“…Despite the excellent record, and their obvious cognitive sophistication, Neanderthals did not show the exponential rate of cultural change characterizing our own species from about 80,000 years ago to the present (Mellars, 1998b(Mellars, , 2004Tattersall, 1999). As already noted, most archaeologists and anthropologists conclude that, despite their many similarities to us, Neanderthals lacked some cognitive and/or linguistic features of our species (Gunz, Neubauer, Maureille, & Hublin, 2010;Hublin, 2009;Mellars, 1998a;Mithen, 2005;Schepartz, 1993;Shea, 2003;Wynn & Coolidge, 2004; for a dissenting view, see Dediu & Levinson, 2013). While I agree with the premise that Neanderthals lacked something, I think it unlikely that they lacked language entirely; rather, a multicomponent perspective suggests that they already possessed some aspects of modern language and cognition, but lacked one or more others.…”