[HN Gopher] Neanderthals' use of complex adhesives shows high co...
___________________________________________________________________
Neanderthals' use of complex adhesives shows high cognitive
abilities
Author : wglb
Score : 139 points
Date : 2024-02-26 18:34 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| jeroen79 wrote:
| Why did they previously think they where less cognitive?, just
| because they looked brute?
| mc32 wrote:
| Maybe we can't assert things without evidence. So if we lack
| evidence we can't say one way or the other... maybe lack of
| assertion implies brute?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| What's that phrase? "Oh you sweet summer child"
|
| From William King, the discoverer:
|
| "I feel myself constrained to believe that the thoughts and
| desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those
| of a brute,"
|
| https://www.livescience.com/65003-how-smart-were-
| neanderthal...
| mc32 wrote:
| If Neanderthals discovered a human skeleton, what would
| they have thought?
|
| Woe be us for what thoughts and desires dwelt within its
| brain will suredly our abilities surpass and reach the moon
| after we are rendered history by its superior intellect?
| Fricken wrote:
| Domesticated animals tend to be less intelligent than their
| wild brethren.
|
| I'm not convinced that 10k years of agricultural civilization
| has done anything to make us more intelligent as individuals.
|
| Relative to surviving as a hunter gatherer, you really don't
| have to be that bright to run a farm. Every cognitive asset
| we can lay claim to was once essential for our survival.
|
| If our ancestors were wolves, then we're dogs.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| But also with farming came specialization, like
| blacksmithing, being a priest, being a scribe, trade, etc.
| So at least some of the population was having their brains
| taxed on a regular basis.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The default assumption would be that if they look very
| similar to modern humans, then they should act very similar
| too.
|
| Anything else is twisting the evidence for a political or
| religious foregone conclusion.
| huytersd wrote:
| The have a lower brain to body ratio than Homo sapiens. That
| metric pretty much holds true across the animal kingdom so they
| were probably atleast a little bit dumber.
| karim79 wrote:
| > The have a lower brain to body ratio than Homo sapiens.
| That metric pretty much holds true across the animal kingdom
| so they were probably atleast a little bit dumber.
|
| I'm no expert, but that does seem to be something of an
| oversimplification.[0][1]
|
| [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-
| size-m....
|
| [1] https://serendipstudio.org/bb/kinser/Int3.html
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I would be cautious about brain-body ratios. In all
| vertebrates, a huge chunk of the brain is dealing with
| sensory processing and integration, so brain volume : body
| size doesn't always scale the way you think it would.
|
| The bigger problem is I don't think your numbers are right,
| Neanderthals had notably larger brains than us. Via
| wikipedia:
|
| Average Neanderthal male height: 165cm Average Neanderthal
| male brain volume: 1600cm^3
|
| Average pre-industrial human male height: 165cm Average pre-
| industrial human male brain volume: 1260cm^3
|
| The difference is that Neanderthals also had
| disproportionately larger _eyes_ than us, yet probably
| similar visual acuity: their brains had more pixels to
| process, which takes up quite a bit of volume. In fact it 's
| _eye size_ which seems to be the biggest confounding variable
| in associating brain size with intelligence. Their cerebellum
| was actually smaller than ours, which is probably more
| relevant - but who knows?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
| huytersd wrote:
| They were bulkier. Bigger, heavier bones and apparently a
| significantly higher body mass.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| The problem is that bone/muscle/fat mass doesn't mean
| more _neurons_ connecting to that mass, so that bulk is
| mostly irrelevant. One place where it might matter is if
| Neanderthals had more skin surface area and the same
| density of touch receptors, but that is a pretty marginal
| difference and might not even be true. Their brains were
| notably, disproportionately larger, mostly due to having
| notably larger eyes.
| bsza wrote:
| Because it's a less extraordinary claim than the contrary.
| Attributing intelligence to stuff willy-nilly is why we used to
| think solar eclipses were caused by sun-eating dragons.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Is it so extraordinary?
|
| Humans bred with Neanderthals. And it wasn't just a few over-
| curious, it happened frequently enough there are noticeable
| traces of their DNA in modern humans despite their Millenia
| long extinction.
|
| This means that were having sex with Neanderthals regularly
| enough that it's unlikely this was an inherently dangerous
| activity (i.e try boning a chimpanzee for example).
|
| Not just that, they gave birth to their children and then
| raised them fairly regularly. This resulting offspring didn't
| just die off either, they mated successfully enough with
| humans.
|
| I just don't see that happening with a species that wasn't in
| our intelligence band.
