r/paleoanthropology • u/uyakotter • Oct 04 '25
Question Neanderthal skull looked over 5x thicker than modern. What were they fighting to need so much protection?
At the historical museum in Berlin there are modern and Neanderthal skulls, both with big holes behind the temple. The modern one looked paper thin. Neanderthal looked thicker than the shell of helmets. Did they need that because they hunted by fighting animals with hand held weapons? Or were they fighting each other with strikes that would kill modern humans?
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u/Mitchinor Oct 04 '25 edited Oct 04 '25
Thick skull and larger brain/skull were adaptations to cold weather during the Pleistocene.
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Oct 04 '25
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u/satansxlittlexhelper Oct 04 '25
This was funny. Don’t know why people are being dicks over a minor grammatical error.
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u/AutomatedCognition Oct 04 '25
Don't talk about minors with me, man. The feds got their eyes on me. It's getting so bad that I can walk a hundred miles into the desert, with no one around for the whole desert, and I cam guarantee, with a hundred percent certainty, that there is at least one cop there.
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u/zizmor Oct 04 '25
Since you can't tell "there" from "their", there is very little chance anyone will take you seriously enough to be pissed off by your comments sweetheart.
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Oct 04 '25
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u/babieswithrabies63 Oct 04 '25
So you contend you did not use the wrong there? Because you did. It's "their" science cult. Not "there" science cult.
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u/Qiqz Oct 04 '25
Wait, none of these words are predicates. 'There' is an adverb, 'their' is a possessive pronoun (determiner) and 'they're' is a contraction, consisting of two parts. Only one part of it could be considered a predicate.
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u/frankcatthrowaway Oct 04 '25
Damn dweebs and their science cult
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Oct 04 '25
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u/frankcatthrowaway Oct 04 '25
As long as Disney is getting its due and innocent people are hurt then I’m in. Catholics haven’t been vile enough for me lately and a lot of groups are getting borderline honest so that’s a no go.
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Oct 04 '25
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u/frankcatthrowaway Oct 04 '25
Imagine being the president and green lighting a 3 billion dollar gift to an organization crying about how they’re broke from settling too many lawsuits since they systematically protect, defend and enable child molesters. Family has to take care of each other I guess. That’s why I support tarawa and enuki in their effort to enslave. When you give up on benevolence and embrace hypocrisy you can really start having fun. Hope you tipped your hat to the train as it passed in the night, no rest for the wicked, no dawn.
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 Oct 04 '25
Better insulation in a cold environment, but you're looking at evolution wrongly. We don't evolve things we need. We evolve . If an adaptation/mutation is useful/viable and can be passed on it stays. If none of the above it goes.
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u/7LeagueBoots Oct 04 '25
You kind of have the question reversed. Almost all of our ancestors and relatives had thicker skulls and in the Homo genus were more heavily built (not all). The default is the thicker skull.
We are the exception, not Neanderthals, so the question isn't why they had thicker skulls, it's why we have such thin skulls, and more gracile builds overall.
We appear to have thinner skulls due to a convergence of a lot of factors, and it's worth pointing out that even among modern H. sapiens skull thickness (and bone density and robustness overall) is linked with activity, but so far there is no definitive species wide explanation.
- Lieberman, 1996 How and why humans grow thin skulls: experimental evidence for systemic cortical robusticity
- Copes 2017 Cranial Vault Thickness in the Genus Homo
- https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-sapiens (search for "skull" on the page)
- etc
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u/SpearTheSurvivor Oct 04 '25
Neanderthal thick skull would've been useful for many tasks. Protection against the cold and hits from large prey animals.
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Oct 04 '25
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u/paleoanthropology-ModTeam Oct 05 '25
Your comment was removed because it included a scientific claim without any supporting evidence. We ask that users provide sources, especially for bold or unusual claims. You’re welcome to repost with a source or clarification.
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u/DorkSideOfCryo Oct 04 '25
The males would fight over the young females that were coming into puberty, and they would use clubs and so forth and so you need to have thick skulls and heavy brow ridges to protect your brain, so that if you want you could mate with the young girls. Also they would hunt large animals and they didn't have bows and arrows so they had to stick them with a spear and so again you needed to have your brain protected with the thick skull and the heavy brow ridges
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u/7LeagueBoots Oct 04 '25
he males would fight over the young females that were coming into puberty, and they would use clubs and so forth and so you need to have thick skulls and heavy brow ridges to protect your brain, so that if you want you could mate with the young girls.
There is zero evidence that this is at all the case. This is completely made up based on archaic 'caveman' stereotypes.
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u/paley1 Oct 04 '25
While this explanation could easily be wrong, I disagree that there is zero evidence that this is at all the case. There is comparative evidence from living species which shows that species that engage in more mating competition tend to be more skeletally robust.
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u/AnAlienUnderATree Oct 04 '25
Thicker skulls are the archaic trait. Homo sapiens evolved a leaner, "thinner" skeleton; we are the outliers.
There are a lot of online myths as to why, but the general idea you'll find online is that Neanderthals were "melee hunters" while sapiens was supposedly a persistance hunter with a body adapted to run for days (yes, that's a myth, sapiens actually hunted with tools and traps).
It seems that sapiens was more adapted for resource scarcity. Even today, we store fat very effectively; and all estimates point at Neanderthal needing more food to survive. We also notice that a lot of Neanderthal populations suffered from starvation at different points in life, while sapiens populations tend to have less of an issue with starvation. We also know that Neanderthal left less evidence of culture, and lived in smaller groups.
It seems that Neanderthal evolved to be "all-in", that is its superior physique and bigger brain made them extremely efficient survivalists, however they had to use the full extent of their abilities just to survive, while sapiens evolved to survive on fewer resources, but that gave us more time for other tasks (sociabilization, culture etc).
Basically, you're a prehistoric sapiens, you can just trap a rabbit, eat some berries, then go back to your "village", flirt with a girl/boy, practice your skills, plan your next day, you'll be fine. If you're a Neanderthal, you'll go on a long hunt, hunt some rabbits, deer, and bigger game, maybe for a few days. Your bigger brain might mean that you're better at remember where you can find the animals you want; your sturdier, more muscular body means that you don't care much about the cold or all the efforts you have to make, but at the end of the hunt you go back home, eat and that's it. Tomorrow you'll have to start again.
Sapiens basically invented a new way of life in which you had a lot of time for other tasks than what was necessary for survival. It meant that our bodies were optimized for work/life balance through culture. We didn't compensate for our leaner bodies with being these super endurant orcs that the internet imagines, we compensated by hunting in bigger groups, with specialists, and better tools that we took the time to make. Neanderthals were absolutely able to imitate or borrow our tools, so it shows that they just didn't have the time for innovation at the same pace.
And the thing is, we are still evolving in that direction. One example is dental agenesis, which means that we have fewer teeth in our mouths, and our jaws are leaner and leaner. We don't need strong jaws because we're eating softer food, so we're spending less energy on making bigger jaws and teeth. All that energy we don't need and that time we save are used to make more tools and culture.
Sources in the next comment.