Neanderthals : downgraded by anthropologists
Neanderthals, "the other humans", were a clever and perseverant breed of survivors, much like us. They were 99.5 percent genetically identical to us, but had evolved distinctive anatomy during thousands of years in the cold Eurasian climate. Behind its bulking browridges, a Neanderthal’s skull housed a brain slightly larger on average than our own today. Yet they went extinct when our breed ("modern humans" we call ourselves) invaded their populated areas some forty thousand years ago. Against all odds, no traces of interbreeding: we didn't inherit any specifics of Neanderthal genetic code.
There is a bunch of theories how the extinction happened, but all of them with a nice "modern human" touch: Neanderthals are replaced by us simply because we were more clever, more sophisticated, more "human". Well, some theories do allow somewhat hostile replacement. My question is: why don’t we assume that Neanderthals were extinct by more primitive human breed (us)? Our own history shows quite a few examples of more primitive peoples displacing (including genocide) those who are simply more human. When it comes to the means of displacing, "more primitive" has some advantages. By the way, evidence of cannibalism in Neanderthal fossils is used as evidence that they were more primitive. There is no evidence of cannibalism in modern human fossils contemporary with Neanderthals; so, were those modern humans (us) unappetizing or maybe they were the cannibals or both?
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