Prehistorical Human

One of our ancestors that our group is going to talk about is the Homo Neanderthalensis. It was a kind of prehistorical human-like animal lived in Europe, Mid Asia, and Near East. It is said site of the Neaderthalensis can even be found in Siberia. Scientists thought they existed around 200 thousand years ago, and lived through an ice age successfully. But however, they disappeared around 30 thousand years ago. That's the period when homo sapience entered Europe in most scholars' mind.

The historical remains of these people were firstly found in year 1856 in Neander Valley of Germany, where gave the name of them. As they had similar physical characteristic as Homo heidelbergensis did, which was considered evolved from homo erectus from Africa. The species of homo neanderthalensis was evolved from Homo heidelbergensis which was the 'offspring' of homo erectus after they entered Europe. Then, some of them migrated towards east.

Most scholars used to think it was a parallel lineage of homo sapiens, the only subsisted species of genus homo. They had more characteristics of homo sapiens than the early homo erectus did. They had a height of 150~160cm. Their Volume of skulls were 1200~1750 cm^3. Their foreheads are much shorter than modern human beings. Lower and tactful jaw's corners, strong skeletons and frigostabile constitution showed the environment they lived in was much colder than that of nowadays do. The animals lived with them, mammoth and a kind of rhinoceros all supported this hypothesis. The ratios between humerus and foot radius bone, thigh bone and tibia, fibula were bigger than our modern human's. Those are the physical characteristics of frigostabile.

Mousteria is the name of a culture which mainly belongs to the homo neanderthalensis. That is a culture of old-stone age and came to its top place between 30-80 thousand years ago. The typical Mousterian tools are blunt stone knife, small ax and acuate stone tools. They buried dead people singularly or in a group. They also took care of the sick and injured people. The satisfied animals' remains usually discovered with the skeletons of people. Those evidences indicated they started to have more complex societies and original religions.

Comparing them with the human beings nowadays, they seem to be stockier and stronger. Anthropologists found that they sometimes used rocks to build the entrances of caves. Some evidence shows they didn't have arrows and bows, and they only used special methods and less efficient tools, such as stone tools and wooden spears to hunt the different kinds of animals, like goats and deer. Those people probably only ate meat and could only hunt with quite low efficiency. People found that flesh was cut down from most neanderthalesis' skeletons. From most anthropologists' point of view, this is the evidence shows that those people were not good enough at hunting so that they had to eat their dead neighbors' flesh.

We've already known that their tools were much simpler than that of our ancestors and weren't improved much during more than 10 thousand years. According to these points, some anthropologists thought their intelligence was lower than modern human's.

As their extinction happened almost in the same age as homo sapience entered Europe, anthropologists used to thought they were probably butchered by homo sapience, the modern people. The other theory about their extinction is that they lived in a colder environment than us. And some scholars considered that they were also attacked by the homo sapience,