The Unconscious Neanderthal
We outcompeted the brilliant Neandertals with our ability to share.
There are indications that the Neanderthals were smart and strong, yet we are here and they are not. What happened? I don’t think it’s because we were smarter or stronger; I think it’s because we evolved a way of living that is unique in all living beings. We became conscious.
I’ll define some terms here so you can stop reading now rather than reading to the end and complaining in the comments. The brain is a lump of fat we carry around in our heads that connects to itself and other parts of the body. The mind is our personal experience of our brain and nothing more. Consciousness is entirely a feature of our own brain and not related to anything outside our body. What I write here is entirely consistent with the latest findings of 21st century neuroscience and Buddhism.
Specifically, this article is based on the Oakley-Halligan model of consciousness presented in Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being. I invite you to read it, but I will give enough of its content for you to understand my ideas.
Before describing my hypothesis about neanderthals, we need to make a detour through consciousness.
Our life is unconscious, meaning outside of conscious awareness. We are fundamentally animals, and our brains work almost entirely like that of any other animal. We are driven by fundamental survival needs such as water, food, sleep, safety, and reproduction, and these needs are all met by brain processes that operate without conscious awareness or intervention. This view is supported by 21st century neuroscience and its insights into neural processes provided by recent neural imaging methods, and it is amplified by our growing understanding of Karl Friston’s A Free Energy Principle for the Brain.
What then is this experience we call consciousness? Oakley and Halligan describe it as feedback process wherein the limbic system broadcasts a personal narrative about what is happening in the brain and the narrative may be listened to by us and others.
The personal narrative doesn’t include everything that happens in the brain, and not everything in the narrative is shared. The brain does so much unconsciously every second of our lives that the narrative would seem like an open fire hydrant if it was. Instead, what we see in the narrative is what we have learned is important for day-to-day survival, and what feeds back to the limbic system for autobiographical memory is a subset of that information.
The personal narrative is what we think of as our conscious reality, and it has two implicit characteristics: it is an incomplete record of what happens in the brain, and it appear to us about a half second after the reality it appears to represent. Both of these characteristics have been verified in psychological studies; we make choices about a half second before we are aware we made them, and we ascribe the decision behind the choice to the narrative report since we have no direct experience of the actual unconscious decision.
The other effect of the personal narrative is that we share some of it with those around us. The amount we share is determined by what we learned growing up; some of us share just about everything that comes up in the personal narrative, others of us share only what we consider important to share. Some of us share very little. Oakley and Halligan call this our external broadcast, and it happens with little attention or intention in most of us, and sometimes we call it gossip.
Our external broadcast is the basis of human civilization. It is how we share new information and work together as groups so effectively. When a new idea appears to any of us, it can become part of a tribe overnight, a village in weeks, a country in months, and a continent in years. It often appears as smalltalk, and it has been part of human civilization for as long as we have records and stories.
Animals don’t appear to broadcast in the same way humans do. They may communicate with each other verbally, and some can understand human words and phrases, but sound communication in non-human animals appears to be entirely intentional and based on some purpose.
This brings us to neanderthals. Did neanderthals broadcast in the way humans do? We see verbal communications but not broadcasts in earlier apes. Where in the hominid family tree did personal narratives, broadcasting, and consciousness appear?
Humans and neanderthals diverged about a half million years ago. and I propose that this was where consciousness arose. Both humans and neanderthals by this time had huge brains and commensurately large numbers of neurons, but the opportunity for evolution was what to do with those neurons. Our brains couldn’t grow larger by that time without a major redesign to the female pelvis, so there was an opportunity cost to whatever evolutionary path was taken to exploit brain size.
I propose that brain architecture split along with the divergence of humans and neanderthals. Neanderthals evolved to continue the nominal animal brain architecture of previous apes, and humans evolved to sacrifice the previous usage of the left hemisphere to adapt a new way of thinking about the world, which enabled language.
That reuse of the left hemisphere in humans to support language certainly happened, along with specialized language areas like Broca and Wernicke. Neanderthal language ability hasn’t been fully characterized, but examination of its hearing and vocal areas suggest that it wasn’t as advanced in language as humans. Our specialization in language and other symbolic arenas certainly carried opportunity costs relative to neanderthals.
Was language alone enough of an advantage over neanderthals, who could devote both hemispheres to more conventional animal learning such as predators, prey, nature, and perhaps tool use? Neanderthals had words, but did they have language as we know it?
I propose that language became a strategic influence on human survival when humans developed rich enough language skills to gossip and broadcast, even minimally. I doubt if humans or neanderthals intentionally fought with one another, but they undoubtedly came into conflict as humans expanded their range, and the ability to gossip and broadcast likely made group (tribal) planning better.
Human broadcasts and gossip allowed memes to appear and spread, memes such as “moving across the river” and “floating on logs”. So consciousness enabled ideas and undoubtedly encouraged expansion and exploration.
There is little evidence that humans and neanderthals fought much, and no evidence that aggression or conflict was the reason for the disappearance of neanderthals. Humans probably saw the occasional neanderthal family or village as a source of knowledge about the land and respected them for it, not realizing that their more localized lifestyle and limited communication ability was inherent in their brain architecture. The neanderthals probably responded to the human interlopers as any other animal would do: they moved on, until there was no other place to move to.
As humans explored and proliferated, they traveled and lived in larger and larger groups. Most natural predators wouldn’t be able to do that, but our ability to communicate and propensity to broadcast and gossip allowed us to live communally. As we filled every productive niche, the neanderthals disappeared quietly.
The neanderthals were animals, just as all homo species were before homo sapiens. We invented a new way of thinking and living that gave us apparent mastery over the natural world and allowed us to live in just about every environmental niche, including most improbably large dense cities.
Without consciousness, neanderthals wouldn’t have adapted to most environments, certainly not crowded cities. Another way to look at this is that a neanderthal could probably live successfully in any circumstance it grew up in, and it might even be able make significant and surprising contributions because of the power of its great brain. But it would always be handicapped by its language limitations, and it would have difficulty adapting to any other circumstances.
It’s just a hypothesis at this point, but it seems to fit with all the known facts.
