{"id":10330,"date":"2018-09-19T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-09-19T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reasons.org\/differences-in-human-and-neanderthal-brains-explain-human-exceptionalism\/"},"modified":"2018-09-19T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T09:00:00","slug":"differences-in-human-and-neanderthal-brains-explain-human-exceptionalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reasons.org\/adam-eve\/early-humans\/differences-in-human-and-neanderthal-brains-explain-human-exceptionalism","title":{"rendered":"Differences in Human and Neanderthal Brains Explain Human Exceptionalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When I was a little kid, my mom went through an Agatha Christie <\/a><\/u>phase. She was a huge fan of the murder mystery writer and she read all of Christie\u2019s books.<\/p>\n

Agatha Christie was caught up in a real-life mystery of her own when she disappeared for 10 days in December 1926 under highly suspicious circumstances<\/a><\/u>. Her car was found near her home, close to the edge of a cliff. But, she was nowhere to be found. It looked as if she disappeared without a trace, without any explanation. Eleven days after her disappearance, she turned up in a hotel room registered under an alias.<\/p>\n

Christie never offered an explanation for her disappearance. To this day, it remains an enduring mystery. Some think it was a callous publicity stunt. Some say she suffered a nervous breakdown. Others think she suffered from amnesia. Some people suggest more sinister reasons. Perhaps, she was suicidal. Or maybe she was trying to frame her husband and his mistress for her murder.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we will never know.<\/p>\n

Like Christie\u2019s fictional detectives Hercule Poirot<\/a> and Miss Marple<\/a>, paleoanthropologists are every bit as eager to solve a mysterious disappearance of their own. They want to know why Neanderthals vanished from the face of the earth. And what role did human beings (Homo sapiens<\/em>) play in the Neanderthal disappearance, if any? Did we kill off these creatures? Did we outcompete them or did Neanderthals just die off on their own?<\/p>\n

Anthropologists have proposed various scenarios to account for the Neanderthals\u2019 disappearance. Some paleoanthropologists think that differences in the cognitive capabilities of modern humans and Neanderthals help explain the creatures\u2019 extinction. According to this model, superior reasoning abilities allowed humans to thrive while Neanderthals faced inevitable extinction. As a consequence, we replaced Neanderthals in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia when we first migrated to these parts of the world.<\/p>\n

Computational Neuroanatomy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Innovative work by researchers from Japan offers support for this scenario.1<\/sup> Using a technique called computational neuroanatomy, researchers reconstructed the brain shape of Neanderthals and modern humans from the fossil record. In their study, the researchers used four Neanderthal specimens:<\/p>\n