head-strong ancestors?

Post Category: Fun, poor man's Sci-fi

I'm currently on a gene-theory binge, reading up random stuff I find on wiki and other places, on the subject. So that's when I read this thing about the Neanderthals (our outrageously distant ancestors) having a larger average brain size than us Sapiens. Assuming this as a given, its rather interesting to wonder what life must've been like for our old-old men.

Firstly, its pretty surprising that such a smart race managed to get themselves extinct so quick.
Maybe they achieved everything there was to achieve, got bored and decided to put an end to the whole damn race, before they eventually die anyway, of plain boredom. That would certainly count as being smart.
Or maybe they actually discovered the grand unified theory, the single master equation that rules all nature. The rest is obvious. With his last big secret out of the bag, Lord Almighty blew a fuse big time and in one big swoosh, annihilated the entire bunch of apes for being smart asses. He naturally also wiped out any traces of scientific advancement, lest we find them out when we step into the scene.
If that seems like pushing the imagination a little too much, consider this: maybe they realised there actually was no grand unified theory and died from grief and sheer failure of the scientific process.

It is believed that Neanderthals co-existed with Sapiens for a brief period. We survived after that, they didn't. There's a lesson there, for all you super-bright, bloated intellect people reading this. The fools shall ultimately prevail!