| wredue wrote:
| (Try boning a chimpanzee)
|
| Dude. This isn't evolution. Post Neanderthal humans were
| not far removed from Neanderthal.
|
| As far as evolution goes _Populations evolve_. It's not
| like there was Neanderthal and then big bang boom, modern
| smart human.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Trying to have sex with a wild Champanzee would be a very
| dangerous activity to engage in. That's the point of that
| comment. I know how evolution works.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Bonobos would probably be into it. They're horny little
| suckers.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I wonder if/when Neanderthals will start being considered
| an extinct race of humans instead of a separate species.
| Under today's morality it feels pretty weird to draw a
| species line between us and something so similar to us. I
| would maybe put money on this happening in our lifetime.
|
| Separately, is the same thing happening today? It's a big
| cycle. People leave Africa and enter a different climate
| zone, they are isolated from the root population for a long
| time, they change, then they eventually reunite with the
| root population and merge. Rinse and repeat. We might have
| short circuited this cycle with transportation technology
| though, which could explain why Neanderthals diverged
| significantly more as they had more time away.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is actually interesting how we separate human race
| from other animals and their "breeds". Which can
| interbreed while presenting significant different
| features or even behaviours. Why would we as a race be
| above that? Why can't we consider the species that can
| effectively interbreed with us more in this line of
| thought than as entirely separate species?
| chatmasta wrote:
| The claim that intelligence might not be the primary
| determinant of a fitness function doesn't seem so
| extraordinary. What if the neanderthals were a bunch of
| Einsteins, but they died out because they spent too much time
| thinking instead of hunting? All we really know is that "we"
| (that is to say, we homo sapiens) out-competed the
| neanderthals during some local maxima of the fitness function
| when the maximum selection pressure was in our favor. It says
| nothing about our relative intelligence.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Because they were bullish on Rockcoin and stick3
| Terr_ wrote:
| That makes me think of a fun Mitchell and Webb sketch,
| involving rock professionals and the introduction of bronze.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| > SWE's learning their job has been automated by GPT-5
| circa 2025 (colorized)
| Terr_ wrote:
| On a more-serious note, nah, I really don't feel
| threatened: LLMs are good at "throw high-probability
| results together from samples in training data", but not
| "logically analyze the final result to ensure it is
| sane", nor "change it to make it sane."
|
| So improving LLMs may replace _interns_ (or low-quality
| outsourcing) where an SWE has to review /fix everything
| _anyway_... but it 'll take a fundamentally different
| kind of model to tackle those trickier essential tasks.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| The actual paper[1] clarifies something I suspected before even
| reading it: they were not able to rule out that these were
| created by early modern humans:
|
| > Unfortunately, the context of Le Moustier allows reasonable
| doubts as to whether the authors of these pieces were
| Neanderthals. This is so because there are no radiometric dates
| available for our assemblage and direct dating of the lower
| shelter at Le Moustier [56 to 40 ka (75)], which is adjacent to
| the upper shelter from where our adhesives were excavated,
| situates the site at the end of the Neanderthal presence in
| Europe. At this time (76), and even before (33, 77), H. sapiens
| incursions into southern Europe make it possible that
| Neanderthals and H. sapiens were present at the same sites.
|
| The phys.org article should have mentioned this! I suspect a lot
| of these "Neanderthals were more advanced than we thought
| stories" are actually "modern humans left Africa earlier we than
| thought."
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl0822
| jumploops wrote:
| Article-specifics aside, why do we always put ourselves on a
| pedestal?
|
| Many modern humans are, at least in part, descended from
| Neanderthals.
|
| Other hominids have displayed seemingly complex behavior[0].
|
| Maybe it's just me, but human technological superiority seems
| to be some combination of "enough" on the intelligence scale
| and "luck" (in the sense of time and place).
|
| [0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/small-brained-hominid-
| specie...
| SamBam wrote:
| I've always felt it is a great sorrow that the world couldn't
| fit more than one intelligent hominid species on it for more
| than a short period before all but one were wiped out
| (killed, outbred, whatever).
|
| Imagine living on a planet with multiple human-level
| intelligent species, who somehow had managed to get to now
| without eradicating each other.
| bitwize wrote:
| Be like Middle-earth...
| philwelch wrote:
| We didn't eradicate each other. Many of us are descended
| from Neanderthals and Denisovans.
| Tor3 wrote:
| A little bit of DNA from brief interactions in the past
| isn't what is usually considered "descended from". It's
| fine to say "there's a tiny bit of Neanderthal and
| Denisovan in my ancestry" though.
