[HN Gopher] Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years
___________________________________________________________________
Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years
Author : Hooke
Score : 228 points
Date : 2026-04-01 01:12 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I know even with humans pre-modern populations were drastically
| smaller, but it's still just astounding to me how small of a
| population size it seems like Neanderthals had.
| conductr wrote:
| I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but I think it's hard
| to fully appreciate how at risk they were to predators and that
| they were certainly not the top of the food chain yet. Humans
| and similar aren't naturally adept for survival in the
| wilderness. We developed coping mechanisms but it took some
| time. Had to extinct a few big cats, bears, wolfs, etc along
| the way.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| Were they really not at the top of the food chain before
| modern humans came along? It's hard for me to imagine big
| cats and wolf packs being higher in the food chain than
| beings that had their own social groups, language, fire, and
| spears and that are known to have effectively hunted big
| game.
| hattmall wrote:
| I feel like it's more to say that, "getting eaten was a
| legitimate concern" they weren't really the single top of
| the food chain because there were other animals that would
| reasonably consider them prey. Cave lions were massive and
| definitely targeted neanderthals.
| conductr wrote:
| They/we also are weak and helpless for large portion of
| early life. Can't reproduce unless they survive a dozen or
| so years. And even then pregnancy and child birth are also
| huge risks to life. This probably really stunted our
| ability to grow large populations.
|
| Fossil evidence exists pointing towards large eagles
| scooping up 3-5 year olds. It's been a long time since we
| had to think of our toddlers safety the same way we think
| of a lap dogs.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Why was this the case? I thought they were at least as
| intelligent as modern humans and had more muscle mass, used
| rudimentary tools and had control over fire. They lived in a
| climate without a lot of dangerous animals or a lot of disease
| and disease vectors at least compared to the jungles of Africa.
| remify wrote:
| There's new evidences that even Sapiens "introduction" in
| Europe happend multiple times in the scale of thousand years
| with migratory waves comming from Africa/Middle East.
|
| There's a 12h College de France course from Jean-Jacques Hublin
| that display new understandings that is really captivating.
| It's in French though
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| You're talking about "Sapiens remplace Neandertal"?
| asdff wrote:
| FWIW the populations weren't actually as small as a lot of
| these articles (including about human bottlenecks) allege in
| the popular press. This comes from a knowledge gap in the
| public compared to a biologists understanding here. The
| biologists are talking about effective population size (1) in
| most all these cases. This is an idealized sort of population
| size based on the idea of using the smallest possible
| population size that can fully capture the observed genetic
| diversity. It makes sense to use this measure, considering you
| are never fully sure how large a real population can be beyond
| its effective population size. So you just use the effective
| population size and implicitly acknowledge its assumptions.
|
| This is well past HS biology though so popular press just skips
| that nuance and equates it to true population size.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size
| lobf wrote:
| I spent a year of high school in the Basque Country, and it
| always stuck out to me that a common feature of the Basques,
| especially the beefy ones, was incredibly caveman-like.
|
| I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always
| wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the
| historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used
| to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model
| from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very
| few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very
| small population.
| boxedemp wrote:
| Basque Country also has an interesting language which doesn't
| seem related to other European languages. Basque language (or
| Euskara).
|
| Seems as though it could have been an enclave of neanderthals
| who eventually integrated with humans.
| lobf wrote:
| This is a much-discussed topic. All we know of the Basque
| language is that it is pre-Indo-European.
|
| The last time I looked in to this, the consensus was that it
| was most likely a version of otherwise-extinct ancient
| Celtic.
|
| Now that doesn't mean that the Basques don't have a
| potentially outsized Neanderthal genetic influence, but the
| odds of their language being so ancient as to pre-exist
| modern humans entirely is unlikely.
| vintermann wrote:
| If it has any relation to Celtic languages, then it's Indo-
| European by definition.
|
| We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more
| or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite
| their odd language, they are much like other Europeans
| genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers,
| Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we
| believe brought the IE languages to Europe.
| lobf wrote:
| Oh! Sorry- I meant to refer to the hypothetical proto-
| Celtic language!
|
| This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me.
| mkl wrote:
| The proto-Celtic that is Indo-European?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language
| piperswe wrote:
| Proto-Celtic is also an Indo-European language...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm just an armchair wikipedia browser, but it's an
| interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-
| Basque_language
|
| This article talks about the Basque language from before
| contact with the Romans, 5-1 centuries BCE. It also
| references a "pre-proto-basque" language, that would have
| been the one before the Celtic invasion of Iberia (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtiberians).
|
| The rabbit hole kind of ends there, as not much linguistic
| artifacts or history remain from BC unfortunately. But one
| can imagine the Basque society would live in relative
| isolation for a long time before that.
| tren wrote:
| My Dad wrote an article about this 25 years ago or so:
| https://aoi.com.au/LB/LB705/ (How the Neanderthals became the
| Basques). He would really get a kick out of people reading it
| (he's 90 now). His website goes back to 96' and it shows.
| olibhel wrote:
| Ah, reminds me of good old CGI websites.
| dumol wrote:
| Greetings to your father from a European with O- blood, fair
| freckled skin, and a receded chin! I've always been
| fascinated with Neanderthals. Happy to see science slowly
| realising these were not some stupid brutes...
