Here we explore variation and similarities in the two best-represented population groups who lived during the Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic—the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Building on approaches such as gene-culture co-evolution, we propose a four-field model to discuss relationships between human cognitive evolution, biology, technology, society, and ecology. We focus on the pre-50-ka phase, because we reason that later admixing between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in Eurasia may make it difficult to separate them in terms of cognition, or any of the other fields discussed in this paper. Using our model enabled us to highlight similarities in cognition between the two populations in terms of symbolic behaviour and social learning and to identify differences in aspects of technical and social cognition. Dissimilarities in brain-selective gene variants and brain morphology strongly suggest differences in some evolutionary trajectories that would have affected cognition. We therefore suggest that rather than insisting that Neanderthals were cognitively ‘the same’ as Homo sapiens, it may be useful to focus future studies on Neanderthal-specific cognition that may have been well-developed within their specific context at the time.

在这里，我们探索在石器时代中期和旧石器时代中期居住的两个最有代表性的人口群体（尼安德特人和智人）的变异和相似性。基于基因-文化共同进化的方法，我们提出了一个四域模型来讨论人类认知进化，生物学，技术，社会和生态之间的关系。我们专注于50-ka之前的阶段，因为我们认为后来尼安德特人和智人之间的混合在欧亚大陆，可能难以根据认知或本文讨论的其他任何领域将它们分开。使用我们的模型使我们能够突出显示两种人群在象征行为和社会学习方面的认知相似性，并确定技术和社会认知方面的差异。大脑选择性基因变异和大脑形态的差异强烈表明，某些进化轨迹的差异会影响认知。因此，我们建议，与其坚持尼安德特人与智人在认知上“相同”，不如将未来的研究重点放在尼安德特人特定的认知上，这在当时的特定背景下已经得到了很好的发展。