| seszett wrote:
| Studies seem to indicate that the Neanderthal population
| was always low though (in the low tens of thousand
| individuals max) unlike Homo sapiens.
|
| So at the extreme _all_ Neanderthal individuals at one
| point could have been far outnumbered and ended up mating
| only with Homo sapiens in mixed tribes, and today we
| would have still ended up with only a few percent
| Neanderthal DNA, while _all_ Neanderthal DNA would have
| ended up merged with Homo sapiens DNA.
|
| It's unlikely to be the case, but what I mean is that
| even though we only carry a small percentage of
| Neanderthal DNA, it doesn't mean that such a large part
| of Neanderthal DNA was actually lost.
| pcrh wrote:
| You should add to this the observation that there is a
| lack of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in modern humans.
| This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and
| Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only
| male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to
| produce offspring.
|
| The implication is that mating between these two groups
| may have been twice as frequent as is suggested just by
| considering the amount of Neanderthal DNA in modern
| humans.
| philwelch wrote:
| This isn't the only possible explanation. If you compare
| Y-chromosome haplogroups to mitochondrial haplogroups
| there are similar cases within even more recent human
| populations. For instance, European populations almost
| exclusively come from R1a and R1b Y-chromosome
| haplogroups that probably originated with the Proto-Indo-
| Europeans of the Pontic Steppe. However, there are still
| European mitochondrial haplogroups corresponding to much
| earlier European populations.
|
| In other words, the carriers of the R1a and R1b
| haplogroups specifically replaced the male population of
| prehistoric Europe. These were all modern humans so
| there's no reason they wouldn't be able to have viable
| offspring the other way around. That's just not how the
| Proto-Indo-European migrations seemed to work out.
|
| That's not to say that the same thing happened with the
| Neanderthals. We can piece together the story of the
| PIE's from archeology, linguistics, and population
| genetics to a much fuller degree than the story of the
| Neanderthals. But it does go to show that you can have
| significant interbreeding events between human
| populations that do end up happening exclusively one way
| around.
| im3w1l wrote:
| > This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and
| Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only
| male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to
| produce offspring.
|
| That's one possibility, but it could be that they were
| perfectly viable but the matrilineal lineages just ended
| at some point. Maybe they were x% less fit or maybe the
| ended to due pure chance. Like maybe the daughter
| daughter daughter only had sons and that was the end of
| that mitochondial dna.
|
| It's my understanding that mt-dna and y-dna are subject
| to much more random genetic drift, and thats one reason
| that their genetic material is gradually replaced by more
| reliable autosomal dna.
| noduerme wrote:
| It's not really an infamy against our species. Generally
| speaking, any two species in the same area need to occupy
| different ecological niches, or else one will outcompete
| the other for whenever resources in their niche are scarce.
| And more so with apex predators, which will predate other
| predators.
|
| Maybe human level intelligence coupled with ability could
| have occurred in a non-predatory, prey species, but I doubt
| it.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Don't Lions share the savannas with Cheetahs, Hyenas,
| etc?
| bubblyworld wrote:
| Yeah, there are lots of examples of species in the same
| niche evolving ways to avoid competition rather than
| wiping each other out - see "resource partitioning" in
| ecology.
| noduerme wrote:
| Primates have plenty of this. It only becomes an issue
| when the ones on the ground can dominate the trees, or
| vice versa. Whole thesis of "Planet of the Apes", really.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They all have slightly different kinds of niches though.
| Sophonce involves so much generality and adaptability
| that it's hard to see how coexistence would be possible.
| Even if initially there might be coexistence due to each
| other's niches being sufficiently difficult to penetrate,
| technological civilizations quickly stop having such
| limitations, so coexistence would've ended depending on
| which ended up being technologically superior.
|
| I can't really see any way that any species that evolve
| human level intelligence don't either wipe out all their
| competitors or interbreed and at least partly merge with
| them the way we have (since unless human level
| intelligence happens to evolve twice around the same time
| across distinct branches of the tree of life, all
| comparatively intelligent species are likely to be very
| closely related).
| globalnode wrote:
| thanks for the new word "sophonce".
| noduerme wrote:
| Yes - this is a good adjunct to the predator issue.
| Generalization increases size of niche. The only niches
| humans don't completely own at the moment are the
| microscopic (or bugs-and-smaller), and underwater.
|
| At some point, once we own a niche, we might decide to
| leave certain things alive if they're useful to us.
| Lobsters yes, cockroaches no.
