Vegetarians versus Carnivores.

Cathal Cloch wrote: »

Also, the fact that humans can employ tools that can kill other animals does not make us superior. There is no evidence superior technology leads to better survivability.

Eh yea it does. We went from small fruit and nut eaters to typing on keyboards in space because of technology. We externalised and drove our own evolution and we're the only animal to have ever done that.

Arawn wrote: »

Actually humans at the start ran prey to death. Humans ate much smaller prey than neanderthalls. We started to eat rabbit while they continued to hunt big game whiich was rapidly disappearing.

Not quite. They lived in Eurasia for the guts of 300,000 years and no widespread large animal extinctions occurred. We show up and they do. Indeed you can nigh on trace our arrival in various parts of the world by following large animal extinctions. If Neandertals were running outa food, it would have been our doing. But they weren't for the most part. Plus they had wide ranging tastes in food too. At some periods more wide than us. They ate root veg, birds, shellfish, fish, even sea mammals. Hell they were processing wild grains and seeds into biscuits tens of thousands of years before any evidence we were. Yep Neandertals were eating biccies, not unlike those health bars so fash today. The shaggy haired man ape trudging dumbly through snow fields in pursuit of mammoths is a tiny and cliched part of their culture over 300,000 years.

Also do you really think neanderthal man didn't have spears??

And they had them before us too. Oldest spears so far found in the world belong to them and they're beautifully made throwing spears too and 100,000 years before the primitive versions of us modern humans show up.

Also it's been suggested that interbreeding had a lot to do with it, or the fact we may have brought germs and viruses with us when we settled europe,

Maybe but that can go both ways too. They seem to have had nuclear powered immune systems. A number of them found had horrible traumas that would fell an elephant yet they survived them. One guy lost an arm in his youth(may even have been purposely amputated to save him) and survived at least a decade after it. Imagine the infection risk there. Interestingly a couple of researchers are reckoning that the reason we have some of their genes still is because those genes gave an immune system boost to us.

think small pox and native americans.

Actually that's not nearly so cut and dried either. EG the Aztecs had a word for smallpox in their language before the Europeans arrived and Spanish descriptions of early outbreaks follow what you would expect of smallpox, but the later mass killer is different. Plus how would an introduced pathogen take 30 years before it's first outbreak, then take a further 50 years before really getting genocidal? Makes no sense. For a start those who had survived the first bout would have passed on some immunity. The pestilence that really decimated the population had a different and newer word. From the extensive descriptions by Spanish priests, and Phillip the 2nds personal doctor(sent by him to learn about native meds and therapies) the real killer wasn't smallpox, but some sort of local, non introduced hellish hemorrhagic fever.

also they needed more food and required more energy to function, so with the massive climate change they would of been less able to adapt.

They lived in Eurasia for 300,000 plus years. In that time they would have survived countless climate changes, both local and global, yet they survived all of that by adapting. The thing is if an alien was to land on earth say 100,000 years ago and asked the question which one of these humans would survive, it would have been a hard one to answer and they may well have chosen Neandertals.