1) Studies of muscle attachments show Neanderthals were about twice as strong as humans, and injury patterns show that they killed large animals with thrusting spears in close in hand to hand engagements. Neanderthals are built for ambush hunting from fixed sites.

Studies of humans show that far from being nature’s wimps in terms physical ability as is usually presumed, in one aspect – endurance running, humans can beat all other animals hands down. When it comes to running down animals over a distance of 5 to 25 miles, humans can best all other animals except the horse family and the dog family. Humans can also beat horses and dogs at any distance over 5 miles in hot weather like they would encounter in their native Africa. Humans are built for following migrating herds and hunting by running animals down. Studies have shown that early humans used projectile weapons including spear throwers to kill at a distance rather than getting close in.

The two different lifestyles would have given humans and Neanderthals different advantages and disadvantages in different environments. However the change from forest to steppe would definitely favoured humans.

2) It isn’t true to say Neanderthals were more intelligent than humans, although Neanderthals certainly weren’t stupid brutes. The fact is that we simply don’t know. We know Neanderthals had marginally larger brains than modern humans, but humans displayed a far more complex culture and social behaviour, including the making of ornaments, works of art etc. – traits which are distinctly human.

There is one major developmental difference between humans and Neanderthals which has been proven scientifically by examining teeth for daily growth ring patterns. Neanderthals reached adulthood at eight years old, and dis not go through a teenage phase – like chimpanzees, while humans reach reproductive age at 12-14 years and are not fully grown until 16-18 years. Human brain development is unusually prolonged, and isn’t complete until 18-20 years or more than three times the time it takes Neanderthals to develop fully. What this slow development allows is for the human brain is being rewired according to environmental experiences. In particular, a human child has an incredible and innate ability to assimilate language at a phenomenal rate – something adults cannot later match. The language learning ability is the ability to recognise patterns and associations in this case in speech. However it is paralleled in other forms of symbolic recognition – writing, music, visual representations in the form of art work etc. which are all particular characteristic of humans. I suspect that like human adults who find it difficult to match the language learning abilities of children, Neanderthals would have found it difficult to match humans in the ability to learn language and abstract symbolic representations despite their slightly larger brains. Put simply, humans can more efficiently use their brain cells for abstract concepts, because they leave brain development late, and so can hardwire their brains to match specific languages and symbolic representations.

This would have made Neanderthals culturally more simple, and less able to pass on complicated information from one generation to another – for example explaining how to find a migration route hundreds of miles long to somebody who has never seen it before, or recounting far flung relatives and explaining which of these owe you favours, or proving you are who you are to relatives who owe you a favour by recounting old childhood memories only you would know.

3) Recent evidence has supported the “swamped 10 to 1 by immigrants” theory as the reason for the extinction of the Neanderthals. The question is how humans were able to exist in larger numbers in Europe when the Neanderthals were better adapted physically to Europe, and would have been able to breed faster because they reached adulthood at only eight years old.

There is only one answer to this question, and that is that humans must have been able to exploit Europe more intensively than Neanderthals in order for the area to be able to support an order of magnitude more humans than Neanderthals. This is probably due to humans being able to exploit far more varied food resources including small animals, plants, steppe animals, fish etc. and being able to migrate long distances to exploit meagre resources over a wider area.

The reason? Simple – humans were nomadic following migrating herds, whereas Neanderthals lived and stayed put at fixed sites in valleys where they could ambush migrating herds. Being nomadic means that you need to carry additional flint or flint blades with you to cover for blade breakages, but you don’t want to carry excessive weight. This means humans would adopt a technology that would produce the lightest blades compromising on functionality a little if necessary, whereas Neanderthals would aim to produce the most functional blades regardless of weight.

Neanderthals were more capable and more intelligent on average than their contemporary and modern homo sapiens. The reason they died out is simply due to unequal population numbers over a long time span – with the less intelligent humans possibly breeding more quickly and being able to rely on a virtually endless supply of new arrivals from the Middle East and Africa.

I assume he or she is one of those people desperate to put as much distance between humans and all other species as possible. Such people are a danger to our long-term survival, although that probably won’t affect me individually so much.

I would laff my butt off if you found you had Neanderthal genes.