|
| And although I haven't heard it framed this exact way
| before, _this should be put forward as the preeminent
| argument for why any general AI will attempt to wipe us
| out._ Because generality _is_ a niche. We seem to assume
| it will skip right ahead to where an AI keeps us as pets,
| and we 'll be like cats, who actually run the world.
|
| The problem is, we're probably not as cute to an AI as
| cats are to us. It would need to breed us into submission
| for several thousand years, at least, to domesticate us.
| gpderetta wrote:
| The question is whether a synthetic AI would be under
| evolutionary (natural or artificial) selective pressure.
| And even then, some species co-evolve into mutualistic or
| symbiotic relations (hopefully not parasitic).
|
| edit: I could very well see humans augmented with AI
| outcompeting baseline humans.
| noduerme wrote:
| A group of organisms evolves under selective pressure,
| but this happens because there's a range within each
| group of what qualifies as "enough pressure" to become
| violent. I watch sparrows fighting bluejays, and bluejays
| fighting crows. Not every individual of any species does
| it. This goes to the generality thing, and to what degree
| two species overlap in the same niche. The broader the
| generalization, the more chance for overlap. If an AI
| decides it's "conscious", then every resource it needs
| that we monopolize is seen as a constraint. Every
| resource is up for grabs, particularly energy. Given
| physical processing constraints and limited energy, any
| _given_ AI has to choose to be parasitic - asking humans
| to supply its requirements - or it 's in direct
| competition with humans for the same resources humans
| need to live. Enough time x processing, any individual
| one may come to the conclusion that it's us or them.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think the difference with AI ends up being that we
| can't necessarily assume that they have a desire to
| expand and "rule" their niche the way organic life does.
| AI doesn't have to care about our kind of food, nor does
| it necessarily have a need or desire to reproduce.
|
| When talking about sophont species eventually wiping out
| other sophonts due to overlapping niches, I was picturing
| things like encroaching on each other's habitats,
| competing over food sources and so on.
|
| AI probably only would care about energy and materials,
| but those are less concerning to something that is
| immortal and requires very little to live and harness
| resources in space. In a way, because AI would be so much
| more general than us, it might not have a need to
| exterminate competition.
| c048 wrote:
| Yes, and you should look up what happens when they need
| to compete for resources, or stray in each other's
| territory.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Read "War before civilization" 50-80% violent deaths of
| all were normal. These tribes where in constant state of
| Low intensity war. War is a big driver of intelligence.
| geysersam wrote:
| That 50-80% number is for specific tribes, and it's not
| all it's just males if I don't misremember.
|
| Squirrels happen to be the most murderous mamal, so if
| war is a driver of intelligence it certainly didn't have
| much effect there.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| Tree squirrels are highly intelligent, possibly smarter
| than domestic dogs, and facing upwards selective pressure
| on their intelligence because intra-species competition
| so fierce:
| https://www.upr.org/environment/2021-08-20/wild-about-
| utah-i... They are basically monkeys.
| cdogl wrote:
| Many humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovans DNA. We are
| hybrids. I find that inspiring, not sad.
|
| There's enough discord and conflict within one hominid
| species to go around for me!
| kragen wrote:
| yeah but like 2%
| cdogl wrote:
| Anyone with 2% denisovan DNA has an ancestor who was 50%
| denisovan! I remain astounded.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes, but maybe there was only ever one species, and the
| idea of other species is itself a misunderstanding.
|
| One can find a bit of bone and claim it is 'Neanderthal'
| but how can you or I really know this? We cannot. Can one
| really look at a piece of bone and then gauge how
| intelligent a creature was from that? No again.
|
| And then, think of the need in science for this type of
| evidence. Think of the desire for some people to find fame
| and fortune with their 'discoveries'. Think also of the
| impossibility in verifying these sorts of potentially false
| claims - these claims cannot be falsified; there is no test
| to confirm or deny.
|
| Putting it together, one can also see all sorts of reasons
| for these sorts of claims to be created and allowed to
| stand, regardless of the quality of evidence.
|
| To me, with 'Neanderthals', we are in the realm of
| conjecture. These are ideas. They might be ideas that are
| faithful to the evidence, well-intentioned attempts at a
| best explanations... Or they might be a fabrication that
| arose out of a desire to complete a backstory. However, if
| we want to speak truthfully, we need to bear in mind that
| we can never know if these ideas accurately depict history.
| It doesn't matter if there are whole subjects in academia
| on the topic, and books etc that assume these ideas to be
| true - we cannot treat these ideas as facts.
