Just how smart the Neanderthals were is a big question in anthropology. They were smart enough to be around for around 200,000 to 250,000 years. During that time their culture changed very slowly, as far as can be seen from a study of the detritus around their campsites. That is both from cave sites and from a few open air sites. Archaeologists have found some indications of the use of pigments and possibly decorative cut marks on items in Neanderthal sites but they are not nearly as prevalent as in modern human sites.
Taking a different line I think I mentioned recently that the estimated peak population of Neanderthals was estimated to be around 70,000 individuals in all of Europe. I have not been able to find any estimates of modern human populations in Europe at around 30,000 years ago but my impression is that it was probably much higher than that of the Neanderthals at their peak.
All this seems to indicate that there is probably some difference in the way that Neanderthals and modern humans thought. What that difference is is difficult to figure out. Some have suggested that modern language capabilities could account for the difference.
The Neanderthals undoubtedly had some kind of language. They did cooperative hunting which requires a fairly high level of communication skills. Modern humans may have taken language to a higher level. This could have made a difference. However, this is of course purely hypothetical, there is no evidence one way or the other.
There are people who love the Neanderthals, and who are looking for evidence that they were 'just like us'. The problem being that we don't really have any strong evidence that they were. Most evidence seems to indicate that they were something like us, but also different.
And as far as people living primitive lives in remote locations, they might not leave a lot of evidence of what their life was like, but their skeletons would match the skeletons from people in developed areas where there will be lots of evidence.
Bill Gill
