[HN Gopher] Neanderthals cold-adapted? Ribcage reconstruction ma...
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Neanderthals cold-adapted? Ribcage reconstruction may hold the
answer
Author : wglb
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-12-23 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| I wonder what adaptions humans could develop to survive
| overheating in a wet bulb szenario. Some thermal shutdown of
| metabolism or almost all muscles could make those temperatures
| surviveable?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The only thing to do is hvac management. We don't have enough
| time to accumulate sufficient favorable mutations across the
| population given the speed we are affecting the earths climate.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Do thinner people fare better than obese people?
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Based on my experience gaining and losing weight and the
| amount I sweat when I'm heavier, I'd guess yes.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Square cube law would say so. The more surface area per
| volume to dissipate heat the better.
|
| The inverse can be seen in arctic animals that are basically
| baubles to conserve heat.
| Qem wrote:
| Low hanging fruit probably would be smaller body sizes, and
| early onset baldness in both sexes.
| 00N8 wrote:
| I expect housing & behavioral adaptations would carry the most
| weight. E.g. you'd want to dig a basement in a moderate weather
| season, so you'll have somewhere survivable in the hot season.
| And of course have redundant backup power for A/C if you can
| afford it.
|
| Some of the adaptations camels use could theoretically be
| useful, like dropping temperature at night & letting it rise
| throughout the day, tolerating higher temps overall, etc. But I
| doubt there's time for humans to naturally evolve those
| abilities very far in the next several thousand years.
| hiergiltdiestfu wrote:
| Many orders of magnitude too few time to adapt naturally to the
| coming climate crash.
| timschmidt wrote:
| This is wrong thinking about evolution. The potentially
| beneficial mutations are already out there in the population.
| They gain dominance in the population after a large die-off
| of folks who don't have them and the remaining survivors
| reproduce.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yeah but the selection for who survives is going to be
| based not on a specific gene, but on membership in the
| group with the will and power to kill for the remaining
| arable land.
| gorbachev wrote:
| The selection is going to be based on wealth, not on
| genes.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| That's pretty much it yes.
| asdff wrote:
| Not all potential traits are going to be present in the
| population. If this were true nothing would go extinct as
| there would be enough diversity in this theoretical
| population to see some individuals with the right
| combination of traits.
|
| It it somewhat more likely to happen when you have say a
| flask of bacteria where they grow logarithmically by the
| hour in terms of generational time and have much simpler
| single cell systems vs us poor multicellular well
| differentiated humans that are waiting until our thirties
| when reproductive systems start failing to have our 0.6
| kids or whatever the rate is in western countries where
| diversity is already quite low due to a lack of significant
| african demography in most populations out of africa. Even
| in places with significant african background population
| numbers, social history means these alleles have not yet
| dispersed across the population homogeneously and are
| maintained in their demographic subset.
| vkou wrote:
| I think given the option of a mass die-off, and moving into
| _your_ still-habitable back yard, most people would take
| the latter.
| davidw wrote:
| Migrating north (or south, in the southern hemisphere). Which
| is going to increasingly collide with the man-made borders
| preventing people from doing so.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| This is in the back of my mind as my spouse and I ponder
| emigration.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Evolution will select for humans intelligent enough to buy air
| conditioners.
| Loughla wrote:
| Do air conditioners matter if you don't have crops or
| livestock?
| cgh wrote:
| Bergmann's rule: animals in colder climates have larger bodies
| than members of the same species (or subspecies) in warmer
| climates.
|
| Allen's rule: limb lengths vary according to climate. Limbs are
| longer in warmer climates.
|
| Both rules observed in human populations over time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_and_heat_adaptations_in_h...
| Qem wrote:
| I wonder if adaptation to cold in Neanderthals included torpor
| during the winter. That could at least provide an alternative
| explanation for their eradication/dilution by Sapiens, despite
| the evidence they had greater physical strength and larger brains
| than the later. The newly arrived Sapiens learned to raid
| Neanderthal shelters in the winter, while they slept and were
| mostly defenseless.
| antegamisou wrote:
| > larger brains than the latter
|
| What matters though is how _efficient_ were the _H. Sapiens_
| brains.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I read somewhere, long ago, that larger brain is not
| necessarily better "intelligence" .. maybe a survey of
| primate brains.. pointers welcome
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| From the little I've read and watched regarding animal
| intelligence, it's typically mentioned that the brain-to-
| body size ratio is more important/correlated to estimated
| intelligence than brain size alone. It seems to help
| explain things like the outsized intelligence of certain
| smaller animals (e.g. corvids), but it also seems to only
| be a partial explanation.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| That's a fascinating idea.
| jeltz wrote:
| The article claims that while Neaderthals had some cold
| adaptations they were not exclusively so. So your idea is very
| far fetched.
| whythre wrote:
| Humans can exhibit some mild torpor like behavior in extreme
| winter conditions. We are not 'exclusively' cold adapted
| lifeforms. Even if the Neanderthals had more adaptations for
| surviving in northern climates that does not mean they are
| exclusive polar specialists like the arctic fox or the polar
| bear.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| There's one paper from 2020 suggesting that Neanderthals may
| have torpor (there's some evidence in bone growth patterns
| suggesting that they basically just... stopped during winters).
|
| That being said, Homo Sapiens likely could have directly out-
| competed Neanderthals even without this hypothesis. While
| Neanderthals almost certainly could overpower Homo Sapiens,
| we've yet to find any evidence of projectile use amongst
| Neanderthals, especially bow and arrow. There's also some
| evidence suggesting that Neanderthals biomechanics/skeletons
| would have severely restricted their ability to use throwing
| spears.
|
| The spread of Homo Sapiens tends to coincide with local changes
| in climate transitioning from forest to grassland environments,
| which would have further favored the the apparent range
| advantage that H. Sapiens had.
|
| That's what we've found so far anyways.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| There are still many uncertainties about how sapiens
| outcompeted and interbred neanderthals. How hard was it for
| them to find food in winter? Less food could also explain
| slowed growth. Why did they not invent spears or bows? Maybe
| they were accurate enough with stones.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "we've yet to find any evidence of projectile use amongst
| Neanderthals, especially bow and arrow"
|
| Interestingly, the same is true about their contemporary Homo
| sapiens sapiens competitors. There is no evidence of use of
| bows and arrows in Europe until way after the Neanderthals
| died out.
| wil421 wrote:
| Is this fiction, fantasy, or some far off prediction based on
| science?
|
| Sapiens barely like sapiens who look different, I'd bet they
| killed or outcast them just like what happens today.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Sapiens in Europe went extinct roughly the same time that
| Neanderthals in Europe went extinct, or shortly thereafter.
| Careful DNA testing has not been any to detect any DNA
| signature that carried from 30,000 BC to the present
| population. All humans, of all species, seemed to have gone
| extinct at some point. It is known that Europe was colonized by
| Neolithic farmers who expanded out of Turkey about 17,000 years
| ago, this group had DNA that is still found in the modern
| population. But none of the older DNA seems to have survived.
| Therefore it is not clear that Sapiens eradicated or diluted
| Neanderthals in Europe. They all died out.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| But then, where did the people the Neolithic farmers mixed
| with come from?
| lukan wrote:
| There are people with Neanderthal genes, so it cannot be
| true, that they all died out.
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