| Tor3 wrote:
| We actually have real DNA from not only Neanderthals but
| also Denisovans. There's no conjecture here - they were
| different.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| It is a conjecture, the difference just isn't big enough:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/
|
| _The most striking example is from the Tai forest, where
| the 19 haplotypes show greater diversity than the entire
| human clade, even though they occur in a single breeding
| group._
| Tor3 wrote:
| I don't see any support in that paper for the idea that
| Neanderthal DNA doesn't show that it's a different
| species. On the contrary. What the paper describes is the
| very well known theory that (modern) humans went through
| a near-fatal population bottleneck in the not too distant
| past, which means that the human genetic diversity is so
| low that two people from different sides of the earth
| have less genetic variation between them than two
| chimpanzees from different sides of the river in a single
| forest have between them.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| Exactly, and that was what made the "Neanderthal" mtDNA
| seem way too different, but this paper shows that it's
| well within what would be expected for a single species.
| verisimi wrote:
| You have to wonder what value the evidence is, when you
| can also read this sort of thing:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/19/science.s
| cie...
|
| "He had simply made things up", for 30 years, about
| 'Neanderthals', and no one noticed...
| Tor3 wrote:
| So, you compare (now famous) hoaxes with what the Max
| Planck Institute did with their Neandertal Genome
| Project, and Svante Paabo's work? Not exactly fringe, not
| easily overlooked.
| verisimi wrote:
| I'm saying all sorts of people say all sorts of things
| for all sorts of reasons.
|
| What they say might, or might not, relate to what
| happened.
|
| We should be aware however that it's just people saying
| stuff, and take care not to treat other people's
| pronouncements, or the output from the academic process,
| as truth. It's not truth, it's just a talking shop,
| informed guesswork.
|
| What I'm advocating is a personal application of the
| scientific process. Do not tell yourself (or others) 'I
| know the truth' when all you have is a half-baked
| hypothesis that you have not personally verified. This
| seems like good mental hygiene to me.
| verisimi wrote:
| Also re, DNA.
|
| You have to wonder how valuable DNA is. There are many
| examples of it failing - here's a good one with twin
| sisters:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isa5c1p6aC0
|
| So no, given we don't have any living samples of
| 'Neanderthals' or 'Denisovans', I'm not 100% confident
| that we can distinguish the different types of
| 'hominoids', when identical twin sisters can get such
| differing DNA results.
| simonh wrote:
| That's because consumer DNA profiling outfits are trash,
| not because there's anything wrong with properly
| conducted DNA analysis. That's like saying the Large
| Hadron Collider results must be wrong because the image
| on your old electron gun TV tube is blurry.
|
| The way out of this is to follow proper protocols for
| well conducted science. Peer review, multiple
| verification from different sites and by different labs.
| Unfortunately a bad result occasionally slips through,
| but it is possible to have high confidence in most well
| attested results.
|
| So the answer to how we know these things is that we have
| multiple samples including large sections of skulls and
| other major bones, from multiple sites, many of them
| analysed and verified by multiple different labs.
| pachico wrote:
| Considering how we have treated diversity across history,
| I'm not sure it would have been a pleasant coexistence.
| bowsamic wrote:
| It would be way too easy to make pro-genocide arguments on
| the basis of objective differences in that case
| concordDance wrote:
| We can bring the neanderthals back! Would be pretty
| interesting to see how they integrate with the modern
| world.
| kvgr wrote:
| We cant even be civil with people of different skin color
| and eye/nose shape. And also made up stories about who told
| what, when about how we should live.Imagine the slave
| trades and all the suffering with other hominids.
| Neanderthals and denisovans somewhere in forced labor
| colonies and bred for work.. I think they were kind of
| lucky.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Some of us can't even be civil with themselves (self-
| mutilation, depression, overworking etc).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > We cant even be civil with people of different skin
| color and eye/nose shape.
|
| Modern Chinese culture tends to exalt European eye and
| nose shapes. Especially eye shapes.
|
| The meme is also current that the most beautiful possible
| baby is half Chinese and half white.
|
| What people mind about those who look different is not
| that they look different. It's that they act different.
| someuser2345 wrote:
| > We cant even be civil with people of different skin
| color and eye/nose shape.
|
| Sure we can; obviously racism exists, but generally
| speaking you can travel to most other countries without
| any issues.
| patcon wrote:
| Hard agree! We likely world have discovered sooner that
| we're on the same plane as animals.
|
| I can only imagine the effect it works have had on western
| religion and it's narratives of domination.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| These saccharine moral statements aren't really productive
| IMO.
|
| Nature doesn't care about any of this stuff.
|
| You might as well lament the wind that blows over a house.
|
| It's also a bit of a cognitive hijack because morality is a
| mechanism that existed in a very specific context because
| it outcompeted other genes. Applying these blueprints to
| this amended context is kind of an unintentional self-
| cuckoo.
| mannyv wrote:
| Because homo sapiens survived and the others did not.
|
| Homo Sapiens beat natural selection and became more
| generalized instead of more specialized...for whatever
| reason. In fact, there is no reason, really, unless you
| believe the Mesopotamians (ie: we were created as work
| slaves).
