Neanderthals Traversed Vast Distances | Hacker News Reader

Neanderthals Traversed Vast Distances

sapiens.org

106 pointsFossilHominid31 comments

Here's a short but informative ‘lecture’ by anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky, which finally comprehensively answered the myth of ‘cavemen’ for me. It's not about Neanderthals, but still: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IihGveExaqU

(English subs aren't stellar but they're there.)

He mentions that territory from Siberia to Central Europe was a well-trodden path in Paleolithic, and there's an example of one person traveling from some sea to the centre of Europe.

Kudos to the article for having 2 clear maps that show exactly the various migrations that they are hypothesizing, including the different time frames.

One sad note: the maps show the present reduced state of the Aral sea, whereas historically, I think it would have had its original size. Unless the cold and dry climate of the time caused the same sort of shrinkage. To think that an entire sea (albeit fragile) has been wiped out by humans in my lifetime...

The theory is that there was no Aral Sea until the Holocene; the Amu Darya flowed directly into the Caspian, and the Syr Darya flowed into a large lake Southeast of the Aral.

Note just that; the entire maps are showing present-day landscapes instead of ice-age landscapes. There should be glaciers, lower sea levels, and Doggerland.

Basically every historical map of Rome which includes Britannia also depicts the Netherlands as having its current coastline.

Though in that case, correct me if I am wrong, the old coastline was actually further inward.

Yes.

"This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons."

Original article https://theconversation.com/stone-tools-reveal-epic-trek-of-...

This shouldn't be a big surprise. Just 150 years ago, tens of thousands of people simply walked across the continental US.

I like how you phrased this. Wild how recent the continental migration was.

Tens of thousands of people still regularly walk across continents. The Appalachian trail and pacific trail, for example.

Most do so now supported by the infrastructure of modern society that requires them to carry less than ten days of food with them at any given time. And most of those hikers will travel into towns and cities and take long vehicle rides or even plane rides during their long hikes.

One question that nags me is why did people move so much?

Pop density was _very_ low. So I can’t think they exhausted foodsources and it can’t be that they hunted favorite pray to local extinction and were forced to follow...

So I guess they kinda liked to be separate from other clans to avoid strife? Or as a pop reproduced they have halvings and one of them had to migrate and one had to remain?

I always assume people probably weren't that different from you an I, just different skills. Assuming they had a handle on getting food, they probably just want to see what's over the next hill just because that's human nature. Meet women. Or look for better places to live. Or some belief gods are powerful over there. Much of the same reasons people travel today.

It's amazing how we travel today, but put a long walk in google maps and see how much distance you can cover in a week. Obviously roads help this but it's amazing how far you can get on foot in relatively small amount of time. When hiking rule of thumb is 6km/hr on road and 4km when in bush, unless really thick so you don't slow down that much.

Obviously this is me musing rather than evidence based so take with pitch of salt.

Idk, per the fish & wildlife service’s site, a pack of wolves ranges over 50 square miles, but could cover and area up to 1000 sq miles if game is scarce. And wolves move much faster than humans: that’s covering 30 miles a day, an exhausting pace for people.

Considering that a neanderthal tribe would be bigger than a wolf pack, and remain in the same general vicinity longer (because slower), plus an ice age, I could see how local resources could get depleted pretty quickly and you’d have to move on.

Why was population density low? Perhaps even a small clan would need a wide territory to hunt/gather what they possibly could. Neandertals may very well have had greater caloric needs than early homo-sapiens.

Territorial conflicts could be quite common if a tribe required a large area, more chance of it coinciding with another's territory.

One could speculate maybe that could be what the cro-magnon special sauce was. The ability to survive off of smaller territories - or feed a greater population off of the same.

>Pop density was _very_ low. So I can’t think they exhausted foodsources and it can’t be that they hunted favorite pray to local extinction and were forced to follow

Population density increased with farming and acquiring/plundering/storing grain like millets/barley/corn

This is still nothing compared to the migrations of "modern" humans, no?

