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Okay, they have a skeleton with damage to a rib. Period.

From that they deduce that it was made by a projectile rather than a spear whose wielder held on to the spear as he thrust. They deduce by experimenting with dead pig carcasses. But remember that they have no soft tissue to examine—they are going by the mark left on the bone by a projectile as compared to the mark left on the bone by a hand-held spear.

On the bone of a modern pig.

Having decided that it was a projectile, then they deduce that the projector of the projectile had to have been a human rather than a Neanderthal because, humans had learned to use spear throwers and Neanderthals had not.

Notice that the question is not the nature of the weapon’s head—in either case it’s assumed to be a spear point. The issue is whether it was hurled or held and thrust.

That’s an awful lot to deduce from a single rib with a mark on it.

It could be true, of course. But it’s a huge theory based on very tiny evidence.

If I tried this sort of thing with historical arguments about something in, say, the high Middle Ages or something during the Thirty Years War, deducing this sort of momentous sociological theory about this or that group’s relations with some other group and did it on this slim a foundation of forensic evidence, I’d be laughed out of the court of historical scholarship.

But they get away with this because, after all, we’re never going to have much more evidence—we’re stuck with a single rib with a mark on it.

The more honest thing to do would be to say, “we just don’t know.”

But if they did that, their whole discipline of “evolutionary anthropology” would go up in smoke.

I don’t mind them playing around with speculative theories. I just despise the journalists and popularizers who treat this now as established fact: early humans killed off the po’ widdle Neanderthals” “Big bad human meanies are always killing of po widdle defenseless critters.”