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| That is a gem of the old internet; concise, informative, well
| articulated, it's got it all. Tell your pa thanks for keeping
| it up for me!
| riffraff wrote:
| It was a fun read!
|
| Although one of the references goes to a now dead "reptilian
| agenda" website which might have been even more interesting:)
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Sorry for your father but nothing in the article makes sense
| asdff wrote:
| >His website goes back to 96' and it shows.
|
| The thing loaded instantly. What a breath of fresh air in
| 2026. Hats off to Dad.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| It's wild to think how long very human-like beings and modern
| humans existed before the technological revolution really took
| off. Hundreds of thousands of years of existing on the
| technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of
| hides, and fire. Then at some unknown point probably in the last
| 100,000 years, the bow and arrow. Then about 12,000 years ago,
| the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the
| subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security
| and larger populations.
| tyre wrote:
| > Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution,
| which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological
| progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.
|
| It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in
| multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans
| did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for
| technological development before Europeans arrived. At which
| point, it was too late.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it
| quickly enough
|
| This is false. Most native Americans throughout both
| continents-- _especially_ those in Mesoamerica--were powerful
| civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural
| history.
|
| What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to
| smallpox, which was brought over by the first
| explorers/colonists.
| AJMaxwell wrote:
| The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic
| diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill
| equipped when those diseases appeared.
|
| IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade
| or so before Columbus arrived.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| So a lack of animal husbandry is the same as lower
| technology and a lack of farming.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I never understand the "lack of animals to domesticate"
| angle. They did domesticate animals, such as the llama
| and alpaca.
|
| More could have been domesticated and presumably would
| have been if the had more time to advance. It's a shame
| giant sloths were killed off...
| t-3 wrote:
| Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The
| animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding
| human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and
| alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor.
| Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big,
| wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.
| eru wrote:
| Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour,
| but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed
| of scraps or whatever they find around the house and
| garden.
|
| In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise
| fairly useless to humans.
| pfdietz wrote:
| In North America, deer eat acorns, but apparently are not
| suitable for domestication.
| t-3 wrote:
| Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has
| become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have
| also been domesticated as beasts of burden across
| northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-
| tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump
| very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to
| keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer)
| population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally
| nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other,
| larger, native species like moose are usually considered
| too big and too aggressive to tame.
| underlipton wrote:
| The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes
| and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is
| that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement,
| because it _did_ take place, but took a very different
| form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly
| subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and
| certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior)
| adapted other parameters they could control to the
| natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations.
|
| E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-
| science-cen...
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| That played a large role, but they were also pretty far
| behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain
| they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just
| taken longer.
|
| I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it
| seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492
| were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian
| civilizations had already reached in the first millenium
| BC.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's impossible to tell. If it had taken decades or a
| century longer because their numbers were higher, they
| might have had time to start up their own production of
| technology.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Around 90% of the people died of plagues.
|
| It's really impossible to speculate how things would have
| progressed without those plagues.
|
| Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that
| the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90%
| of Eurasia.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| There's some speculation that Syphilis may have been a
| new world plague. The first major outbreak was a couple
| of years after Columbus returned, but figuring out when
| the first _ever_ case was has proven more difficult.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| I agree that if the disease luck had gone the other way
| and a large fraction of Europe had died of disease then
| it's possible the Native Americans would have remained
| unconquered. If the disease factor was just taken out of
| the equation completely, I think the Native Americans
| would have been conquered, simply because of the great
| European advantage in technology. But the conquest would
| have looked more like England's colonization of India,
| and many more of the native cultures would probably have
| had a chance to evolve and assimilate modern technology,
| like India's cultures did, rather than just going
| extinct.
| riffraff wrote:
| In things like the battle of Cajamarca the Incan lost a
| battle against the Spanish with 8000 warriors against 150.
| All the 150 survived.
|
| Disease was important but there was a large technological
| and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at
| night!).
| tehnub wrote:
| I just read this
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca
|
| It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't
| expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only
| a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb
| instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were
| outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards
| because they were so demoralized.
| riffraff wrote:
| Well, yeah, and if you keep reading about it, the whole
| rest of the campaign has the same tenure.
|
| Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168
| men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds
| etc.
|
| The scale of this is absolutely insane.
| vasco wrote:
| Around the same time, 460 men in 6 ships destroyed 30000
| men in 400 ships taking over Ormuz. Portugal and Spain
| were just incredibly OP during that time period. And the
| people in Ormuz were more advanced than the natives in
| US. And they still got absolutely destroyed.
| avadodin wrote:
| > the Incan didn't fight at night!
|
| To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night-vision-
| equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| You're missing a zero. It was EIGHTY thousand, not 8000.
| riffraff wrote:
| I thought so too, but wikipedia says 8k
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Ah weird - the text of the page says Atahualpa had 80k
| troops, but then the infobox describes the Inca forces as
| 3-8k in size. I guess not all the 80k were involved in
| the battle
| peyton wrote:
| There's some more recent scholarship than _Guns, Germs, and
| Steel_. See _Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of
| American Indian Mortality since 1600_ [1]. The truth is
| maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering
| to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand.
|
| Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it's likely
| the populations on this continent were caught in large
| boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust
| cycle. It's definitely up for debate. There's also modern
| work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.
|
| [1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > we happened upon them
|
| That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's
| not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened.
| This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient
| for not being ready.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Stupid people may not be able to read sarcasm. I figured
| HN would have enough internet literacy, but maybe not.
| zirgs wrote:
| Yeah, someone would have started to cross the oceans
| eventually. Europeans happened to do that first.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed
| tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The
| exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open
| question in the history of North America, and the natives
| attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK.
|
| We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico
| but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its
| epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting
| scientific questions about North America, the possibility
| of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been
| isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.
|
| Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in
| more northern parts of the Americas, but there is
| substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we
| can't explain in the southern parts of North America.
| mock-possum wrote:
| > There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that
| killed tens of millions of people
|
| I haven't heard of this - do you have any material to
| recommend on the subject?
