From: Monte Davis 


>Do you happen to know anything about current thinking about Neanderthals in
this regard?

What Alan said. To pick just one example, many many expert-hours have been
devoted to proving/disproving that homo neanderthalensis could not have
articulated speech nearly so well as homo sapiens, based on the size and
position of the hyoid bone in fossil skeletons, and several steps of
inference from that... applying more anatomical and physiological precision
than most anatomists would be comfortable with applying to a *current*
skeleton... and knowing essentially nothing about the structure or
sophistication of their brain centers for speech.

It's hard not to be reminded that for many decades, Neanderthals were
depicted as crouched and troll-like because (as we now know)  an
influential early find happened to have had severe osteoarthritis.

You can get a career-long argument about the extent to which hands/tool
use, speech, or bipedal posture drove (or were driven by) the expansion and
specialization of the cortex. I expect it'll be sorted out in another
hundred generations or so.

-Monte 

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