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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GameDaddy" data-source="post: 5988960" data-attributes="member: 80711">No one really used bows early on as they simply weren't needed. There was a plentiful amount of Large Herd Animals like Mammoths, Elephants, Giant Sloths,  Bison, Buffalo, and Wild Cattle, hence the heavy spears with large flint projectile tips. Trapping and killing an animal was a team project, where the group would isolate and direct one (or more) of the large animals into a cul-de-sac, dead end canyon, deep ravine, force it over a cliff, or direct it to another inaccessible place where they could take turns sneaking up on it and stabbing at it until it collapsed. Then, plentiful amounts of fresh protein for the next week or so. The rest of the meat they dried out to eat later. A small nomadic family group (10-30) could easily get by taking down about four to five big animals a year, supplemented with foraging. Before agriculture, that was the tried and true hunting method. The Giant Sloths being the slowest, were of course, one of the first species to be hunted to extinction. It was only later, after the biggest animal herds were reduced, that hunters used atl-atls and bows. Bows and Atl-atls are a lot more accurate, use lighter projectiles, are much easier to carry, and have more range than heavy spears (or rocks), making them ideal for hunting mid-sized and small game as well as fast birds. Hunting with rocks was for idiots and homo sapiens... Bows and Atl-atls (as well as rocks) really weren't all that effective versus the largest game animals.Agriculture only really caught on in an area after all the big game animals were mostly gone and the mid-sized, small game, and birds significantly reduced. Neadertals didn't need writing. They were empathetic to the point of being psychic, spoke in the original common tongue as described accurately in the bible, and were just better at non-verbal communications, than the more predatory homo-sapiens who moved in on their traditional hunting grounds.I wouldn't give Neandertals a -2 INT in my games, or a -2 DEX, simply because their is no direct evidence to back that up, however I would give them a -2 CHR, as they usually reacted poorly with other humanoid groups whenever they encountered them. Staying in smaller family groups they didn't breed as much as their homo-sapien counterparts (another reason they didn't hunt out all the big wildlife in Northern Europe). They were eventually overrun, in pretty much the same manner as Native Americans were overrun in the much more recent colonization of North and South America (1592-1700 ad).</blockquote>

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