| mkl wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics
| Retric wrote:
| 1545 is well after European contact and close enough that
| it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519-1521: Hernan
| Cortes conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532-1533: Francisco
| Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire.
|
| Further low 10's of millions of deaths on its own really
| doesn't explain the 90% population drop across several
| hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of
| Native American populations but it was far from alone.
| We're talking devastating plague after plague for
| generations which canceled out the tendency for
| populations to rebound when competition is low. Something
| like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a
| few hundred years not just one or two devastating but
| short lived outbreaks.
| eru wrote:
| Well, we have plenty of plagues to go around in Eurasia.
| There's plenty of diseases we barely notice, because
| pretty much everyone has enough immunity to mostly shrug
| it off.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > disease we can't explain
|
| Disease we can't explain that spread a few decades after
| European ships full of plagues arrived.
|
| I mean, yeah, sure.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You're making a fair point. Any native pathogens would
| have been shipped back to Europe with slave populations.
|
| The fact that Europe didn't have the same catastrophic
| population decline suggests that either that didn't
| happen (possible, but a stretch) or that Europeans
| already had immunity.
|
| Which would only be true if there was some freak genetic
| immunity (also a stretch) or the disease was already in
| wide circulation (far more likely).
| ywvcbk wrote:
| They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally
| lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand
| years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the
| bronze age or so.
| t-3 wrote:
| American agriculture was very advanced for the time and
| the crops and ideas developed transformed food and
| agriculture throughout the rest of the world. What was
| lacking were beasts of burden and metallurgy and
| resistance to smallpox.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Isn't there indications that even large parts of the
| Amazon is in actuality planted?
| eru wrote:
| Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the
| grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't
| invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a
| bit slower to get started.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance
| to smallpox, which was brought over by the first
| explorers/colonists.
|
| They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only
| held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of
| diseases like smallpox.
| melagonster wrote:
| The Inca Empire had crazy plant breeding techniques.
| poisonarena wrote:
| they also didn't even invent the wheel
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| The wheel isn't that useful if you live on terrible
| terrain and have nothing to drive it with.
| poisonarena wrote:
| llamas and alpacas
| t-3 wrote:
| Not great beasts of burden. Barely better than dog with
| travois, arguably worse than having an extra human to
| carry things.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| Llamas were used for some logistics, but they're not the
| most sturdy, modern Llamas can carry around ~40kg but I'm
| unsure if it would've been higher or lower with the
| breeds they used back then. Either way, better than
| nothing, but definitely no horse.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I live on a hilly plot and use a wheelbarrow or cart all
| the time in the summer.
| Aefiam wrote:
| they did invent the wheel, they just didnt use it for
| transportion.
| AngryData wrote:
| Yes they did, they had wheeled toys. They just didn't
| have a use for the wheel for transportation because of
| poor terrain, lack of pneumatic tires, and a lack of
| beasts of burden.
|
| Everyone gets caught up in the wheel thing, but how many
| people have tried rolling a non-pneumatic tire loaded
| with weight up mountains or even just across broken
| terrain? We still got people carrying fridges and shit on
| their back up mountains in Nepal because wheels are still
| not useful on that terrain. Not to mention something we
| think of as old like the wagon wheel is the culmination
| of over 1000 years of innovation.
| MyHonestOpinon wrote:
| The Americas were always going to be behind Euro Asia due to
| the shape of the continents. Going North-South you get big
| changes in climate and thus agricultural techniques and
| plants. Civilizations in the Americas could have spent
| thousands of years in a grow and bust cycle and never reach a
| similar level of development as the old continent.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| The East-West thing probably does confer an advantage, but
| it might be overstated. I'm not sure that the difference in
| required agricultural techniques between Mesopotamia and
| Europe was actually any smaller than the difference in
| required agricultural techniques between Mesoamerica and
| North America.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Er, Aztecs and Incans definitely had agriculture. They
| actually had highly complex societies.
|
| What they mostly lacked were antibodies against the numerous
| diseases brought by the Europeans. Measles, Mumps, Cholera,
| Tuberculosis, and so on.
| jstanley wrote:
| They had agriculture, yes, but they hadn't had it long
| enough to bootstrap an advanced civilisation before the
| Europeans arrived.
|
| If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by
| South Americans instead of the other way around.
| AngryData wrote:
| What do you mean they didn't have an advanced
| civilization? They had city densities above the best in
| Europe and their gold work put European goldsmiths to
| shame. They had the abacus, pain medications, aqueducts,
| armor, dams, beer, gold plating along with sintering
| soldering and lost wax casting, roads, the concept of
| zero in mathematics, advanced astronomy, plumbing, the
| suspension bridge, multiple unique writing systems, and
| tons of food preservation techniques. That is a far cry
| from some dudes tieing rocks to sticks.
| vessenes wrote:
| Friend, this is just not true. Thousands of years of
| large sophisticated governments and civilizations in what
| is now Mexico and farther south. Its reductive to the
| point of being completely wrong to think of the Americas
| in this way.
|
| Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering,
| and a very large implied economy built so long ago the
| name of the people group is not recorded.
|
| Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because
| they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops,
| yes. The rest? I would be cautious.
| Fricken wrote:
| Also nukes. We've got the whole place rigged to blow in case a
| few of us just doesn't feel like it anymore.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Yeah when you read it in Dune "He who can destroy a thing,
| controls a thing". sounds super cool and badass and like
| totally brilliant strategy but in real life not so much.
|
| Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon
|
| https://medium.com/luminasticity/predicting-the-worst-and-
| st...
| firecall wrote:
| We are all just evolving on vibes at this point ;-)
| eru wrote:
| Nuclear war would be a major inconvenience, but it wouldn't
| nearly destroy the world.
