Who were the Neanderthals?

 The Ancient Apocalypse series which Netflix produced was quite fascinating. I love a good travelogue and used to attend them often as a child. Generally they were given by missionaries to Africa or China or another Asian country when I was a child. Usually they were at my Church but not always sometimes they were at my Uncle's and Grandmother's Church (they went to the United Church) and I went with them to their travelogues. They brought reams and reams of pictures even in those days and told stories of so many treasures that were located in these countries and often they would recount stories told to them that had been passed down for generations. The treasures (my terminology) were not so much of great value but rather spoke of an earlier time and culture. 

Way back then Neanderthals were spoken of as not being very erudite and rough in their living style but gradually our knowledge of Neanderthals has become much greater especially now that their genome has been studied. Who were the Neanderthals? They lived and walked the face of the earth for over 400,000 years disappearing at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. Our Hunter Gatherer ancestors retreated to so called Ice Refuges at Ukraina in Eastern Europe and other sites in southern Europe.

In the series Ancient Apocalypse Graham Hancock mostly addresses the ancient monuments which we visit in this series and discusses fables that are part of the culture of the peoples who lived around the particular sites. Some of them date back before the Last Glacial Maximum. But he only briefly mentions the peoples of the fables who brought education in farming and building to the hunter gatherer Homo sapiens. Why did the Neanderthals disappear? This series has raised that thought once again in my mind. They are thought to have arisen in the Neanderthal Valley but is that accurate? Is that just where remains have been found that belong to Neanderthals. They literally walked the face of the earth 400,000 years plus. Homo Sapiens is limited to considerably less than half that time. What sort of people were they? What were their accomplishments? 

I love old stories of civilization that have been passed down by word of mouth. I do not belong to the idea that these became altered over time. My grandfather and grandmother could recite many things from memory and that recitation never changed. They were taught by rote (as we were when I was first at school) and getting it right was important. Beating the bounds is a good example of a habit repeated yearly as villagers went to the borders of their village and taught their children where the markers were to show their village or farm or whatever. Some items were taught and taught until they became second nature. Why not the stories of the past? If they are important than they would have been repeated again and again until a person had it just right and could pass it on to the next generation exactly as learned. Our generation has lost that verbatim and it shows when you see people make up stories and claim they are truth and yet if one just thinks back a year you know they are a lie. But not everyone has trained their brain to remember. 

Who were the Neanderthals? What could they do? What gifts did they leave behind for us to build on and develop into new ideas? We need more Graham Hancocks to stimulate our brains and learn the past before it is lost to time.