the Neanderthal Mind

I might have a hard time comparing the Neanderthal mind to anything else. I think it may have operated differently all together. The same instincts and needs would have driven their subconscious but Neanderthal brand consciousness is another story. There are some differences in hardware between them and later hominids. When it comes to ‘cave art’, those differences begin to present themselves. Neanderthals might have drawn in the dirt of their caves or maybe even on the walls but it would have been for pretty utilitarian reasons.
They might have tried to plan a hunt that way, I suppose. I don’t think they ever would have preserved a landscape with cave imagery the way Cro-Magnon Man did though. Their understanding of science might be different too. I would like to talk science with a Neanderthal. I think they would have interesting ideas if we had a common language to exchange them. Even if they had the vocabulary and understanding of it, they might have lacked the imagination to come up with the in-depth visual representations that started with cave art. It might just have been something their big minds didn’t have the imagination for.
Lack of imagination is a pretty conventional idea in regards to the Neanderthal mind. Their big powerful minds weren’t tasked with imaginative creativity. Some of that is anatomical. Development of parts of the brain responsible for imagination arrived later. I have wondered if legends about telepathy didn’t originate from Neanderthal lore, though. If they didn’t have the physiology for extensive communication through speech to go along with their fairly large brains, maybe they communicated by other means.
That’s pretty romantic speculation. At some point, I think we can only speculate though. At least without the cave-man to experiment with. The Neanderthal mind might have been purely archaic. It was probably consumed by instincts and other ancient recessive functions. Somewhere between primate minds and modern human ones, the powerful Neanderthal mind remains a mystery. A ‘complex artifact’ or relic of its own. In another time it was modern but sometimes relics serve to remind us what life was like in wilder times when primitive was contemporary.