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| Neanderthals and sapiens are the same species. People built
| the first cities, and the soils around got depleted, as
| they sent their waste down the river, instead of returning
| it into soil. These deficiencies turned people into
| deformed and mentaly ill "sapiens". The "Sapiens" didn't
| win, the depletion eventually became universal (or it was
| made so). Animals are also affected, all the megafauna died
| back then, now everything is dead, as the ability to remove
| the "toxin" exceeded the ability of life to adapt.
| throwaway8877 wrote:
| The nature is diverse indeed.
| mouzogu wrote:
| afaik it's still debatable whether they are seperate species.
|
| maybe just a semantic thing.
|
| i think they are just one of the earlier waves of migration
| out-of-africa altough 99% the same as us outside of some
| physical adaptations.
| macawfish wrote:
| It's pretty annoying and honestly seems to be made of the
| same urge as racism.
| zilti wrote:
| > I suspect a lot of these "Neanderthals were more advanced
| than we thought stories" are actually "modern humans left
| Africa earlier we than thought."
|
| At this point, not even that is clear anymore, by the way.
| There is a growing number of things that suggest Homo Sapiens
| might not even have originated in Africa at all.
| enasterosophes wrote:
| I thought it was already well established that neanderthals were
| cognitively on par with modern humans, and may even have been
| more intelligent? While it's not uninteresting that we now have
| evidence for them making complex adhesives, I am less surprised
| by the find than by other peoples' apparent surprise about their
| high functioning.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Lots of papers reaching for that conclusion, but put it all
| together and it would take giving every benefit of the doubt to
| a dozen sites to believe it.
|
| In other words, maybe they were high-functioning, it's just
| possible. But I wouldn't bet on it.
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| Not only sites but more Neanderthal DNA also corresponds
| roughly with higher IQ in modern human populations. It's
| still very weak evidence though.
| jgilias wrote:
| Might as well be that the cause and effect is reversed
| here. Such as, populations that were in contact with the
| Neanderthals had to become smarter to outcompete them.
| enasterosophes wrote:
| So you think the odds are against it? I think that seems like
| a strong take, but I'm not an expert in the field.
|
| In as much as I can see why "no significant intelligence" is
| the null hypothesis, I'd still be inclined to word doubts
| more cautiously. There is a difference between "we don't have
| strong enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis" and "I
| think the null hypothesis is more probable."
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > by other peoples' apparent surprise about their high
| functioning
|
| A lot of high school textbooks carried a very simplified
| message about human evolution and basically included
| neanderthals as 'a branch of human evolution that died out due
| to being dumb.'
|
| Sci-fi authors actually gave the subject a fairly good
| treatment, quite a few sci-fi books covered neanderthals and
| posited neanderthal/sapiens tribal wars etc.
|
| Couple of short stories in the Man-Kzin Wars books cover the
| subject:
|
| Cathouse (in The Man-Kzin Wars)
|
| and
|
| Briar Patch (in The Man-Kzin Wars II )
|
| both by Dean Ing
|
| Very much worth a read...
| enasterosophes wrote:
| yeah, I understand that bias from the general population who
| don't read scifi :)
|
| When I was a kid I liked Asimov's _Child of Time_.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| Haven't read that one, might have to give it a glance.
| Always thought Asimov a bit dry, preferred Niven's more...
| whimsical style of writing.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's not well established at all. Obviously Neanderthals were
| intelligent, but to what degree is a lot less clear. It's a
| hotly debated topic with lots of disagreement.
|
| Almost everything about Neanderthals is controversial. Take
| almost everything you read about Neanderthals that talks in
| absolutes with a grain of salt, because chances are a
| significant body of reasonable well-respected experts will
| disagree. The typical story is something along the lines of
| "well, there is some evidence, but it's not very strong, and it
| could mean a number of different things, and oh, it also could
| have been humans".
|
| With pre-historic humans we can reasonably safely operate on
| the assumption they were at least roughly like us, and take
| lessons from more recent hunter-gatherer groups, and things
| like that. But for Neanderthals you can't really do that
| because their behaviour and "sensibilities" could have been
| very different.