| mcv wrote:
| Unless it's a very limited nuclear war, it would probably
| destroy the world _as we know it_ , but that's a vague and
| flexible concept. It would likely destroy countries,
| societies, our way of life. Many people would die, but
| humanity would survive.
|
| Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the
| northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much
| less affected.
| eru wrote:
| I agree. My much more limited point was that we don't
| actually have enough nukes to glass the planet; but I
| could probably have made that more explicitly.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We have enough nukes to sterilise large areas of the
| planet.
|
| But most of them are tac nukes, and they don't come with
| the support hardware needed to deliver them to large
| areas of the planet.
|
| Reality is that Europe, Russia, the US, the Middle East,
| India, Pakistan, and parts of the Far East could have a
| really bad time.
|
| But most of South America and Africa would likely survive
| with only economic and political damage rather than
| physical destruction.
| eru wrote:
| Not sure sterilisation lasts long on earth: life re-
| claims sterilised areas.
|
| See your favourite massive volcano outbreak, or look at
| the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
|
| (The impact of the disaster at Chernobyl is much smaller
| in area than a nuclear explosion would be, of course. But
| life has re-conquered everything there.)
|
| In any case, I largely agree!
| mcv wrote:
| It might be worth noting that the number of direct deaths
| caused by Chernobyl is very low (2 perhaps?). But there
| have been hundreds of thousands of birth defects in its
| wake.
|
| The survivors of nuclear war would have a really bad
| time, but humanity would survive.
|
| None of this is to suggest we should be careless about
| it; it would be a massive disaster. But not the end.
| dainank wrote:
| I think it is also interesting to realize that we have had a
| huge population boom since the last 50 years or so, thus
| currently, the entire world population alive makes up roughly
| 8% of the entire population of the world since the existence of
| Homo Sapiens. In summary, if you were to be randomly born as a
| human, you would most likely be born in the latter centuries,
| rather than the early ones, since the sheer amount being born
| recently than many years ago is so much more.
|
| https://www.sifrun.com/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-ea...
| jarjoura wrote:
| Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying
| alive. Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal
| attacks.
|
| You would never feel like you have time to just, be. Instead
| you're focused on getting your next meal, and finding a place
| to sleep.
|
| It only took a few ice-ages to force us to get smart about how
| we organize and then here we are.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Welcome to Gaza I guess.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I immediately thought or Iran.
|
| It's neat what we do to each other...
| solids wrote:
| Having one clear short term goal after another may sound to
| freedom for some people.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I think about this a lot. How much anxiety do most people
| feel from the millions of options that are available to
| them daily, or young adults that are told they can be
| anything they want, but clam up and choose to do nothing
| instead.
| krapp wrote:
| Most people don't have millions of options available to
| them daily, at least not in any meaningful sense. Anxiety
| and choice paralysis is very much a first world
| privilege.
| Schmerika wrote:
| > Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying
| alive.
|
| Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent _and_ food.
|
| > Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal
| attacks.
|
| Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of
| food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't
| an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' -
| but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.
|
| > You would never feel like you have time to just, be.
|
| Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature
| of life back then was like 3-5 hours/day spent on food
| gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting,
| storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of
| delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and
| grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely
| untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.
|
| We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old.
| Pentatonic tuning!
| broken-kebab wrote:
| >pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then
| was like 3-5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the
| rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling
|
| It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science.
| Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties
| by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern
| Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced
| figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.
|
| Which, taking into account that their chores were quite
| physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not
| even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari
| experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are
| unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of
| affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.
|
| That said they probably socialized more than us for many
| reasons, just not instead of work.
| Schmerika wrote:
| > Later re-verification of the same data produced figures
| around 6.5-7.5 hrs.
|
| Well, yes, climate and ecology matter a lot. Still, I
| believe that figure is including things like making sure
| a pot doesn't boil over, ie low intensity chores; and
| includes 'social' tasks which look and feel very
| different to, say, factory work.
|
| Still, the idea that life was "nasty brutish and short"
| for most of human history _is_ thoroughly debunked. Life
| wasn 't constant misery for everyone, despite what many
| people learned in school.
|
| I think it's important that we remember what we've lost,
| as much as what we've gained. Whether we worked 3 hours a
| day or 7.5, no one (outside slavery) was working 60 hours
| a week and just keeping their heads above water despite
| thousands of years of 'progress'.
| ralferoo wrote:
| > A lot of food was more abundant
|
| That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be
| much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe
| organised into a group to catch anything large, but the
| flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much
| easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering
| and eating what you want.
|
| In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have
| to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of
| course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of
| time gathering food.
| mcv wrote:
| Most hunter-gatherer tribes had exactly that: time to just
| be. Their lives weren't governed by this rat race to always
| move up. Except for the harshest circumstances, they probably
| worked only 15 hours a week. Of course their play was
| partially training for that work, but I think in many ways,
| they lived more relaxing lives than we do.
|
| Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the
| agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers,
| but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived
| shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to
| disease after the agricultural revolution.
| whymememe wrote:
| I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week
| stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper
| that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time
| spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual
| number of hours varies massively - seasonally and
| geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.
| prawn wrote:
| I'd bet that a lot of that in-camp work didn't feel
| excessively laborious when it was done while socialising
| within your group, and without a sense of "wish I was
| playing video games". Sitting around a camp fire now
| whittling away at something is more mucking around than
| chore.
| thfuran wrote:
| Sure sitting around a campfire and whittling away at
| something now feels more like mucking about than chore,
| because it is. You don't actually need whatever it is
| you're whittling. It would probably be less relaxing if
| your survival depended on your handiwork.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I have friends who handweave clothes, blacksmith tools,
| and of course garden for food for their families.
