Neanderthalese: A Constructed Language for the 42nd Millennium BC | Hacker News Reader

Neanderthalese: A Constructed Language for the 42nd Millennium BC

jbr.me.uk

54 pointsKhoomeiK22 comments

I have a debt to http://jbr.me.uk/futurese.html for kick-starting (ironically enough for an article speculating on the future of English) an armchair interest in historical linguistics.

Unfortunately without audio examples...

Ugh.

> [..] syllables that either were or weren't “voiced and/or nasal”, [..] If you add them up, you'll find there were barely five thousand combinations (and “ug” wasn't one of them).

Looks somewhat like Vietnamese.

In terms of the diacritics used or the actual grammatical structure?

This, too, but mainly that one word has one syllable.

Interesting concept.

Btw a bit of spin, presenting them as about the same as modern Homo Sapiens. They killed and ate their neighbors when times were tough; they had a very hard time mastering crafts more complex than 'break a rock'.

> They killed and ate their neighbors when times were tough

So have modern humans.

reference, please

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/climate-change-may-h...

Certainly not unheard of for modern humans though...

As far as technology, modern humans weren't really too different at the time (in Europe at least). And of course, modern humans and neanderthals were similar enough that we were willing/able to interbreed, which certainly says something.

I do think people overstate how similar we were though -- we don't have any super clear examples of neanderthal artwork (people make arguments, but this stuff isn't exactly Chauvet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Art). To me, this seems to indicate that their brains might have worked pretty differently.

"we were willing/able to interbreed, which certainly says something"

Does it?

Men like to spread their seed, and I'm not sure what the rules were regarding giving women a choice in the matter. I'm guessing rape wasn't in their vocabulary though.

The ability to produce viable offspring is generally considered the primary differentiating characteristic between species and subspecies. That's one of a number of arguments in the debate over whether Neanderthals should be named H. neanderthalensis or H. sapiens neanderthalensis.

I was addressing the willing rather than the able.

That criterion has had to be abandoned, replaced with "forms reproductive groups with practical boundaries".

Sometimes a river is that boundary, or a preferred prey species, a mating strategy, or odor preference.

Otherwise, we cannot distinguish bear, dog, or great-cat species.

Isn't there already a separate word—subspecies—for "isolated reproductive groups, with different phenotypes, which could still interbreed if the opportunity arose"? My understanding was that every phenotypically-distinct isolated reproductive group was considered a subspecies until its genetics diverged enough to have speciated, at which point it was now a species.

It seems to me that if e.g. American black bears and Asian black bears can interbreed, then we could call them all one species—black bears—and put all their subspecies together in into that taxonomic category. Maybe with some optional taxonomic level between "species" and "subspecies" for describing their phenotypic groupings.

But I see, looking at various sources, that those two types of bears are indeed considered separate species. Why do we do that? What's better/more useful about drawing the species boundary there?

"Species" is an organizational convenience for biologists. Nature doesn't have such a boundary. It just has varying degrees of reproductive compatibility, inclination, and opportunity.

"Subspecies" is a concession to what lumpers call splitters.

There is certainly a conservative definition for speciation, though: the point where something has zero reproductive compatibility—where there is no known example of viable offspring. At that point, inclination and opportunity cease to matter.

Why not just define “species” by that clear formal boundary, and then call everything that doesn’t manage to reach that line “subspecies”?

Because the line is very hard to discern, where it exists as a line at all, and it is nowhere sharp. Lions can be bred with tigers, in captivity. Are their offspring fertile? Well, sorta. Does it make sense to call lions and tigers subspecies? Hell, no. Say lions and tigers are one species and biologists will call you a lumper. You don't want that.

Sometimes the product of mating between species becomes, instantly, another species, if they prefer mating with one another over either progenitor. That just happened, with some birds, in the Galapagos.

Legally, there are no endangered subspecies, only endangered species. So, claiming some variety is "just a subspecies" may mean they get no legal protection against extermination. To me that's more than enough reason for a species.

>Btw a bit of spin, presenting them as about the same as modern Homo Sapiens.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/02/neande... (and there is link in the article to the study itslef)

"After careful study of archaeological records, scientists in the Netherlands found evidence to suggest that Neanderthals were just as advanced in culture, weaponry and hunting as our human forebears. According to those scientists, the misunderstanding came about because people had been comparing Neanderthals to their successors, who had more advanced tools, rather than their contemporaries. Which is rather like assuming I am more advanced than my parents because I know how to work an iPhone. But this doesn't make my parents any less intelligent … just obsolete and unable to function in this modern, fast-paced world."

I find elsewhere an assertion that what distinguishes neanderthal behavior from modern humans' most reliably is a total absence of trade networks.

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