Discover Top Posts Tagged with #neanderthals

Homo Sapiens boy together again with his Neanderthal girl on the first warm day of Spring

#art #neanderthals #paleoart #prehistory #love #likes and reblogs are super appreciated!! i worked so hard on this #look out for the print!!

Giving a lighter and some firewood to a time-displaced Neanderthal and he spends hours failing to make a fire but then I accidentally leave him alone with a couple empty 2-liter bottles and some tinfoil and when I get back he’s intuitively constructed a gravity bong and he’s in the process of torrenting drone metal FLACs to my laptop

#neanderthals

The thing is that the portrayal of Neanderthals as having been inherently grotesque and alien to H. sapiens is something we will never have proof of. But we do have proof that, in different locations and in different populations across time, we all found eachother desirable. We saw eachother and wanted to touch. And the offspring were held by their mothers and raised and had their own offspring in turn.

When you look for the first proof that H. sapiens found Neanderthals repulsive, you have to wait until the Victorian era, when the white masters of empires were busy portraying Neanderthals as stupid, brutish, and (of course) dark-skinned.

In more modern times, we’ve had people arguing that instead of seeing Neanderthals as Benighted Savages, they should instead be seen as Noble Savages, (allegedly) cruelly destroyed and driven from their lands by H. sapiens. Which one of their two you believe says more about your modern political views than it does about ancient H. sapiens.

And, whether we construct Neanderthals as Savage or Noble Savage, the fundamental assumption we project into the unfathomably distant past is still that H. sapiens saw Neanderthals as an Other, with the language we use being almost explicitly that of modern racial dynamics.

But we have no proof of any of that. We have no proof of hostilities. We know we co-existed and we had sex. That’s it.

Humans obviously have sex with some humans and kill others. We also know that, when small groups of humans occupy vast spaces with infrequent contact with others, unique cultures will always form, some more hospitable, some more neophobic/xenophobic. But many cultures of small settlements placed among huge unpeopled landscapes place supreme emphasis on hospitality to strangers. Plus, we fucking love other social animals, as evidenced by how we befriended wolves.

I’m a humourless weirdo and a wet blanket about popular constructions of Neanderthals as “monstrous”, and I freely admit it. But that’s because it’s tied up in legacies of imperialism. Not only that, but it also privileges one culture (yours, mine, modernity’s) as being most human by implicitly assuming we can project it onto people in the past. Since you don’t pretend that all global cultures share exact same values as you do, it doesn’t take more than a few moments’ reflection to realise you can’t do that to the past.

#neanderthals #opinions

God I love paleoanthropology. Like what do you mean they found a really good neanderthal fingerprint on a rock. 43,000 years old. A fingerprint that was right in the middle of a rock that looked like it had a mouth and two eyes with a large brow bone. A neanderthal, a human, saw a rock that looked like a face and gave it a nose. That's so beautiful. I'll never stop getting emotional over this.

#paleoanthropology #neanderthals

Quest for Fire (1981)

#quest for fire gif #jean-jacques annaud #ron perlman #everett mcgill #nameer el-kadi #rae dawn chong #80s fantasy movies #cavemen #neanderthals #paleolithic era #1980s #1981 #gif #chronoscaph gif

Neanderthal Dentistry!

Neanderthals had the know-how to identify a tooth infection and the motor skills to drill out the damage, according to a study published May 13, 2026, in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Archaeologists discovered the molar in a Siberian cave. A deep hole suggests a sharp tool, possibly a toothpick made of local jasper, was used for the beginnings of a root canal.

The process would have taken between 35 and 50 minutes, according to researchers, who conducted similar procedures on three modern human teeth.

Wear patterns indicate the Neanderthal was able to continue eating with the tooth following the procedure.

The discovery marks the first such procedure by any species other than Homo sapiens. It also challenges prior understanding of Neanderthal cognitive abilities, showing they could identify a source of pain as well as determine - and administer - proper medical treatment requiring physical dexterity.

#dentistry #Neanderthals #ancient medicine #history of science #archaeology #root canals #my screencaps