The link that takes us from neanderthal to the ability to have a technologically advanced society.
We're now pretty sure that rapid evolution occurs whenever the environment changes, and I think it should not be difficult to pinpoint a chain of coincidental developments which would lead to the selective pressure for these extra brain functions.
Neanderthals would actually be considered 'more evolved' than sapiens if we're going by brain development, because their brain size relative to the
size and complexity of their body is about 10% greater than sapiens, the current reigning champions - for contrast, using this metric, dolphins are only about 3% behind us and most other species are much lower. Of course, this was during the ice age, when behavioural complexity had to be sacrificed for caloric conservation in many more cases than just the
homo genus.
Mix in temporal lobe seizures, synaesthesia, various types of hypersensitivity or hyper/hypofiltration - all possible with simple, single-base-pair mutations, or naturally-occurring drugs with known evolutionary origins, often in structures that have been around since long before the first humans were born - and you can get the visionaries that catapulted culture into the next age.
Is it amazing? Beautiful? Oh, certainly. Is it far-fetched? Depends how you determine whether something is far-fetched. More so than saying 'aliens did it'? I...don't think so. The thing is, many of our cultural processes isolate and pair off people who share these mutations. The social need for understanding and shared experience - common to most social mammals at least - interacts with these mutations in a surely unintended and interesting way. Impaired impulse control, etc - by lowering the threshold for survival in our society, we allow the propagation of genetics which bring individuals down to barely above that threshold. This has the delayed contrary effect we witness today.
No. Uh-uh. This is totally bs. I'm reading the
Indigo and Crystal children definitions at the moment. Supposedly Crystal children between birth and 7 are happy, delightful and forgiving. All babies are like that.
Nope. Only about 60%. Another 30% will be slow to warm up, and 10% will be 'difficult' (scientific term

). Temperament is interesting too, but not exactly relevant here..