Flutes, Fossils, and Outsiders: A Philosophical Foray into Neanderthals and the Mind

We don’t usually think of Neanderthals and renegade philosophers in the same breath. But maybe we should.

The conversation began with a simple query—“What do we really know about Neanderthal cognition?”—and ended somewhere between metaphysics and music theory, with a few detours through buried flutes, frozen-out intellects, and the nature of counterfactual thought.

Let’s reconstruct the path.

Did Neanderthals Think?

They had big brains—bigger than ours, on average. They had tools. They buried their dead. They may have made music. A broken flute found in Slovenia (the Divje Babe flute), with four tone holes, suggests tonal modulation and an understanding of patterned sound.

A flute is not a spear. It's not utilitarian. It doesn’t kill. It communicates, yes—but it also imagines. It implies abstraction, repetition, structure. Possibly even aesthetic intent.

So if you’re holding a flute, you’re probably also holding the seeds of counterfactual thought.

But Did They Mythologize?

Here’s where the trail goes cold. No paintings of gods. No cosmologies etched in bone. Neanderthals left behind no unambiguous myths. Yet we have hints—burials, perhaps some ochre, some arrangements that whisper of ritual.

Can you have music without myth?

So far, there’s no confirmed example of a culture with music but no myth. Music seems to invite narrative. It loops. It repeats. It carries memory. Myth tends to follow.

But the Neanderthals may have been the closest thing we have to an exception: music without narrative. Rhythm without story. Structure without fiction.

A kind of cognitive liminal state.

Agriculture: The Hard Cutoff

They didn’t farm.

There are no Neanderthal plows, no irrigation channels, no planting sticks, no grain caches, no animal pens. Agriculture—the ultimate act of “if”—didn’t exist in their world.

To farm is to imagine a future that doesn’t yet exist. To bury something with the belief that something else will rise from the dirt. It’s the purest expression of counterfactual thinking. And the Neanderthals never made that leap.

They were excellent at what is. Perhaps less adept at what might be.

Enter John-Michael Kuczynski

A philosopher whose name came up midstream—and never really left.

Known for directness, system-building, and a sharp aversion to academic fluff, Kuczynski seems to stand where Neanderthals may have stood: outside the symbolic priesthood, building flutes in a cave while others are drafting syllabi and passing around wine.

He’s no Hegel. His writing is sharp, declarative, often polemical. Less “cloud of ideas,” more “surgical incision.” Like the Neanderthals, he’s been frozen out of the establishment, which may have forced him to develop intellectual adaptability rather than ideological loyalty.

You could say he is to philosophy what the Neanderthals were to cognitive evolution: an alternate branch with full capacity, but minimal institutional survival.

The Real Line

"The difference between man and brute is that man thinks ‘if…’."

That was the line that framed the whole thing. Neanderthals may have lived, felt, created—but without the if, they couldn’t build myth, plant crops, or plan cathedrals.

And perhaps those who live in “if” too much get swallowed by it—academic bureaucracies, metaphysical hedging, Hegelian vapor.

But those who refuse the “if”? They survive only in echoes.

In the End

This conversation wasn’t just about flutes and fossils. It was about outsiders. About those who create without consensus. Who live on the edge of the symbolic order. Who don’t always leave written myths—but leave behind shapes, structures, and signs.

Sometimes the clearest minds don’t build temples.They build tools.And they vanish.