Popular Culture has often depicted Homo Neanderthals as inferior to Anatomically Modern Humans without much scientific evidence backing those claims of how Neanderthals and early humans coexisted. Movies, TV shows and commercials consistently push the same message that Neanderthals were clumsy, unintelligent, and barbaric, which is not the case. Anthropologists in the past have advanced the hypothesis that Neanderthals were an inferior species to make the homo sapiens appear superior and to align their assumptions with already established racial and special prejudice.
A good example of these false claims would be the movie “the Quest of Fire. “The movie is about a tribe of homo sapiens who have been attacked by bipedal Apes. Not sure which species they are. Whilst the in the middle of the attack, the tribe loses their only source of fire. So, the tribe’s elders send three men to go on a quest to find fire. Throughout the journey, the three men face many dangers, especially another Neanderthal tribe who seem to be cannibalistic. The three men come out victorious and find themselves with a homo sapien captive of the cannibal tribe who follows the trio and takes them back to her tribe. There
…show more content…
Factors like species interbreeding, cultural assimilation and lack of genetic diversity all helped cause the extinction of Neanderthals. And to address cognitive inferiority; their cognitive and behaviors capacities spanned an even greater time depth than previously thought. In addition, the Department of Geoscience at the University of Tubingen in Germany, summarized in their findings that the carbon and oxygen isotopic data from several Neanderthals suggests that Neanderthals exploited different foods around them due to changes in their