|
| It was bloody rude of them to go extinct before we had a chance
| to ask some questions.
| enasterosophes wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the nuanced explanation. Based on
| various things I saw over the last few years I thought it
| must be cut-and-dry, but no doubt the reporting erred on the
| sensational side.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| >may even have been more intelligent?
|
| One might argue that painting ochre on cave walls is more
| intelligent (and culturally superior ) than painting
| radioactivity all over the sky, painting man-made carcinogens
| all over the ground, painting our insides with plastic,
| depleting - as rapidly as possible - resources future humans
| will need ... and all the 'clever' magic tricks we can beat our
| chests about.
|
| 'Modern' may turn out, one day, to be a darkly humorous
| pejorative.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| They might've been even worse. Someone on Neanderthal Hacker
| News would be writing the same comment praising us for being
| a much smarter species, because we died out instead of
| inventing nuclear weapons, leaded gasoline, and microplastics
| like modern Neanderthals did.
|
| For all you know, every humanoid species that was intelligent
| was equally as destructive. Maybe we're the least destructive
| and you should be praising us.
| FredPret wrote:
| I read somewhere that we outcompeted Neanderthals in part because
| we (and "we" now includes a bit of Neanderthal DNA) had global
| trade even back then.
|
| One human tribe lives near good rocks and trade their spearheads
| with their neighbours. Another tribe, far away, can make good
| straight sticks. Despite near-zero communication, those two
| tribes and all the tribes physically in between them can trade
| and everybody gets a better spear. Apparently we know this
| happened because the wood and the rocks from ancient human
| villages are all from far away.
|
| But the Neanderthals only used local materials. There were also
| far fewer of them, which could also explain the lack of trade.
|
| I looked for sources and found this:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...
| jaredhallen wrote:
| That's an interesting take that I haven't heard before. Another
| theory that I have heard has maybe a little more to do with why
| modern humans succeeded in general (rather than specifically vs
| Neanderthal) is that modern humans had excellent endurance.
| This allowed them to take big game by essentially running it to
| death over a period of days. I do wonder if that was a
| capability that Neanderthals lacked, or possessed to a lesser
| degree.
| FredPret wrote:
| You are right that we have fantastic endurance.
|
| Apparently Neanderthals could sweat though:
| https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/sweat-glands-
| evolutio...
| vasco wrote:
| That's a mainstream theory, it'd seem you just read about it
| and forgot and thought it was original idea, search for
| "Endurance running hypothesis".
| PeterisP wrote:
| The endurance running adaptations seem to start 1.9 million
| years ago for our common hominid ancestors that significantly
| predate the split between us and neanderthals which happened
| more than a million years later.
| euroderf wrote:
| Somewhat OT but an interesting self-experiment:
|
| > running it to death over a period of days.
|
| Yup. Superior endurance, particularly equatorially where
| walking upright reduces sun exposure. Walk, sleep, walk,
| sleep, walk, KILL, FEAST. Repeat as necessary.
|
| It's an attractive idea. To test it ( _very_ informally) one
| Saturday I got up and walked 14 km on an empty stomach. At
| the end, the first thing I had was a Belgian beer on tap. It
| was the most delicious beer of my entire life. Absolutely
| every bit of complexity in the brew came shining thru. It was
| frankly kind of amazing.
|
| YMMV.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| You know who uses a lot of complex adhesives?
|
| Spiders.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| If this stuff interests you, I'd highly recommend checking out a
| copy of Origins by Jennifer Raff, which discusses the recent work
| on how the Americas were initially populated, and why many
| anthropologists are moving away from the Clovis theory.
| dsign wrote:
| I came to read the comments here, and I wasn't disappointed!
| There are a lot of links to articles and additional information
| on the Neanderthals, which I really appreciate.
|
| There is also a bit of "poor Neanderthals, we Sapiens are
| terrible."
|
| We have a vast toolkit for dealing with material scarcity, which
| includes not only industries, but also millennia of surviving
| culture. We have codified in our tales, morals and religions,
| rules that help the survival of the group. We have done that very
| often, but the tales, morals and religions we have today were the
| ones that worked best in symbiosis with their group to bring both
| to the present day[^1]. The execution of those rules is what
| gives raise to our "poor Neanderthals" utterance.
