Thanks for the reply. Something I will have to think about. But I understand what your saying. They could be evolutionary very different or just a mutation point that was way off from the final point. Could be that they are descendent from a massive genetic mutation or maybe we are.
It gets worse.
Let me preface this with I’m an agnostic.
Neanderthals kept the same tool kit for 100,000 years. That’s an extraordinarily stable culture, one lacking malcontents eager to tear down the old.
Neanderthals had a spiritual life, graves with ocher to give the dead more of a lifelike pinkish color, grave goods, and even burials with flowers.
The modern peoples with the highest IQs also have the highest percentages of residual Neanderthal DNA. (China/the Orient and to a slightly lesser degree Europeans).
Those peoples invented writing and technological civilization.
Peoples in the new world could pile stone on stone, barely managed to domesticate a few food crops, never used the wheel, and spent much of their time cutting out each others’ still beating hearts, Africa much the same, Australia not even crops, Tasmania, not even fire! (I’m glossing over cyclopean stone structures, which according to the natives in areas with them predate their arrival).
We, even those of us with a few percent of Neanderthal DNA, are quadruped apes poorly adapted to walking upright.
Neanderthals with their straight spines and balanced heads were purpose built to walk upright.
Built from scratch.
By who or what?
For what purpose?
And in whose image, eh?