|
| The stakes are lower, but not the work level required,
| and they all do it for funzies, essentially.
| mcv wrote:
| Exactly. I don't think there really was a clear
| separation between work and not-work back then. It's just
| life. Consider wild animals: do they work?
| whymememe wrote:
| Yeah pretty much, it's a pretty tough to pinpoint what
| work actually is without paid labour.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying
| alive. Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal
| attacks.
|
| If you wanted, you could ask any of the people living like
| that today what it's like. You can find them even in any
| American city.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Here's some food for thought: Something like that was their
| normal and they likely had all of these sorted out with
| relative ease, given that they'd be experts at that kind of
| living. Also wild food sources were plentiful. Overall they
| may have enjoyed more downtime than us, who have to do quite
| a bit to maintain our higher standards of living. Estimates
| are that hunter-gatherers "worked" around 20 hours / week to
| sustain themselves, the rest being spend on low intensity
| tasks or idle time.
|
| Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't
| imagine their life could have been considered stressful in
| that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific
| point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no
| point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before
| it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has
| "more" regardless of how hard you work.
|
| You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in
| modern society, not even considering that if there's any
| major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed
| our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the
| majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and
| starved within months if not weeks, with very little
| individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a
| couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't
| operating somewhat smoothly.
| paulnpace wrote:
| I have wondered if animal husbandry played a larger role
| than agriculture, alone. The horse, as we know it, altered
| all of civilization.
| Monotoko wrote:
| It was the cat, those little fluffy bastards walked into
| a human camp about 10,000 years ago and kicked everything
| off. That's why the Ancient Egyptians revered cats as
| Gods /s
| Schmerika wrote:
| Honestly not sure how necessary that /s is.
|
| Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much
| harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without
| storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.
|
| Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat
| on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.
|
| Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have
| been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe
| yoga was inspired by them too.
|
| It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of
| grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.
|
| And then there's the profound cultural significance of
| Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually)
| calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...
| komodo99 wrote:
| > introverts can hang with cats all day
|
| There are certain personalities that are often attributed
| to modern sources, but haven't we always had that weird
| eccentric dude(tte) living in a shack that has a
| predilection to collect herbs/mine rocks/watch the
| skies/you name it, that isn't thought much of or seems
| productive until someone gets sick/needs ore/wants to
| know the weather/etc?
|
| All that said, what did crazy cat people do before
| cats???
| Schmerika wrote:
| > haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte)
|
| I would bet the first human to do _lots_ of stuff was
| that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up
| with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes,
| domesticate a wolf, etc.
|
| > what did crazy cat people do before cats???
|
| I have no idea, but that's a great question.
| tsoukase wrote:
| Fire, pets, electronic chips, all advanced human
| civilisation step by step in different stages. It's hard
| to estimate the relative importance of each.
|
| Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all
| these are means for achieving higher goals. How many
| people think about that today? Quantity is not followed
| by quality.
| Melatonic wrote:
| The dog probably as well - and both horses and dogs are
| similar to people in that they are great at traversing
| long distances.
|
| Horses also have semi similar more specialized analogues
| - you could argue Camels filled a similar niche for very
| dry areas. And other animals like Goats/Llamas/Alpacas
| for mountainous areas.
| komodo99 wrote:
| I've always been partial to the notion that wolves
| domesticated human ancestors, honestly.
|
| We like to say that dogs are wired to understand human
| language patterns, but who's not to say that we're not
| wired to emit canine 'linguistics'?
| jarjoura wrote:
| One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not
| going to live much longer. It would have been especially
| horrific if you broke your foot or leg and weren't able to
| do anything about it.
|
| Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in
| childbirth.
|
| How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest
| of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied
| to long ship travel.
|
| Mosquitos carried pathogens, the other food sources were
| also of random quality.
|
| If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
|
| I could keep going on, but the point is, being a self-aware
| mammal would have been absolutely torturous.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| On the upside they weren't stressed about the new "Grunt
| Hunt" models by Neanderthalic, which are likely take away all
| of the entry-level hunting jobs in the tribe.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| Yeah but eventually they were stressed by Homosapiensthalic
| tbirdny wrote:
| Can you imagine how many grass grazing animals would have
| been just standing around waiting to be eaten? During the
| Pleistocene, some regions supported huge, stable herds of
| grazing megafauna that could provide reliable food. You just
| needed some friends to help you hunt. In areas with
| relatively mild climates and predictable seasons, people
| likely experienced long stretches, even generations, of
| comparatively low stress and easy resources. Granted, life
| could quickly become difficult when climate, animal
| populations, or competition shifted.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| >the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out
| of hides, and fire.
|
| Don't forget, there are pockets of our species living at this
| level to this very day (uncontacted tribes)!
| jstanley wrote:
| There is a good post on this topic:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mFqG58s4NE3EE68Lq/why-did-ev...
| LinuxAmbulance wrote:
| "Good" is a bit of a stretch, as it asks a few short
| questions, but doesn't answer them in any useful fashion.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think rope, twine, and weaving needs to be recognized as
| significant technical development. That has little record but
| would have been combined with wood for simple machines.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000
| years, the bow and arrow.
|
| The atlatl was undoubtedly earlier, and a bigger advance. It
| essentially doubled a hunter's arm length, and thus impelled
| speed - with force proportional to the square of speed. An
| atlatl can put a dart straight through an enemy's gut, or
| easily pierce a deer's hide.