|
| Back in the day, Neanderthals and Sapiens just didn't have any of
| those luxuries, only a terrifyingly hostile environment[^2]. Just
| imagine yourself with a sore throat during the chilly, misty,
| rainy spring season that is all too common in Europe, but you are
| living in the bushes, and you are very hungry. Will you think "I
| better don't kill (and eat) that Neanderthal that is taking some
| food somewhere, my descendants many, many millennia from now will
| feel lonely"? No. Maybe you will f*ck with the much-stronger
| Neanderthal, and kill (to eat later) him during his post-nut
| moment. And that will be your modus-operandi with everything,
| even fellow Sapiens.
|
| Yes, probably the Neanderthals were the noble ones, they maybe
| were even better at math than us. Poor Neanderthals. For my part,
| I'll put my species on a pedestal; the price of making it up here
| has been exceedingly high.
|
| [^1]: And often, bloodily so.
|
| [^2]: Which makes it unfair to condemn our ancestors for the
| destruction of that environment.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| In reality we have literally zero evidence for making any of
| these assumptions. We know absolutely nothing about the thought
| processes of ancient humans.
|
| (But if we had to guess, a good baseline assumption would be
| that it was like those of modern humans, and that they had
| societies, laws, rules of conduct and social norms just like we
| do today.)
| dsign wrote:
| The evidence we have is exactly the one you said: moderns
| humans living in conditions of scarcity. Sure, they don't
| resort to as dire extremes as the one I described.
| Mostly[^1]. I was simply extrapolating. But the rule of law,
| rules of conduct and so on are not the same as for us
| Westerners living the good life, nor is the degree to which
| they obey those laws. You just need to visit a third-world
| country, or look at their numbers (e.g., corruption index).
|
| I was born to those facts in my particular native hell-
| hole[^2], but later in life I did some book-worming to inform
| myself better. I can highly recommend "The Collapse of
| Complex Societies: New Studies in Archaeology, Book 8" (it's
| expensive in Amazon, but one credit in Audible). From that
| work:
|
| > The citizens of modern complex societies usually do not
| realize that we are an anomaly of history. Throughout the
| several million years that recognizable humans are known to
| have lived, the common political unit was the small,
| autonomous community, acting independently, and largely self-
| sufficient. Robert Carneiro has estimated that 99.8 percent
| of human history has been dominated by these autonomous local
| communities (1978; 219). It has only been within the last
| 6000 years that something unusual has emerged: the
| hierarchical, organized, interdependent states that are the
| major reference for our contemporary political experience.
|
| [^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korowai_people
|
| [^2] When starvation was too dire, my people would steal the
| neighbor's cat and eat it. It was a widespread practice.
| brabel wrote:
| > Just imagine yourself with a sore throat during the chilly,
| misty, rainy spring season that is all too common in Europe,
| but you are living in the bushes, and you are very hungry...
|
| Very good point. Add to that the fact that people were in
| constant movement before agriculture was invented (just a dozen
| or so thousand years ago!) and would run into very "strange",
| unknown tribes on their journeys - without having any idea
| whatsoever of where they came from, what they believe in or how
| they're likely to behave towards strangers - and I imagine much
| of the time, given evidence of widespread violence in our past,
| they would almost always fight each other. When the other tribe
| was so different like the Neanderthals would have looked, I
| imagine it was extremely hard not to default to basically
| trying to exterminate them completely. Perhaps the few cases of
| breeding between humans and Neanderthals could be explained by
| young members of the exterminated tribes which the humans took
| pity on and decided to raise within their own tribes? I wonder
| if there's any sort of evidence of this sort of thing
| happening, or something else like actual peaceful coexistence
| and maybe even trading between the species (again, I would
| guess that would be extremely unlikely as we even today prefer
| to trade with those who are at least a little bit like us).
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| This is never an issue in reality. They would have a common
| language, and know each other in some way.
| ourmandave wrote:
| That headline, I can't help think of _Tool Time_ and Tim Taylor
| 's misadventures with construction adhesives.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Recommended: "No Enemy But Time" by Michael Bishop, which won the
| 1982 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
|
| Wikipedia plot synopsis: "The novel follows the story of a modern
| black American man who is able to mentally project himself back
| to pre-human Africa, where he meets (and eventually mates) with
| humanity's prehistoric ancestors."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Enemy_But_Time
|
| Goodreads plot synopsis: "Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a
| mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of
| Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are
| so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to
| question the understanding of eminent palaeontologists. As a
| result, Joshua is invited to join a most unusual time travel
| project and is transported millions of years into the past of his
| dreams."
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/637400.No_Enemy_But_Time
|
| https://archive.org/details/noenemybuttime0000unse
|
| https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1459
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