At the moment, your comment is being heavily down-voted for what seems to be a totally reasonable point of view.
In recent years we've went from "completely primitive and segregated Neanderthals", to "oh, we share quite a bit of DNA with the Neanderthals", and "the Neanderthals engaged in complex symbolic thought", as well as "the Neanderthals were pretty advanced artists".
The current article is a further demonstration of that trend.
So it's fair to say that our original assumptions of the Neanderthals were profoundly flawed, and, as we go, we discover that they were different to us by a difference of degree -as you propose-, as opposed to the notion of being radically and binarily different.
In that vein, it is not a stretch to imagine that we were perhaps also completely wrong in our assumptions of their ability to communicate by sound, i.e. mastering languages.
In recent years we've went from "completely primitive and segregated Neanderthals", to "oh, we share quite a bit of DNA with the Neanderthals", and "the Neanderthals engaged in complex symbolic thought", as well as "the Neanderthals were pretty advanced artists".
The current article is a further demonstration of that trend.
So it's fair to say that our original assumptions of the Neanderthals were profoundly flawed, and, as we go, we discover that they were different to us by a difference of degree -as you propose-, as opposed to the notion of being radically and binarily different.
In that vein, it is not a stretch to imagine that we were perhaps also completely wrong in our assumptions of their ability to communicate by sound, i.e. mastering languages.