| tim333 wrote:
| There seems a bit of an acceleration ~ 50-100k years from
| evolving brains similar to modern ones to agriculture, ~8k year
| from there to writing, ~4k to the printing press, ~400 till
| computers, ~40 till the web and so on. Each of those has kind
| of speeded intellectual progress and AI will probably be
| another speeding up.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| A fun way to look at this is that the "long head" (ramp) of
| the singularity began some hundreds of thousands of years
| ago. We're just living in teh exciting bit.
|
| Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence
| of primates, etc.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Each of those has kind of speeded intellectual progress and
| AI will probably be another speeding up.
|
| Maybe. I can imagine a dystopian Idiocracy type future where
| everyone is the "ideas guy".
| Nevermark wrote:
| > Harmful mutations can accumulate through inbreeding. Yet
| somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia
| for nearly 400,000 years
|
| It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out
| both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long
| as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained.
|
| So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once
| they reach a threshold, as implied by the article.
|
| It's a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals
| suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going
| "extinct". And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the
| process, but it works.
|
| On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become
| pervasive.
|
| The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic
| diversity as a shield against new diseases.
| gobdovan wrote:
| I wouldn't single out the concern new diseases if the
| population is small. Most diseases co-evolve intra-population.
| The lethal ones are the ones that suffer a mutation and are
| suddenly able to be passed to a different 'species'. So, if
| they already survived on a 'knife's edge', immune variety is of
| comparatively low concern (but still existential) on the list
| of things that can end your species (climate change,
| competition, demographics - 2-3 infertile females in a group of
| 20, say bye bye to tribe).
| Nevermark wrote:
| Isolated populations are all going to be creating isolated
| variants of any disease doing well enough to stick around.
|
| And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new
| variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of
| highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.
|
| Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill
| people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their
| constant churn and weather shielded environments.
|
| But you are certainly right that the cross-overs are
| incomparably worse. And diversity becomes species extinction
| protection at that level.
| gobdovan wrote:
| > The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top
| of that.
|
| For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's
| correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or
| 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population
| dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population
| as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity
| of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my
| 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0])
|
| > Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill
| people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their
| constant churn and weather shielded environments.
|
| Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out.
| Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza.
| Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows
| influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and
| it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There
| is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely
| because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an
| inter-connected population, requiring a critical community
| size in the hundreds of thousands.
|
| [0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/201
| 1/202...
| netcan wrote:
| In captive breeding, it's a brutal way to "improve stock" but
| in wild populations this is pretty normal for large mammals. It
| also generally happens more slowly... so isn't _that_ different
| from every other ambient process that selects some genes and
| culls others.
|
| Fwiw... something similar also occurs with _outbreeding
| /hybridization._ Novel gene combinations can be maladaptive,
| just like double recessives.
|
| These are all pretty normal population dynamics.
|
| There are billions of us now... but that's not normal for a
| large animal, especially predators. How many leopards, or
| bears, or elephants are there at any given time?
|
| These tend to be sparse, structured populations.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| 350,000 years of just chilling, picking berries, you die in
| identical technological and cultural environment as when you were
| born. Now we got to be around when God is made in a data center
| nozzlegear wrote:
| What some otherwise intelligent people will convince themselves
| is God, anyway.
| RealStupidity wrote:
| To our pets we're gods - in some ways it's just a matter of
| perspective
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I don't think my stubborn ass dog thinks of me as a god
| lol, but I understand your analogy
| justonceokay wrote:
| To paraphrase an Arabic saying: "dogs believe man is god
| and follow his word, but cats are aware of the one true god
| and so stand unmoved"
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending
| off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by
| cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.
| justonceokay wrote:
| Parasites are my main go-to when I meet someone complaining
| about the modern world. In the history of multicellular
| organisms on earth, only (some) humans--and only in the last
| ~100 years--have had the luxury of not being completely
| infested with parasites.
|
| Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care
| to admit.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This was / is likely a factor in the "kernel of truth" with
| the whole "deworming tablets cure covid-19" thing, the
| chances of survival of people in certain areas infected
| with the virus increased if they were administered
| deworming medication because they also had a parasitic
| infection.
| justonceokay wrote:
| Yes my friend took ivermectin recently because he grew up
| in he Virgin Islands and realized he had likely been
| harboring parasites his whole adult life. I don't know if
| it is placebo but his eating habits changed significantly
| after his dose
| davidkuennen wrote:
| And just like that we just learned that parasites may have
| been good for us [1]
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8162934/
| sehansen wrote:
| The fact that low-grade parasite-infections dampen
| autoimmune diseases isn't that big of a win. Presumably our
| immune system is as aggressive as it is in part due to the
| parasite-load our ancestors were exposed to.
| gobdovan wrote:
| We solved the parasite problem and at the same time
| changed the ecology we were accustomed to. The irony of
| dynamic systems.
| picafrost wrote:
| Nature's finest achievement. A hyper-efficient "mind" built on
| a pyre of fossil fuels and rare minerals so it can help us burn
| the rest faster. Surely the Neanderthals stand envious that
| millions will be able to confide their unemployment woes to
| ChatGPT after GPS-navigating to the Dollar General in the
| nearest bleak strip mall in search of affordable goods.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Poetic
| sph wrote:
| You forgot the enlightened ~200 years when we tried to kill
| God, to finally be in control of our destiny.
|
| Then some idiots decided it's time to create an artificial one
| in their image. Enjoy your golden idol, pray it doesn't decide
| to turn you into biofuel.
| netcan wrote:
| >somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia
| for nearly 400,000 years, longer than modern humans have been on
| Earth.
|
| These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing.
|
| Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis.
| These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us...
| being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal
| LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so
| calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is
| kind of messy.
|
| There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier
| periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle."
