Social Neanderthals

"Neanderthals occasionally scooped out a depression for the fire, but only rarely lined the pit with stone, or built the hearth in any significant way . And the hearths were not predictably centered in the living area; they were in fact rather haphazardly placed…Neanderthals appear not to have sat around their fires for storytelling, or ritual, keeping the fire intense, and using it as the metaphorical center of the social group. If Neanderthals did not , or could not , maintain shared group attention for purely social purposes, then their lives were very different from our own.
~ Frederick Coolidge and Thomas Wynn - The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (2009)"