neanderthals

We may have eradicated neanderthals, and other species in the human evolutionary line are also curiously missing today.

A small isolated population of neanderthals in the area that survived quite a while after their contemporaries died off?

A major problem with this idea is that Neanderthals were limited to Europe and the Middle East.

Interesting that the author made some assumptions which later turned out to be true about Neanderthals (such as higher cognition).

What else would the Soylent team do with all the free time not spent preparing and chewing their food like neanderthals?

Individual Neanderthals may well have had higher IQs than their contemporary human rivals.

Edit 2: The lawyers for the bank seem like complete neanderthals?!

Humans and Neanderthals interbred, we know now, and yet are different species.

Most of the renderings and conceptual drawings of them portray beings with enormous black eyes (also slanted in the same fashion as the rendered neanderthals in parent article).

Those damn neanderthals look scary as hell.

OK given that this is true which it may well be but is a matter of current research neanderthals ceased at some stage to be a separate group from homo spapians.

That there would have been differences is clear, both physical - Neanderthals were much stronger than modern human beings - as well as mental, although it is unclear how those mental differences would have played out - Neanderthals had bigger brains than modern humans do.

Occasional contact with Neanderthals by the people that would eventually move into Northern Europe, and possibly also the lack of anywhere for Neanderthals to retreat to, leading to more conflict, may have exacerbated the "otherness" with which they were seen (a natural extension of conflict/war), and solidified them under a different name for those peoples, which was then passed down through oral tradition.

In Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, he re-tells the story of Beowulf with the monsters as Neanderthals.

Those species are grouped under genus Homo and would likely have been ancestors of both modern humans and Neanderthals.

We killed off all animals that could conceivably compete with us on intelligence (Neanderthals, various other hominids).