if...

Well...it doesn't look good for them. Agriculture requires an unusually stable climate, like the one we've had for the last 10 000 years. Before that...maybe a milennium now and then would be a window.

But Neanderthals weren't good developers. They'd probably have improved the agriculture slower than humans.

Finally, Neanderthals didn't eat vegetables, just meat. I have some doubts they could survive on a diet with lots of plants in.

Maybe reindeer herding?
 
I thought Neanderthals had greater nutritional requirements than homo sapiens and from what we can gather didn't pass down innovations very well? They also seemed to have lack the ambition/imagination of homo sapiens (I remember watching this docushow talking about how neanderthals lived across this large but passable body of water with a bunch of good land on the other side but never crossed it, whereas under the same conditions homo sapiens did).

Anyways, while the odds seemed stacked that they wouldn't have the foresight to farm nor the desire to give up protein now for grain for a city later, if they did develop agriculture I would imagine it might come from a group developing the same level of agricultural sophistication as some homo sapien hunter-gatherers (this group, growing crops at their temporary hunting grounds, have fed better and thus bred more prodigiously and have passed down the knowledge more from darwinistic principles of self-teaching by watching and copying than from cultural transmission or a civilizational isntitution of agriculture).

Other groups begin following in their path behind them, harvesting any crops the first group had to abandon to move on to the next hunting ground and dropping the seeds. The next group after that moves through, leaving their waste and trash behind, unintentionally fertilizing the ground.

Have this sort of thing happen and you might get an accidental Neanderthal caravan farming civilization? Plus how long before one of these crop-filled campsites is left and is taken over by a group whose able to live in that static spot. They'll develop fortifications to fend off the next band that comes around and voila, you get the first Neanderthal agricultural early civilization stage city.
 
Finally, Neanderthals didn't eat vegetables, just meat. I have some doubts they could survive on a diet with lots of plants in.
And we know this how? While it pretty likely they ate quite a bit of meat the idea that they ate no vegetable matter is IMO pure and utter BS
 
And we know this how? While it pretty likely they ate quite a bit of meat the idea that they ate no vegetable matter is IMO pure and utter BS

By carbone testing in neander teeth and bones. Don't ask me how, but apparently it can be determined how much carbone came from vegetables or from animal matter. The studies show that +95% of neanderthal carbone or something like that was of animal origin, making them as carnivorous as wolves. The same studies were done in sapiens teeth of the same age and the obtained percentage was way lower.

Take in consideration also that for much of the time neanderthals were around, climate in Europe was so unstable that the entire set of plants in a region could change in a single man's lifetime. Even if they cared about plants, they just couldn't settle to grow them. At least not at that time.

Meat, on the other hand, was always sure to be there. In some form or another.
 
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I watched a show about the neanderthals that said that they had a much higher pitch voice than humans. Looking at their larynx and all it could not reach the same range that humans could.
 

Stephen

Banned
I watched a show about the neanderthals that said that they had a much higher pitch voice than humans. Looking at their larynx and all it could not reach the same range that humans could.

Sexual selection is usually the idea used to explain the Adams apple in Homo Sapiens, but I think it probably developed for the purpose of imitating animal calls. Ever notice how men tend to be much better at sound effects than women.
 

Stephen

Banned
Neanderthals seem to me to be too carnivorous for horticulture, and to teritorial and localised for pastorialism.
 
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