Cant watch it over here. Grrrr. Will have to check it out next time I'm up north, sounds interesting.
I dont know what was discussed on the program but the Neanderthal - Homo Sapien encounter is fascinating, it did take nearly 15,000 years for the Neanderthals to become extinct after first contact so there's no case for a mass military style invasion but the fact that the last trace of the Neanderthals is on isolated fringes of the continent does seem to imply that they weren't just struggling alongside modern humans but were being out-competed and removed from the territory rather than withering away among a mixed population.
It may have simply been a case of nerd flu as the homo sapiens came from a hotbed of human-animal interaction as well as more diverse populations. They may just have had genes more resistant to particularly violent epidemics that decimated Neanderthals who had a lense dense eco-system in ice-age europe.
The brain game for me is the most interesting aspect, bigger doesn't always mean better, especially when you take the brain size versus body size proportions into account. There's been a lot of theorizing on this, Stephen Mithen has suggested that modern human intelligence comes from a higher interaction between lower level, seperate intelligence 'modules'. Simply put, humans were able to mix and match areas such as natural history intelligence with social intelligence to create a vastly more flexible thinking machine and a more deeply aware conciousness. There's some elements of this displayed in monkey and ape behaviour, while they are extremely adept at social calculations they can't apply the same logic and inferences to material things in the world even if the relationships are identical. Neanderthals may have had similar levels of discrete intelligence areas but were not fully able to deduce general inferences from the seperate processes.
Mithen also speculates that Nenderthal conciousness may have lacked a quality of accumulating awareness that human conciousness has. He gives an example of taking a drive in the car, if you have been driving for a few years it comes totally naturally. You may have been thinking about completely seperate things but during a trip around town you would have negotiated roundabouts, traffic lights, avoided parked traffic and pedestrians and used indicators whilst all the time these life or death deicisions and actions were completely outside your concious train of thought. He speculates that this 'rolling conciousness' as he calls it may somewhat realte to a lower order conciousness among Neanderthals. They would have been capable of highly intelligent skills, actions and problem solving but lacked a quality of awareness that allowed this to accumulate throug hreflection and put into greater use in other areas or subsequent interactions.
Other evolutionary pscyhologists who loosely follow the Cosmides-Tooby model of brain as a metaphorical 'swiss army knife' made up of interacting 'modules' reject any notion of a general intelligence, instead tracing different selective pressures building highly specialised brains with mental processes every bit as specialised as the anatomy that creates it. Comparing Neanderthal brains to human brains is an apples to oranges thing, they were very distinct by virtue of different selective pressures.
Overall, I think the history of the species has been a rather bloody journey, there's no reason to think this wasn't true or even more true in the very distant past.
