Calling someone a Neanderthal is supposed to be insulting — insinuating ignorance, simple-mindedness or a brutish sensibility. We’ve long thought that humans must have survived because we were intelligent enough to outsmart our own extinction; meanwhile the Neanderthals' demise must have been due, at least in part, to their intellectual inferiority. Although this might make us feel like we’re at the top of the food chain, a number of researchers say it doesn’t line up with the data. In fact, the story of our survival is much more complicated.
Roger Seymour is a cardiovascular physiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia who researches blood flow to the brain as an indication of species intelligence. While brain size used to be the main indicator of intelligence, his team identified blood flow to the organ as being just as crucial to our evolution. The evolving brain’s growing demand for power required increased blood flow to support it. In over 300 million years of evolution, in fact, our brains got around 350 percent larger while blood flow increased by a whopping 600 percent. And when Seymour looked at blood flow and brain size, he found little difference between the sub-species.
