Those idiot savant Neandertals

Another Neandertal paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. But, because there is a delay between when the press is released to talk about it, and when it goes live, I haven't gotten a look at the primary material. There's a lot of juicy stuff in this piece at NBC Science though, Brain comparison suggests that Neanderthals lacked social skills. The two scientists giving quotes, Chris Stringer and Robin Dunbar, know their stuff (one of Dunbar's graduate students also contributed heavily). In case you don't know Stringer, he is the paleoanthropologist who was most forceful in pushing for the "Out of Africa" model. Dunbar is the popularizer of Dunbar's number. I'm assuming Stringer brings the anatomy to the game, while Dunbar frames the bigger theoretical picture. Basically the morphology of the cranium implies that Neandertals may have allocated more of their cognitive capacity to vision and coordination, and less ...