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Species who were far more intelligent than we think.
It’s been between 300,800 years ago, in the mountainside cave the neanderthal wakes up in a pile of furs. Their family are sleeping nearby, they stir and stretch ready to start to start a bright new day in the ice age.
The male neanderthal is about 5ft 5inches tall and the female is about 5 ft one, they are both robust and stocky, both have wide flat features and big nose with large nostrils. Their physique allowed them to retain a greater amount of body heat than humans today.
When it was in ice age, they could take more air through their nose which would warm and humidify, increasing their core body temperature. There are others in the cave with them
a child and even elderly relative. Their average life expectancy is 30 years with only 20 percent of making it all through the way to 40. All have their own roles to play in survival of family group.
This family group lives in far west Europe around about what we now called Belgium. But evidence of neanderthals stretches across two continents from western Europe all the way to eastern Asia. And although they lived across a wide area their numbers was small, at their peak there was an estimated 52000 neanderthals total but, across most of 500,000 years of existence their numbers where much smaller usually in the 10 to 20,000 range. So, how did they survive.
We don’t know whether neanderthals knew how to make fire or not, Although they used fire. It’s unclear whether they were capable of it themselves or relied on instances where they were naturally able to use it.
For example like capturing flames from wildfires or lightning strikes either way they didn’t necessarily need it in the same as we do today, they were able to eat their food raw and often did and their overall physique was able to handle the cold far better than modern-day humans.
But they are still one of the first intelligent hunter-gathered societies. In the case of neanderthal on their mountainside the best way of acquiring food was through hunting using rudimentary weapons, they’d track a mixture of animals including deer and foxes.
ARNOLD