If the Neanderthals were around today, could they be integrated with Homo Sapiens society?

[Lacewing]

One could even make the case that there are humans with equivalent cognitive function to a banana.

I've seen a few on this website.

[cladking]

I doubt Neanderthals could learn modern language. We've mostly failed to teach it to any animal.

We couldn't learn their language.

[Obvious Leo]

Phil, The answer is No. I'm not giving a tutorial on basic genetics because this conversation is stupid and I suggest you refer to any high school biology text on DNA.

[Obvious Leo]

I doubt Neanderthals could learn modern language. We've mostly failed to teach it to any animal.

We couldn't learn their language.

The current thinking is that Neanderthals would not be able to learn modern human language because they had the wrong variant of the FOXP2 gene necessary to develop this cognitive faculty. However we could learn their language very quickly indeed.

[Hobbes' Choice]

There is a major problem with deciding how genetically similar we are to HN.
We both share a common ancestor HE, and we are fairly certain when the European populations of HN started to differentiate from that ancestor.
We also know the approximate time that the gracile form of humans we live to associated with ourselves started to emerge from Africa and migrate to join/invade/annihilate/ marry/kill/discrimimate/eat with HE. (pick one or more)

We have the modern human genome in great detail. Sadly the remnants of the HN genome is literally fragmentary.
Imagine a book with words written with only 4 letters, torn up into shreds and then reassembled.
Worst still we have no genome from HE, our common ancestor.

ALL estimates about genomic differences are highly speculative, and based on assumptions about the common ancestor. But how do we know if difference "X" is due to something unique HN, or because we only have a partial or corrupted sequence?

Our best evidence of the difference was, and still is the analysis of technologies and morphological studies of the reconstructed skeletons. There is no complete skeleton. Not even a complete skull of HN, but they are easier to reconstruct than the genome.

I am horrified at the money wasted on DNA speculation and the media articles that have no shred of scientific credibility. It brings US archaeology into serious disrepute. My own visit the the Smithsonian Museum a couple of years ago found me witness to this fantasy world of speculation offered as fact.

[cladking]

I doubt Neanderthals could learn modern language. We've mostly failed to teach it to any animal.

We couldn't learn their language.

The current thinking is that Neanderthals would not be able to learn modern human language because they had the wrong variant of the FOXP2 gene necessary to develop this cognitive faculty. However we could learn their language very quickly indeed.

...Not if I'm right about the nature of language.

I believe animal languages are context and perspective dependent and are formatted entirely differently than our language. In our modern language we simply state what we're thinking and hope the other person will understand sufficiently to take the meaning. I believe animal language and ancient human language were very different. These languages take reality and cause and effect as being axiomatic and they simply define a perspective from which meaning is apparent. Rather than "saying what you mean" they instead get individuals on the same page. It's more like mind reading than it is communication. They wouldn't say "look at the beautiful red sunset" but rather "allow the phenomenon of attention to detect the redness of the sun as it falls below the horizon in its beauty". This would likely be foreshortened in Neanterthal to something akin to "attend the red beauty of the sun's day end" but learning the rules of grammar would be supremely difficult since each word has a single meaning. Learning the meaning of this utterance would not help in learning the meaning of "attend the falling away of the land at feet".

This simply isn't a matter of intelligence but rather how the brain works. We are only beginning to understand animal languages and, I believe, it's because all are context specific. Modern human language is not. Modern human language isn't difficult except that it's a complex language and so far as we know only humans have been able to speak complex language. Complex language is the root of human progress and the absense of Neanderthal progress suggests they were not capable of complex language.

[Philosophy Explorer]

Phil, The answer is No. I'm not giving a tutorial on basic genetics because this conversation is stupid and I suggest you refer to any high school biology text on DNA.

You say you subscribe to a dozen science journals. Surely you can find an article that backs you up as the NG article doesn't.

PhilX

[Obvious Leo]

This simply isn't a matter of intelligence but rather how the brain works.

Exactly. Although I agree with Hobbes about the sketchiness of the evidence there are good grounds for believing that the individualHN was probably as intelligent as HS was but that it was the collective intelligence of HS as a group which gave them the competitive edge. Only a difference in the use of complex language could account for this superior inter-subjectivity. We got smarter by learning how to pool our thoughts better.

This idea is even backed up by modern science. For at least the past century the average IQ in modern western societies has gone up by about 3 percentage points per decade. Although I don't regard IQ as a particularly valid metric for human intelligence this is a remarkable increase which cannot be accounted for simply with the Darwinian model of evolutionary biology. We are getting smarter because we are sharing more information.