|
| In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't
| have fossils, but _something_ has to be our ancestors. So if we
| are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period
| Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien
| ancestors sapiens.
|
| Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died
| out. But... there were people everywhere.
|
| Humans existed over a _vast_ range. From south Africa to Northern
| Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it 's
| confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different
| species.
|
| Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic
| diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic
| diversity we have today. In some sense, _we_ are the inbred ones.
|
| Also... population estimates are pretty dicey. We don't really
| know. Could have been booms and busts. Could have been ideal
| habitats with higher populations.
|
| We still have a fairly poor grasp of human " _natural history_ "
| jarjoura wrote:
| > Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as
| Heidelbergensis.
|
| Heidelbergensis is the last common anscestor of Neanderthals,
| Denisovans and us.
|
| We were all around for just as long, 400kya+, and before that,
| it was Homo Erectus.
|
| All of them, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans
| and Sapiens were walking around at the same time. There's
| plenty of fossil records we've uncovered that show that to be
| true.
|
| It was only in the last 100k years or so that we remained and
| the other variants "died out".
| MadDemon wrote:
| Did they really die out, or did the population just merge
| with modern humans? Most people on the planet have some
| Neanderthal DNA, so clearly there was some intermixing. If
| modern humans were a much larger population, it makes sense
| that the Neanderthals only contributed a small amount of DNA
| to the gene pool. I could imagine that they were just slowly
| absorbed into the much larger Sapiens population.
| hoppp wrote:
| In Africa most people don't have Neanderthal DNA however in
| Europe probably everyone has. (I have no idea about Asia,
| maybe somebody can chip in)
|
| I think they probably mixed in and we just became one, sort
| of
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Virtually every population outside of Sub-Saharan Africa
| has Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA between 1-4%. This
| includes all of Eurasia, all pre-Columbian American
| populations, Aboriginal Australians, Papuans, etc.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Is there any research about _why_ Sub-Saharan Africa
| doesn 't have Neanderthal DNA?
|
| Is the argument that the tribe of humans from Africa was
| good at repelling outside invaders, but themselves
| expanded outwards and assimilated (and then outnumbered)
| the other populations, or something else?
|
| It just seems a bit bizarre given that all humans
| elsewhere have relatively similar amounts (but quite a
| low amount) of Neanderthal DNA, which seems to suggest a
| reasonable amount of migration, interaction and
| interbreeding between populations everywhere except
| Africa.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yes tons of research
|
| There were multiple waves out of Africa but Most early
| anatomical human groups never left Africa as a result,
| there's more DNA diversity within the continent than
| outside Africa
|
| Its confusing because the non-african group grew
| exponentially while the intra-African continent continued
| to mature
|
| The anatomically modern humans that left Africa spread
| rapidly and aggressively across the world basically
| absorbing and destroying every proto-human group and
| ecological niche and
|
| now the world is ruled by the aggressive narcissistic
| chimeral hybrid of human (African) Neanderthal (European
| proto human) and denisovian (Peking man) that survived
| the exit snd expansion
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4067985/
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Wow, so many judgments and racist descriptions in one
| paragraph attempting to describe scientific knowledge.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Everything typed above has empirical basis
|
| Feel free to investigate each claim independently and
| come to your own conclusions
| kabaka wrote:
| Why was this downvoted?
| underlipton wrote:
| That's a common misconception that turned out to not be
| true.
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-
| surpr...
|
| It also doesn't hold for the African Diaspora, especially
| in the Americas (and probably flowing back into Africa as
| we speak). It's also worth considering that many of the
| actual traits that Neanderthal-associated genes codes for
| probably have analogues in the much-wider African genome.
| Betelbuddy wrote:
| >> Did they really die out
|
| There are a few still. One made it to President of the USA.
| bit-anarchist wrote:
| Do not speak ill of the Neanderthals.
| netcan wrote:
| >Did they really die out, or did the population just merge
| with modern humans.
|
| Most populations die out. Most sapiens. Most neanderthals.
| Most everything. The chance of becoming an ancestor is
| very, very low.
|
| Neanderthals were not slowly observed. Most of our
| neanderthal DNA comes from a single mixing event/period.
|
| Evolutionary history is a history of bottlenecks. Small
| populations that survive and become large populations. The
| rest don't make it.
| stvltvs wrote:
| True, but I'm guessing they're referring to anatomically
| modern humans which have only been here for a couple hundred
| thousand years. Not sure that's a meaningful way to look at
| it since I'm assume Neanderthals also evolved somewhat during
| that time.
| netcan wrote:
| Heidlebergensis is no longer thought to be on the sapiens
| lineage. It's probably the ancestor of neanderthals and
| denisovans. 400kya is around the time of this divergence,
| based on recent genomics. They were the same species at this
| time.
|
| The Sapiens lineage is now thought to have diverged
| significantly earlier.
|
| Erectus existed, but in pockets.
|
| Other lineages existed also. At the very least, Homo naledi.
| Probably other dwarf lineages, an African "ghost lineage" and
| probably others.
|
| Neanderthals and denisovans are structured... With
| subspecies, hybrid zones and whatnot.
|
| There are also many sapiens lineages with no descendants.
| Most of them.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| We shouldn't use the word "species" lightly with hominins.
| There's no accepted way to properly classify archaic
| humans.
|
| For example, some paleoanthropologists classify most
| archaic humans as h. sapiens. Anatomically modern humans
| become h. s. sapiens, neanderthal become h. s.
| neanderthalensis. This incorporates the middle pleistocene
| hominins from mainland Asia pretty well to boot. Many of
| those same people also use the "conventional" binomial
| terminology when they're not making a very specific point,
| so you can't just look at usages to understand where
| they're coming from.
