Tools Forged by Neanderthals Discoverd at Dig

The archaeological site where the tools were found has not undergone a modern investigation since its discovery in 1900.

Astonishingly, more than 2,000 tools were discovered at the site in the early 1900s, but because they were considered fakes, most were thrown down a well and have since been almost completely forgotten. However, recent work that showed similarities between the remaining tools and other known Neanderthal tools from elsewhere in Europe put to rest suspicions of forgery.

Because [the tools] were considered fakes, most were thrown down a well and have since been almost completely forgotten.

According to University College London’s Matthew Pope, the site was once home to a hunting community, and the tools discovered at the site were perhaps once used to hunt horses, along with woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.

Pope’s words encourage us to view Neanderthals not as subhuman, but rather as highly capable and intelligent humans:

The impression [the tools] give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology—not a people on the edge of extinction.

Pope explained that the hill where the site is located would have offered the Neanderthal hunters a perfect vantage point as game herds grazed on the plains nearby.

Meanwhile, Barney Sloane, head of English Heritage’s Historic Environment Commissions, commented, “This study offers a rare chance to answer some crucial questions about just how technologically advanced Neanderthals were, and how they compare with our own species.”

We also can’t help but quote at length from what the Daily Mail has to say about the discovery:

"Our cave-dwelling cousins might not have been quite as thick as we thought."

They were squat, crude and brutish—and barely capable of uttering more than a grunt. Little wonder that Neanderthal Man became a byword for stupidity. But the image of a knuckle-dragging bonehead with a beetle brow and a dimwitted stare may need a little updating. According to evidence revealed yesterday, our cave-dwelling cousins might not have been quite as thick as we thought. Items found at an archeological site in West Sussex suggest they were talented users of crafted tools and were in “complete command” of the landscape they inhabited. Not only did they make razor-sharp hunting spears and weaponry, but probably used flintstone blades to strip and fashion animal skin for clothing. They had the capability to create fire—and may even have used materials around them to craft crude musical instruments. . . . Males were just over 5ft and, despite the ape-like way they are often portrayed in cartoons, stood fully upright. They also had a bigger brain than Homo sapiens, although most of it was probably devoted to keener senses rather than sharper wit.

While the Mail’s claim that Neanderthal’s larger brains were devoted to senses rather than wit is purely evolution-driven speculation, the majority of these comments—and Pope’s research—stand in full support of the Bible-based perspective on Neanderthals. While we often think of them as distinct from “modern” humans, all the evidence we have on their behavior indicates that they were just as modern and intelligent or perhaps even more so.

One thought experiment to help consider how evolutionists “know” Neanderthals were less modern is to imagine a group of modern-day businessmen somehow stranded on an isolated Pacific island. Though they manage to eke out a living and adopt caves as homes, they are never rescued, and all eventually die on the island. Many years later, evolutionist anthropologists visit the island and find some of the remains and “artifacts” the businessmen left—crude tools, fire pits, and animal bones littering parts of the local caves. Ignoring the possibility of modern language use (e.g., in cave artwork), how will the businessmen be judged? As pre-humans?

Now, what if we hypothesize that all of the businessmen had suffered from rickets and had deformed skeletal structures. What will the anthropologists say? A new hominid species, Homo rudimentarius!

Thus is the sad fate of Neanderthals, who are thought to be inferior merely because they lack the skeletal structure of we humans who live today. But a closer look at this just-as-human subgroup tells us that Neanderthals were created in the image of God, descendants of Adam through Noah.

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