The other humans types were meant to be pretty good, just overspecialized or competing with a more potent competitor. Koalas and pandas are overspecialized and terrible at their specialty anyway.
"We'll eat anything"
- The true Advantage of the Cro-Magnons.
BTW I've heard a whole lot of dumb theories about how our ancestors were meant to be smarter than Neanderthals, but each of the theories was massively flawed or just didn't make any sense at all. Basically, when people grasp at straws to keep trying to prove the same thing that has no actual evidence, you know you have a myth on your hands.
The only provable difference is tha Neanderthals ate much more of a meat-centric diet. So they were in a predator / prey balance with the fauna.
Our ancestors were true omnivores, so we hunted, but when the fauna died off, we stick around eating plants, thus ensuring the fauna population is permanently depressed instead of cyclic. So we probably indirectly caused the decline / assimilation of neanderthals by collapsing the big animal stock they relied on.
Some of the stupider theories I've heard about "we beat Neanderthals because of our better brains" include:
- Neanderthals lacked "lateral thinking" (based purely on their tools). Now this one posits "lack brains" because Cro-magnons had tools made of more variety of materials, e.g. fish hooks made of bone. Never mind that materials are dependent on environment, but that same argument was applied in a racist fashion in the past against e.g. Australian Aboriginals. So it's both dubious and has links to known racist arguments.
- Neanderthals lacked
conscious thought. Seriously, for real, an acquaintance saw this on a doco and believed it. The argument goes that Neanderthals made stone tools purely from "instinct" (e.g. they
evolved the trait of making stone tools without actually being aware of what they were doing) and lacked any consciousness because they're "animals", meanwhile our ancestors had the better "conscious" version of toolmaking. I kid you not, this is was a real theory on a science doco. But the whole premise goes against occam's razor. We know our ancestors made the same types of tools as Neanderthals, yet we're meant to believe that both races did it according to completely different mental processes (evolved vs learned). Doesn't make sense, basically.
There are many other dumb theories like this, but they're all trying desperately to prove the "we are smart, they are dumb" argument, based on our ancestors having different tools to their ancestors.