Inferior or Superior Neandertals?

This ties in well with another thread, one that I started.Is there any indication of relative intellegence among humans? Having knapped flint, I know how hard it is to make an effiecient edge. To the pass that knowledge (not intellegence, knowledge) also requires intellegence and forethought.IMHO the creator of the Venus of Willendorf was a intellegent and creative as any modern artist, and those who broke rocks to make edges as intellegent as those who today are breaking atoms and sub-atomic particles.If tool making gets pushed back, as seems likely to be happening, to even greater depths, say in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of years instead of the tens of thousands of years, would not those earliest tool makers, those creating spears, harpoons and then barbed harpoons be considered as intelegent as anyone alive today?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Well, the likelyhood of finding wood or bone tools is a lot lower than for stone tools, and wood and bone tools also have several other factors that might cut down on us finding or identifying them even when found.They can warp, get worn out and reused easier than stone, were easier to replace and so more expendable, could be similar to natural growths and certainly more likely than stone to simply rot away.I do believe it likely that wood and bone implements predate stone ones, but I also see a difference in intent, in the underlying approach to the problem that seems to me apparent in the two. Wood and bone tools are basically a reshaping or slight modification of what is seen already in nature. It's a short leap from getting stuck by a cactus needle to the intuition that I could make any stick sharp on the end. But knapping goes beneath the surface, into the inner workings of the rock itself. Not all rocks cleave. It's damn near impossible to make a sharp edge of chalk, lime or sandstone.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion