[HN Gopher] Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories ...
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Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54k years ago
at Mandrin
Author : mzs
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-02-10 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: it looks like your account is using HN primarily for
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|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
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| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I was told by my parents early on: I can ask for anything.
|
| Doesn't mean, I was getting it.
| [deleted]
| lqet wrote:
| I would _love_ to know what early Sapiens thought about the
| Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is very
| strong, but acts a bit foolishly sometimes? As we have been the
| only remaining member of the Homo species for thousands of years
| now, living side by side with creatures that are only _quite_
| like us is an experience that has been lost in the collective
| human memory. I think it is pretty likely that Sapiens back then
| just thought of a Neanderthal tribe in a similar way they thought
| about another Sapiens tribe. I read somewhere that the body
| proportions of Neanderthals are within the range of body
| proportions of modern humans, and research suggests that there
| was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals.
|
| (As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women
| looked like this [0], they certainly looked a bit strange, but
| they were not repelling or appeared un-human.)
|
| On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why
| most people assume that humans today are, on average, more
| intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago. If anything,
| thousands of years of agriculture and living in large settlements
| _removed_ the evolutionary pressure to be a quick and inventive
| observer of your environment. It is much more easy to somehow get
| by in an established farming community with thousands of members
| if you are a bit dense than it is if you are part of a small
| tribe of hunters.
|
| [0]
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Reconstr...
| agumonkey wrote:
| about intelligence, being in post agricultural has benefits,
| but it removes the constant stimulation and challenge of wild
| life indeed. The former allows for slightly more explicit and
| abstract thinking, the latter for intuitionistic skills
| (ability to find quick solution that work for critical
| situations). I'm interested in this topic because spending time
| in the woods made my brain operate very differently. Also
| crafting with no evolved tooling is very hard.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Maybe you should use another word instead of intelligence. You
| don't need much intelligence to survive and thrive as a pack
| hunter. Wolves, lions, and other animals manage to do that, and
| they are not as intelligent as humans. Intelligence is
| something you need in a complex society rather than in the
| nature.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| As far as I know the commonly accepted meme of neanderthals as
| dopey slow caveman versions of us is not as well accepted as it
| once was. I've read that the current idea is that neanderthals
| were stronger, faster, and possibly even smarter than sapiens
| but that they were less efficient, suited more for quick
| sprinting and hard fighting in environments with plentiful food
| sources and less suited to long distance travel, endurance
| hunting, and calorie-starved environments.
|
| In effect, we won the evolutionary race by being a honda civic
| instead of a Porsche 911.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| I believe Neanderthals were also less pack oriented, so
| humans just had bigger powers in numbers.
|
| It's also fascinating that Neanderthals soundly beat us in
| the first round of incursions, and 50k years later humans
| presumably wiped them out entirely + all other variations of
| homonids
| arbitrage wrote:
| Neanderthals were better able to cope in colder climates
| than modern humans. The climate may just have pushed the
| immigration of them many several thousand years back.
| ed_balls wrote:
| If I were to bet my money I would bet it on social structure
| or a disease.
|
| - Homo Sapiens had tribes 100-200 people when Neanderthals
| had 20-30. They were outnumbered. I'm not suggesting brutal
| wipe out, but competition for resources.
|
| - we "won" because we were immune to a disease be brought
| from Africa.
| bigodbiel wrote:
| Evolutionary The Tortoise and the Hare
| ethbr0 wrote:
| As someone with an abnormal amount of Neanderthal DNA
| (relatively speaking for modern populations), I do seem to
| run a higher metabolic rate. I'd never thought to associate
| the two though.
| alcover wrote:
| How much do you have ? If very high I wonder how it can
| happen, since I'd guess ancient admixtures should dilute a
| lot over time.
| wcoenen wrote:
| It's about 0% for sub-Sahara Africans, and in the 1% to
| 4% range for the rest. [1]
|
| This may not mean exactly what you think it means though.
| Your non-Neanderthal genes are also almost identical to
| the Neanderthal ones, otherwise interbreeding would have
| been impossible. It's just that genes come with slight
| variances that can be used to trace ancestry.
|
| E.g. you may also have heard that humans and chimpansee
| DNA is 98.8% identical, so there is obviously a different
| type of similarity metric being used there
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1245938
| kuhewa wrote:
| Some of the very similar Neanderthal variants of genes
| are manifest as important phenotypic differences though.
| Traits ranging from hair straightness, sneezing after
| dark chocolate, to severe COVID risk. Some alleles are
| now suddenly quite deleterious due to modern lifestyles,
| like the CHRN3 gene variant, but wasn't before widespread
| smoking.
| whodidntante wrote:
| It is also quite possible that the Neanderthals were
| stronger, faster, smarter, and more moral/ethical, and that
| sapiens were simply crueler, more diabolical, more savage.
|
| It is quite difficult to imagine a species that is more
| vicious to even its own members, let alone members of other
| species, than ours is.
| mellavora wrote:
| the percentage of deaths caused by other members of the
| same species:
|
| Hylobates lar - 8.93% Gorilla beringei - 5.00% Pan
| troglodytes - 4.49% Hylobates agilis - 4.17% Nomascus
| hainanus - 1.00% Pongo abelii - 0.82% Pan paniscus - 0.68%
| Nomascus gabriellae - 0.59% Nomascus leucogenys - 0.59%
| Nomascus siki - 0.59% Nomascus concolor - 0.36% Gorilla
| gorilla - 0.14%
|
| Modern humans - 0.14% Medieval Age, Old World - 12.08% (+-
| 7.15%)
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf?referrer_a
| c...
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > I never understood why most people assume that humans today
| are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000
| years ago.
|
| Evolution of our species continues and some changes in our
| anatomy are being observed even in the last 100 years of our
| history. The evolutionary pressure never stopped, it just
| changed its form. We are no longer competing with nature, we
| are competing with ourselves, adjusting our diet, exposure to
| seasonal weather, sun and fresh air, physical activities and
| mental challenges. I would say yes, we may have become more
| intelligent, even if we lost our connection to nature. We just
| use our intelligence for different things: our society, our
| language are much more sophisticated, our abstract thinking and
| creativity have advanced, some of us may have got more control
| over our bodies (I'm pretty sure modern athletes are more
| developed than our ancestors).
| snicker7 wrote:
| We are not smarter than our ancestors. Human brain size is
| down 20% from peak, and is continuing to shrink.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| If size of brains were any measure of IQ, elephants and
| whales would be the smartest animals on this planet.
|
| Brains consume a lot of resources, so evolution had to
| optimize their efficiency. They need energy, they need
| cooling, they need removal of waste, they must deliver
| signals faster - all those things are pushing for
| miniaturization.
| willmw101 wrote:
| Most of the newer research on this topic suggests that it's
| neural connection complexity, and specifically frontal lobe
| volume, rather than overall brain size that determines
| intelligence or brain power.
|
| https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-
| do...
|
| >Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it
| under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe
| that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization
| of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly
| determines a brain's computational capacity. This view is
| supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated
| with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which
| is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer
| brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses
| between different species suggests that what makes up
| synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on
| intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although
| having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big
| smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how
| efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with
| each other.
|
| reply
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > We are not smarter than our ancestors. Human brain size
| is down 20% from peak, and is continuing to shrink.
|
| Processors in 2000 were ~42nm in size, now they're ~5nm in
| size. Not only did they get faster as they grew smaller,
| they became more efficient as well.
|
| https://www.technotification.com/2021/06/what-is-nm-in-
| proce...
| Juliate wrote:
| > our society, our language are much more sophisticated, our
| abstract thinking and creativity have advanced,
|
| Can we be so sure? Our tools have evolved and become more
| sophisticated thanks for our industry for sure, but that says
| nothing of intelligence per se.
|
| How much more or less sophisticated and creative were humans
| only 150/200 years ago? Yet, technologically... things have
| moved quite a bit. Technology that has built upon a lot of
| precedents.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 200 years is not long time ago, the changes may be subtle.
| I'm not aware of any research in this field, but mass
| education improves our cognitive abilities and I won't be
| surprised to see if natural selection favors those who
| respond to education better. Our species developed new ways
| to pass ,,genetic" information to next generations beyond
| DNA. We may be almost the same as ancient human right after
| birth, but we acquire and encode in our behavior and body
| much more extra information as we grow. Our biome adjusts
| to our food habits, our hormonal system adapts to our level
| of stress, our immune system gets upgrades via vaccines etc
| etc. And all of this is controlled by our intelligence.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >Can we be so sure?
|
| We have enough studies on the impacts of nutrition in the
| womb and the impact of experience and neglect on brain
| development in children that we can be sure that
| intelligence is more advanced. More complex languages leads
| to more complex thoughts. Better nutrition leads to greater
| intelligence. Both for our normal communication but also
| for languages to describe abstract ideas like mathematics.
|
| If this still doesn't sound definite, then I think we are
| getting into the issue of what is intelligence and how do
| you measure it in a person or a population. But then we
| would need to get into answering just how can we be sure
| humans are more intelligent than a wide selection of
| animals and even non-animals. Same for creativity and
| sophistication.
| flessner wrote:
| I think a lot of this discussion can evolve around
| definitions.
|
| If we look at history back until the industrial revolution,
| I would guess that less people had to work on food
| production and thus could go into creative fields.
|
| Intelligence is better measurable through IQ tests and we
| can see IQ score rising in societies today. (Flynn Effect)
| Juliate wrote:
| Intelligence is also highly context-specific. Context
| today is not the same for the average human 200 years
| ago, even more different 2000 or 20k years ago.
|
| I'm not sure high IQ people from today would make it far
| in more ancient times, and not because smarter or dumber,
| but only because they are unadapted.
| HappyDreamer wrote:
| > Intelligence is also highly context-specific
|
| It's not though. It's the opposite, and that's what makes
| it interesting, and why it's being measured. The g
| factor:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
|
| General intelligence is related to the ability to learn
| new things in general, no matter the context.
|
| And today's humans, would, if they got to start as babies
| 20k years ago, learn all there was to know, about that
| world. And they'd start feeling bored. Maybe they'd try
| to build and invent things, just to escape the otherwise
| for-the-brain empty days.
|
| (You somehow got it the other way around :-) I wonder how
| you formed your opinions / beliefs about intelligence? If
| it's ok if I ask)
|
| **
|
| If, in your comment, replace IQ with "wisdom" and
| "knowledge", then it makes sense. A grown up human of
| toady -- yes, definitely unadapted, knowledge wise.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > And they'd start feeling bored.
|
| Likely not. Agafia Lykova is not bored, she's still not
| using any of the modern technology and she's still living
| like her ancestors lived 500-100 years ago. And she was
| young when her family was discovered.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| This is fascinating, and now I've fallen down "See Also"
| Wikipedia rabbit hole. I'm glad you shared this.
| HappyDreamer wrote:
| But there's around 10 billion people on the planet, you
| can always find some unusual person to make a point.
|
| In this case, though, she might agree with me, I'd say --
| in that she spends part of her time reading and
| constructing things, from the article you linked:
| "reading and construction".
|
| Modern tech? I think there's lots of cool not-modern
| tech, ancient tech.
|
| _Edit:_ She 's an amazingly cool person! Thanks for
| linking the article, I might have a closer look at her &
| her life (now done. I wonder how many books she has to
| read, and after how long she's forgotten them so she can
| re-read)
|
| _Edit2:_ Sorry if my first version of this post sounded
| a bit grumpy. Now edited
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| My point is, our intelligence requires some activation.
| It is context-specific in the sense, that pure brain
| cannot develop it alone, in isolation or in a low tech
| culture. Configuration of our brain takes time and
| education, so modern human in prehistoric context may not
| reach the same IQ as if this person would have studied in
| one of the best schools on this planet. Agafia is modern
| human being, but she never had a chance to learn all the
| things that others had access to. When she met the
| civilization, she was already an adult person and her
| ability and desire to learn more was limited. She ran
| away from civilization back to her hut in taiga, and
| never wanted to live another life. She does not read a
| lot and, if you watch the documentary about her, she's
| reading Bible or books for children, so it's not the same
| being fond of reading as for someone with university
| degree. She is unusual, yet she is normal, and she is a
| good illustration of what would happen if modern human
| had to become a hunter-gatherer, losing almost all
| cultural baggage except faith.
| AvocadoPanic wrote:
| Do you have evidence for statisticly significant
| increases in IQ that persist into adulthood as a result
| of education?
|
| Success in education is correlated with high IQ. Much the
| same way high IQ is correlated with many forms of
| success.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Human brain size had been increasing until 35000 years ago and
| then started to decrease. Modern human is less intelligent than
| human of old times.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I've always thought that the existence of the uncanny valley is
| interesting. For some reason, it was advantageous for us as a
| species to be creeped out and skeptical of things that looked
| very nearly human, but not human.
|
| I'm sure that informed how early humans felt about
| neanderthals.
| cletus wrote:
| Two things spring to mind:
|
| The first is that how we think is deeply intertwined with
| language. There's tons of evidence of this, not the least of
| which is Helen Keller's description of her world before she
| learned language. We'll probably never know what language
| existed 50,000+ years ago, how sophisticated or simple it was
| and how it affected how our ancestors thought.
|
| The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world,
| which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going
| back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period
| fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how _alien_ we
| would find the ethics and how societies worked. So would we
| even be able to relate to Homo Sapiens (or Neanderthals for
| that matter).
|
| Some things we'd be able to related to (eg the earliest burial
| rites we've found evidence were from ~75,000 years ago) but I
| imagine a lot we simply couldn't.
|
| Some Neanderthal DNA exists in the modern gene pool. That
| itself raises many questions. Was this violent? How was it
| viewed? Were these people viewed the same? How dominant were
| large family/tribal groups?
| spideymans wrote:
| > The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world,
| which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records
| going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this
| period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how
| alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked
|
| Can you elaborate some more on these differences? I'd love to
| learn more.
| cletus wrote:
| Look into Roman and Greek history. Slavery, the treatment
| of slaves, the attitudes towards minors (slaves and
| otherwise) for sexual purposes and so on. It's actually
| pretty abhorrent.
|
| Another example: the origin of the word "decimate".
| "Decimation" was a Roman military punishment to military
| units in provinces that rebel against Rome. I don't believe
| it was widespread but it was common enough to spawn the
| modern word. "Deci-" here is Latin meaning "10". The
| punishment was this: soldiers (typically) were put in
| groups of 10. Each group was responsible for picking which
| of those 10 would die _and be responsible for killing that
| person_. The general way Rome quashed rebellion in general
| was brutal.
|
| The amazing thing we actually have first hand accounts on
| Rome's military conquests in the forms of the writings of
| Julius Caesar (eg with the conquest of Gaul, which was
| essentially genocide). Now first hand accounts aren't
| necessarily accurate (eg Herodotus tended to embellish) but
| there are other accounts that lend a lot of credence to
| Caesar's accounts.
| imbnwa wrote:
| I mean Ridley Scott's The Last Duel features the last
| instance in France of its eponymous jurisprudence technique
| which came from Germanic tribal law before they were even
| literate (Germanic tribal warlords becoming the aristocracy
| everywhere but Ireland in post-Roman Western Europe), and
| this is about 500 or 600 years ago, never mind how much
| further back into the Bronze or previous time periods that
| dueling as juridical adjudication came from and what the
| world looked like to make such an idea palpable.
|
| Wasn't an American President killed in a pistol duel not 130
| years ago or so?
|
| My grandfather grew up on a farm and never went to high
| school (which was a perfectly fine life decision in that
| milieu) and fought in WWII at 16 by lying about his age cause
| there were no birth certificates to prove otherwise
|
| I think we very much underestimate how different human
| reality is as far back as 4000 years ago, nevermind 50k
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > I read somewhere that the body proportions of Neanderthals
| are within the range of body proportions of modern humans, and
| research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens
| and Neanderthals.
|
| Of course there was interbreeding. Their smaller population was
| bred into the larger Sapiens population. This is why most of us
| (Caucasians) have some percentage of Neanderthal in us.
| [deleted]
| wefarrell wrote:
| Modern adult humans would absolutely score higher on all tests
| of human intelligence that we use today. We're not smarter,
| intelligence is context specific and it's not possible to
| objectively compare two brains that developed to survive in
| vastly different worlds.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think the assumption that past rivals are dumb, as we tend to
| roll over the details. I think overall there's an assumption
| that modern humans = better.
|
| Looking at contemporary history, there are dramatic differences
| in power dynamic between different human cohorts. There's
| nothing that separates the biological abilities of any two
| populations on earth, but the one with the machine guns and
| artillery will always beat the guy with a bow and spear.
|
| Look at the fate of the indigenous people of the americas.
| Europe didn't send its best people, but disease, better weapons
| and toxic politics carried the age.
| soperj wrote:
| >Europe didn't send its best people, but disease, better
| weapons and toxic politics carried the age.
|
| It was mostly disease. The muskets at the time were tragic. A
| properly trained infantry soldier could fire at most 4 rounds
| per minute.
| thehappypm wrote:
| There's a theory that Neanderthals didn't have very strong
| language skills. So just like you can communicate with the dog
| reasonably well, maybe we could have sort of communicated with
| Neanderthals. But nothing resembling the rich conversation that
| Homo sapiens is capable of. Bearing that theory in mind, the
| humans would have just been much more able to out-compete,
| deceive, and defeat Neanderthals little by little over time.
|
| "Winter is coming. Should we migrate down to the coast? Last
| winter, there were lots of crabs, but my dad said many winters
| ago there was a terrible flood that killed many of his friends.
| We could stay here and try to gather as much wood as we can to
| keep warm and try to hunt the deer. The dumb people are
| wandering up the mountain. It's always cold up there. They
| won't survive."
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The cave paintings they left behind suggest otherwise.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Why does a painting imply complex language?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Cave paintings are in many cases real artistic
| expressions of animal scenes. Some use the contours of
| the caves to almost deliver an animation effect. It seems
| unlikely that an entity capable of depicting a nuanced
| abstract scene would be unable to verbally express
| similar concepts.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Doesn't seem like a very sound theory, it's just more
| "Neanderthals were more stupid" with a backwards reasoning
| why they lasted so long.
|
| It's more likely they were successful but slowly bred into
| the larger Homo Sapien population over time, judging from
| everyone's genetics today. Caucasians have way too high of a
| percentage of Neanderthal for them to have been killed off.
| Most of their population bred in.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It's a core argument in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Ok, he's most likely wrong.
|
| Interbreeding is pretty much proven.
|
| Do you know why he thought they didn't have strong
| language skills and how he linked that to deception and
| such or was he guessing?
|
| Because we have genetic tests nowadays, and it looks like
| they all bred in from the high percentages people have.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Wouldn't current percentages depend more on how adaptive
| those particular genes are than what the starting
| percentage was? How many generations between then and
| now?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Interbreeding did happen but it's probably not true that
| Neanderthals got wholesale assimilated into Homo sapiens.
| More that there was some low level of interbreeding.
|
| I recommend reading the book, and also I would not
| recommend dismissing a respected book in one sentence,
| but I will say that the argument is largely
| anthropological. that the millions of years of human
| existence without development into more advanced
| civilizations can best be explained by language and oral
| history. More specifically, the ability to think in
| abstract and communicate it to others.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > Interbreeding did happen but it's probably not true
| that Neanderthals got wholesale assimilated into Homo
| sapiens. More that there was some low level of
| interbreeding.
|
| Why is it probably not true?
|
| > I recommend reading the book, and also I would not
| recommend dismissing a respected book in one sentence
|
| Seems reading the book wouldn't help me if you read it
| and can't argue the points on it's behalf.
|
| I'll ask this again:
|
| Do you know why he thought they didn't have strong
| language skills and how he linked that to deception and
| such or was he guessing?
| patcon wrote:
| STRONG agreement! I think if we'd found a way to co-exist with
| Neanderthals, we'd be faring much better with toeing around the
| edge of the great filter of Fermi's paradox[1]. The
| contemporary ability ("contemporary" as far as life history
| goes) to craft stories about human vs animal/nature has
| stimulated catastrophic growth and "othering" of nature in
| really significant way. Every religion and belief system would
| be affected by having a "bridge" intelligence closer to our
| own. (Not saying we'd have a history free of shameful treatment
| though.)
|
| Related: a past comment on article "Scientists grow bigger
| monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104373
|
| While recklessly creating new intelligent life is ethically
| nauseating to me, I also fear the status quo of NOT needing to
| consider these dilemmas. In my mind it's a clash between my
| visceral horror (of creating an intelligent being that is not
| human) vs a very real fear of global human extinction (of
| continuing on our destructive track without hard, global-scale
| conversations about our
| relationship/responsibility/entanglement with animals and other
| forms of life)
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Great_Filter
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0],
| they certainly looked a bit strange, but they were not
| repelling or appeared un-human.
|
| The theory is out there that Neanderthals were furry; I believe
| that's because there isn't evidence of them wearing clothing.
| usrusr wrote:
| "I would love to know what early Sapiens thought about the
| Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is
| very strong, but acts a bit foolishly sometimes?"
|
| If population density was as low as we like to imagine (was it?
| Or is it just sites where traces survived into the present
| being so rare?), perhaps a neanderthaliensis tribe was just as
| alien to them as any foreign sapiens tribe would be?
| enriquto wrote:
| > As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal
| women looked like this [...]
|
| Apparently, this is not what happened. It seems that there are
| no neanderthal traces on human mitochondrial dna. This means
| that all neandertal legacy comes from neanderthal males mating
| with human females.
|
| It's not a question of how attractive you found a neanderthal
| girl. Maybe as a human male you wouldn't be strong enough to
| seduce her!
| titzer wrote:
| > research suggests that there was interbreeding between
| Sapiens and Neanderthals.
|
| Yes, this very clearly established with genetic studies now.
| Caucasians have around 1.5% to 2% Neanderthal DNA.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| If that were true, I'm not sure we'd use the term "extinct" to
| refer to Neanderthals.
|
| (Some) humans are willing to mate with just about anything.
| There would be human-dog hybrids if it wasn't genetically
| impossible, as unsettling as that thought is.
|
| Seems more likely that we treated Neanderthals as humans do
| with other outsiders: we exterminated them and took their
| resources.
|
| Word has it that you can find their descendants on Wall Street
| though.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| They certainly didn't treat other humans anything different.
| In those days "us" meant the tribe or family group. Everyone
| else was "them", sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe,
| depending on the situation, resource scarcity and the power
| of both sides. And those were the violent times, so when
| there was no enough food for everyone, competition (whether
| it's human, neanderthal or animal) had to be either scared
| away or destroyed. That's how all creatures in nature
| function, it's a matter of survival, there's nothing
| unethical about that.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| It's important not to underestimate the intellectual life
| of ancient cultures. They were humans, with language, and
| probably had music, stories, traditions, religion,
| conflict, politics, and more. Methods of oral traditions
| have been identified that are essentially equivalent to
| modern memory athlete techniques, hundreds of thousands of
| factoids could be transferred with very little "bitrot"
| over generations. There are traditions in Australian
| aboriginal cultures that go back 40,000 years, and very
| sophisticated memory techniques that perpetuated their
| culture.
|
| The relations between tribes near each other would have
| been as nuanced and varied and sophisticated and weird as
| any collectives of humans in relation to each other in
| modern life. "Those asshats downriver are rude, but they
| trade fair"
|
| Modern life has given us profound advantages over previous
| generations, but we are basically the exact same kind of
| creature as plains walking humans from 300k years ago.
|
| The notion of primitive simple hunter gatherer tribes
| doesn't account for the innate complexity of individuals.
| Their experience going through life would be the same as
| ours, we just have better (on most measures) tools and
| knowledge.
| mc32 wrote:
| Isn't it possible that humans simply outbred them? You don't
| have to "get rid" of a population if you can interbreed and
| outbreed a given stock, no? It's not like one day they exist
| and the next they don't; rather, they slowly get absorbed
| into the larger, faster breeding pop. Or even disease they
| had no natural immunity for. I presume there would be some
| conflict as even among human pops conflict is a given --but
| not necessary one to the end.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A clearer view might be, the population distribution
| changed. Fewer 'purebred' anything existed over time, and
| more mixed individuals. Until today we have a large
| fraction of humanity with both genes.
|
| It's not necessary to posit a catastrophic change. There
| were simply more of the new kind, so there were more of
| their genes in the mix and fewer Neanderthal.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It's possible. It's just one of those explanations that
| we'd really love to believe, since the alternative is so
| unthinkable. It's been a hobby of mine to be skeptical of
| it.
|
| Even Kurzgesagt mentioned in passing that we're not sure if
| it was due to "a series of minor genocides."
|
| - https://youtu.be/dGiQaabX3_o?t=79
|
| - https://youtu.be/CWu29PRCUvQ?t=165
|
| If anyone knows of breadcrumbs to follow, please chime in.
| Genetic testing implies it should be possible to figure out
| how much interbreeding took place. We seem to be able to
| trace extinction events with some degree of accuracy, so it
| would be surprising if a genocide-type extinction event was
| easy to confuse with interbreeding.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| > since the alternative is so unthinkable
|
| In the scientific parts of the ethnographic record (there
| is a split in anthro between scientists and non-
| scientists, see e.g. Napoleon Chagnon[0]; basically, he
| pointed out that the Yanomamo were breeding themselves
| for violence and was punished for it) the idea that our
| M.O. in small-scale societies when encountering
| outsiders, or when invading other groups, is to kill the
| men and take the women and children (often as slaves) is
| not all that controversial. See e.g.
| http://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon
| robwwilliams wrote:
| It is interesting to read David Reich's wonderful book
| "Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New
| Science of the Human Past". He deals carefully and
| cautiously with the processes of human population
| "replacements". So cautiously that the word "genocide" is
| not even in the index.
|
| But with few exceptions, when I read between his lines, I
| see that ugly word tacitly, time and time again.
| Exceptions include some Celtic migration events, but in
| most cases the DNA results indicate major breaks in DNA
| haplotypes that are consistent with an unhappy end to one
| group.
|
| And of course recent "sapiens" history gives us our own
| backyard examples--unrelenting!
|
| If you read Napolean Chagnon's "Nobel Savages" or Polly
| Wiessner's and Akii Tumu's "Historical Vines" you can get
| a good=bad gut feeling for what "replacement" probably
| meant operationally in pre-literate cultures. Sadly not
| much different since the invention of Greek orthography,
| Gutenberg's printing press, TV and the internet. Us
| versus the Other is apparently the name of the human
| game.
|
| If we could get everyone to absorb Richard Rorty's
| pragmatic approach to a life well lived starting in grade
| school, now that would be real progress.
| ummonk wrote:
| The genetic data is clear that interbreeding took place,
| and neanderthals contribute a few % of modern human DNA
| in many Eurasian populations. The lack of surviving
| neanderthal y chromosomes could be suggestive of genocide
| though, but it's also possible that the neanderthal y
| chromosome lineages in humans disappeared due to
| subsequent expansions by newer lineages in human
| populations.
|
| For an example of non-genocide, look at African bushmen.
| While their relations with other humans aren't always
| great, African bushmen populations haven't really
| experienced any genocidal decline. But if/when they fully
| interbreed with other humans and get incorporated into
| the gene pool (after evolving as a separate branch from
| mainline homo sapiens for over a hundred thousand years),
| their genes will be an even smaller fraction of the human
| gene pool than the neanderthal genes.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > While their relations with other humans aren't always
| great, African bushmen populations haven't really
| experienced any genocidal decline.
|
| They are confined to a few small areas in South Africa
| and a few small areas much, much further north than that.
| The obvious implication is that they used to cover the
| area in between, too.
|
| This doesn't make for a very compelling example of non-
| genocide.
| asdff wrote:
| We did in fact interbreed. Some modern human populations
| are as much as 5% neanderthal in their DNA. That much
| gene content to me suggest that this population was
| absorbed; a one off breeding here or there would not
| persist to 5% of the genetic material millions of years
| ago today unless hybridization was occurring frequently.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| Neanderthals and humans co-existed for some 5,000 years.
| Think of that in terms of our modern history, and how
| many ethnical groups was there in that time span - and
| almost all of them perished completely, either destroyed
| or assimilated by others (usually a combination of both).
| Thinking of it, neanderthals actually lasted for quite
| long time, probably thanks to the overall scarcity of
| hominid populations and vast territory available to them.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| We also lived in caves for several tens of millenia
| across multiple stretches of time, without written
| language. There may have been some sort of ephemeral
| symbolic transfer (knots, beads, wood carvings,) but it
| looks like those cultures used primarily oral traditions.
| We know many non literate cultures develop memory palace
| techniques, so rigorous oral traditions can be incredibly
| durable and stable, with lots of information passed down
| accurately. All that to say, human tribes could have had
| detailed and specific knowledge of interactions with
| Neanderthals over millenia, and developed peaceful
| tradition that maximizes cooperation, or at least borders
| that kept conflict minimized. Neanderthals could likely
| do the same memory tricks.
|
| 5000 years is a blip - if humans find a sufficiently
| habitable environment, we apparently can settle for a
| pretty low quality of life.
|
| It only works until it doesn't, though. Neanderthals or
| humans could have initiated an incident, in which
| traditions were distrusted or discarded or lost on either
| side, resulting in hostility, or they lost their elders
| to disease and the knowledge to survive.
|
| Just like megafauna extinction, "bad humans were bad"
| probably doesn't come close to what actually happened.
|
| Neanderthals were likely as or more intelligent than
| humans, implying susceptibility to all the same
| conflicts, biased thinking, and bad incentives that
| affect human cultures. It could be environmental or
| biological or a pure fluke that Neanderthals didn't
| outlive humans, but whatever the reason they're gone,
| it's going to be just as convoluted and nuanced as the
| rise and fall of millenia old human cultures.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Nobody ever lived in caves.
|
| Artefacts were left in caves because they're the only
| place where the artifacts can persist for hundreds and
| thousands of years, and ancient man knew this just like
| the modern man.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Cavemen are a trope, for sure, but there were cave
| dwellers, known as troglodytes. There were extensive
| periods of time where caves represented a really good
| solution to environmental and climate changes over the
| last 300,000 years.
|
| Troglodytes were relatively rare, and most prehistoric
| humans were probably of the nomadic or small village
| types of hunter gatherer cultures.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-humans-
| wea... - the toba catastrophe was one such event that
| likely forced humans to live in caves extensively.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnacle_Point
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blombos_Cave
| jccooper wrote:
| There are plenty of caves that show evidence of long-term
| use of fire and burials, a good indication of habitation.
| However, it's true that caves were never a primary mode
| of habitation, just one that was convenient when it could
| be found... and pretty much the only one that we can see
| now due to differential preservation.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > If that were true, I'm not sure we'd use the term "extinct"
| to refer to Neanderthals.
|
| Why not? Lots of our ancestors are extinct.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| You're right. I'm simply mistaken.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis
|
| I like that Homo habilis translates to "handy man" since
| they were the first to use stone tools. https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Evolution_of_g... is also an
| interesting read.
| jccooper wrote:
| I've always enjoyed the theory that the Wild Man figure is a
| cultural memory of the last days of the Neanderthal. It's a bit
| far-fetched, since they've been gone for a very long time, but
| recent realization of specific cultural memories on the order
| of 10,000 years (and of more schematic ideas like the Pleiades
| for even longer) suggests it may be possible.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > I think it is pretty likely that Sapiens back then just
| thought of a Neanderthal tribe in a similar way they thought
| about another Sapiens tribe.
|
| I would think so as well, although the Neanderthal tribes were
| much smaller than Sapiens tribes, weren't they?
| runako wrote:
| Admins: the link is dead, maybe swap for one of the links posted
| by @mzs?
| dang wrote:
| Ok, changed from http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj9496.
| Thanks!
| mzs wrote:
| Thanks for the heads-up. I think there is something that
| automatically switched it to the DOI after I submitted. It
| should redirect to this:
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj9496
| mzs wrote:
| some press coverage
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60305218
|
| https://phys.org/news/2022-02-french-cave-story-neanderthals...
|
| original: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj9496
| trevize1138 wrote:
| The whole story gets more and more interesting and complex over
| time as we uncover it. No single "missing link." No simplistic
| story of homo sapiens coming in and wiping out neanderthals. A
| recent documentary I saw painted this very messy picture of
| migration in-and-out of various parts of Eurasia, back to
| Africa, back out and a general genetic mixing all-around.
| Overall modern humans out-competed neanderthals but also bred
| with them and that DNA shows up in many of us today.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Can you post some info on that doc? Fascinating stuff.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| This was covered via a historic overview of genetics in
| Carl Zimmer's 2018 book She Has Her Mother's Laugh towards
| the end as he puts it all together and explains how
| scientists figured it out. IIRC some neanderthal and
| denisova bones still had DNA material.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Of course that does not make it any less messy or bloody. One
| sex for killing, one sex for continuity.
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