| I'd say that "Spiritual" here stands for the human spirit, rather than some kind religious spirituality. Spirit being everything surpassing mere cognitive actions needed for survival. The finding (like many other) strongly implies that neanderthals had the ability of abstract thought and creative urges. This should in no way be surprising since neanderthals appear at a quite late and developed stage of the human evolution. Neanderthals are generally quite an interesting topic, but equally interesting is the approach and prejudice of the scientific community towards them throughout the history. Research on neanderthals has been littered with logical fallacies by researchers who were absolute experts in their field, but refused the idea of neanderthals being a human subspecies or a remotely intelligent or capable one, just because it didn't fit in their personal or religious worldview. Upon discovery of neanderthals, leading anatomists at the time were like "yup, that's just a disease ridden regular human". More skeletons crop up and it's obvious that they have similar traits all across the world, and they are still going "Yup, so many disease ridden humans, how strange". Only after a whole cave in Vindia was found with more than 100 individuals that the scientific community half-unwillingly conceded that oh well there might have been another (sub)species parallel to homo sapiens. And that opened another can of worms and it's been decades of trying to prove how Neanderthals were intellectually inferior to Homo Sapiens. Those fallacies still exist today, and happen to very prominent scientists. I recently read a scientific articles from the late nineties by two anatomists who reconstructed the vocal tract of neanderthals to see if they had acoustic ability for spoken language. While their wok on the reconstruction was impeccable, their conclusion was that neanderthals couldn't have evolved spoken language as they could only produce two consonants. Which is a ridiculous conclusion seeing that there are languages today that use two consonants. So that's why people get worked up about a neanderthals having a flute and why we still have people saying a hyena made it in the comment section. It's totally wild to me how people can be prejudiced and kind of racist toward someone from tens of thousands of years ago. |
Things have gotten a little weird lately, as the Nazis have started identifying with Neanderthals. Or vice versa - or something like that. The notion that Erectus evolved in-situ into the various species of Homo - a resurrection of the Candelabra model - isn't quite as fringe as it used to be, and it might have some nuggets of truth. Unfortunately, the Candelabra model is just hot stew on toast for the Hitler-inclined, and then that overflows into everything else, making open discussions of human origins a mexican standoff. Anthropologists, meanwhile, approach anything hinting of the model like it's made of plutonium, and rightfully so, but this just cranks up the conspiracist vapors to 11. "See the Human Origins THEY'VE BEEN HIDING FROM YOU!" and then someone shows you an x-ray of some dude's leg with an extra bone in it.