|
| There's also a hundred other classifications, some giving
| neanderthals their own species, others including it with
| heidelbergensis, and so on. None of them has clearly "won"
| and probably won't while we keep publishing "new"
| transitional forms every couple of years.
| netcan wrote:
| Sure... and it would help if there was more consistency
| in general.
|
| But given that there isn't, we should at least maintain
| _internal_ consistency. That 's what I was commenting on
| above. You can't use one conceptual framework for
| Neanderthals/Eurasia and another for Sapiens/Africa. It's
| confusing... and you end up with statements that are
| essentially false.
|
| Neanderthal and Sapiens exist approximately concurrently.
| The "classic neanderthal" form doesn't predate sapiens.
| It only predates Sapiens if we define "Neanderthal" from
| the point of divergence. If we do that, we need to define
| Sapiens the same way. It can't be the establishment of a
| founder population for one and the emergence of a
| distinct form for the other.
|
| I'm not advocating for one system or another... or even
| for the establishment of one consistent system
| necessarily.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| One thing that confused me in TFA is that it says that
| "[neanderthals were] maybe a couple of thousand breeding
| individuals", yet they were enough to inter-breed with sapiens
| at some point(s) [1]. In my mind, tribes of "far-flung
| populations of just a few dozen individuals" would be shy and
| difficult to find.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics
| mproud wrote:
| How ironic that the science.org website wants to verify I am a
| human!
| razorbeamz wrote:
| Perhaps some cultures' stories about "wild men" are about
| Neanderthals.
|
| Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Without being an expert that still seems very unlikely to me.
|
| The epic was written around 2000 BCE which was well over >> 10k
| years after agriculture and more than 4 times that much after
| neanderthals died out.
|
| It's possible but much more likely that they refer to something
| more contemporary. There are always "wild men" around no matter
| who you ask.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| I believe Enkidu also became much more wild over time. In
| Against the Grain the author suggests earlier tellings of
| Gilgamesh presented Enkidu as unusual, but human. When the
| same story was being recorded a thousand years later, he was
| a monster. If the story was preserving some ancient memory
| about Neanderthals, such significant change seems unlikely.
| asdff wrote:
| Could also just be someone with mental illness ostracized from
| society at the time.
| SarahC_ wrote:
| Shouldn't have bothered....
| brador wrote:
| Food, water, then the RNG is solved by large N.
|
| Was it a knifes edge at times? Sure. Was it abundant at times?
| Also true.
| zkmon wrote:
| The phrase "survived on a knife edge" or the dramatization is a
| product of awareness of modern living. For them at those times,
| neither "survival" nor "struggle" has any meaning. There was
| likely no consciousness of such concepts. They just continued via
| instincts and evolutionary goals such as reproduction, food
| gathering, hunting etc, which were just the same activities their
| ancestors did, with no changes. Lack of change should actually
| mean pretty normal life, instead of rapid change-related struggle
| that we go through now.
| vasco wrote:
| We are also surviving on a knife edge from the perspective of a
| super advanced civilization that doesn't deal with disease or
| has more energy than they know what to do with. Everything is
| relative
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Funily enough, that could describe pretty well the first
| sapiens that learned how to make fire.
| jojobas wrote:
| Hunter-gatherers were always on a knife edge, as they were in
| equilibrium with the food supply. Killing children in dry
| years, constant fighting over resources, massacres of entire
| tribes. Of course they didn't know they were on the knife edge,
| so what?
| zkmon wrote:
| Relative terms such as "living on edge" require normative
| references. It was just business-as-usual, normal life for
| them, in their own normative reference frame. Just like how
| cultures in some parts of the world today see things as
| normal, which would be abnormal to others. It's all your
| reference frame. There is no permanent or universal norms
| that can tell what is normal.
| Fokamul wrote:
| Seventy years ago, a scientist published a book about
| Neanderthals. According to his scientific opinion, they didn't
| speak; they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go
| to sleep early because they couldn't see those gestures at night,
| lol.
|
| In my country, there is an area with archaeological sites of
| Neanderthal villages and their mammoth hunting grounds. In one
| area, there are thousands of mammoth bones. Imagine having only
| wooden spears and ordinary stones at your disposal. Maybe flint
| spears, maybe not. In this area, flint is too rare and is mainly
| used for cutting, because the nearest flint deposit is 400 km
| away.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to
| sleep early because they couldn't see those gestures at night,
| lol.
|
| LMAO did he never saw a dog or a cat in is live ? They don't
| speak but can still use sounds to communicate
| shevy-java wrote:
| What is more interesting is how they went extinct.
|
| I would assume there were local populations that lived for a long
| time. But then they were gone too.
|
| Some DNA is in modern humans, so there must have been some inter-
| breeding, but that in itself alone can not explain why the
| Neanderthals went extinct.
| prplxd_nihilist wrote:
| The females in this article look exactly like modern age humans,
| the males have these long beard but apart from that there is no
| visible change in the looks. Far different from what we used to
| see depicting neanderthals. Is that AI generated?
| macintux wrote:
| Looks like those are stock illustrations for "cavemen". You can
| see more from the studio that created them:
|
| https://www.dreamstime.com/gorodenkov-more-popular-photos
| ghtbircshotbe wrote:
| I liked the recent Nova episode on neanderthals. They talked
| about how awful the last ice age was for the neanderthals despite
| being adapted to cold climates, and how modern humans survived it
| by staying away until it got warmer.
| tsoukase wrote:
| As is usual for such a distant past, we can't answer basic
| questions: how many persons and where they were distributed, how
| their evolution and life was and mostly why intermediate species
| between modern human and the rest of primates don't survive
| today.
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