One of my favorite ideas about human nature is that we are absolutely driven to explore. We walked all the way from Mesopotamia across all of Europe and down to the top of South America! Some ancient madlad hollowed out a boat and paddled to Australia! Why would someone do that?? But we continue to do the same thing trying to get to the moon, Mars, etc. It's a defining feature of the human race.

It's interesting that the neanderthals walked from Europe to Asia, but it's nothing compared to our ancestors explorations.

BTW, I think there was a land bridge to Australia for a time, though not all the way to the Asian continent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallacea

It is perhaps unknowable whether someone went of exploring for years, then actually came back and got his/her remaining clan to migrate great distances. More likely that those migrations were multi-generational: the clan moved 20-50 miles every season following the game, and the descendants eventually got to a different continent.

However, there are examples of somewhat shorter distances in more modern times: I find it fascinating how the different cultures of Europe moved about: the Scandinavians to England and Normandy, later the Normans to Spain, Sicily, and Africa, the Slavs to the Balkans and Adriatic, etc. These are perhaps 1000 miles at most, but it seems like an entire warrior class and parts of the population went far away, conquered and installed themselves for generations in a foreign (and fully populated) place.

A couple of interesting articles I read concerning early arrival in Australia recently:

http://theconversation.com/when-did-aboriginal-people-first-...

https://www.sciencealert.com/50-000-years-ago-hundreds-of-an...

The theories contained in those articles include the ideas that they arrived initially in relatively large numbers in a somewhat organized fashion, and migrated around the Australian coastline in both directions.

I don’t think we were driven to explore so much as we were hunter gatherers often following our food, especially as human densities in one area came to exceed the number of hunter gatherers that area could support.

(The Pacific Islanders are perhaps an exception)

Carrying capacity and land bridges (excepting far-later Polynesians), AOHS.

But we're ridiculously adaptable, tropic to artic.

Maybe that, too. But any other species that had the same drive could not have accomplished what we have.

Our killer app is intelligence. Maybe cheetahs were also driven to expand, but they were far less adaptable than us, so places that were barriers to them were no obstacle to us.

On the contrary, cheetahs likely evolved in North America, and all modern African cheetahs are descended from the small number that made that migration. There is still a small population of them in Iran too, a remnant from that journey.

Right, but no cheetas in Greenland, Hawaii, the Andes, on the banks of the Zaire river, in Sahara, in the Ganges Delta, and so on and so forth.

In Ganges delta they were present:

Reintroduction of the cheetah in India involves the re-establishment of a population of cheetahs into areas where they had previously existed but were hunted into extinction during and after the Mughal Period, largely by Rajput and Maratha Indian royalty and later by British colonialists, until the early 20th century when only several thousand remained. The Mughal emperor Akbar kept Cheetahs for hunting gazelle and blackbucks. Trapping of large numbers of adult Indian cheetahs, who had already learned hunting skills from wild mothers, for assisting in royal hunts is said to be another major cause of the species rapid decline in India as they never bred in captivity with only one record of a litter ever

It's always amazing how many people on this forum, while allegedly smart, keep taking simple, basic statements in a completely wrong way.

Guys, stop, take a deep breath, step away from the computer, take in the real world. Not everything you see is simple, bare facts explained until there's no ambiguity left. If real world worked like that, it would be a bunch of pixels and geeks would rule.

So... figures of speech, anyone?

Same with horses

Can someone explain to me or point me to some sources as to how Neanderthals and Denisovans came about?

Was it just an older form of human that left Africa and turned into Neanderthal/Denisovan once they got to their “final” localities?

When did this happen? What was the form that left Africa and eventually turned into Neanderthals?

Yes!

The current consensus is that Homo Erectus left africa ~2million years ago. Homo Erectus were upright tool wielders, but were likely replaced by another wave of hominid from Africa - the ancestors to Neandertals and Denisovans - Homo Heidelbergensis around 500,000 years ago.

Ancient Eurasia had a variety of upright apes mostly originating from these. When Homo Sapien-Sapien, most probably both you and I's ancestors, left Africa (again in several waves between 40,000-70,000 years ago), they encountered, interbred with, and maybe warred with upright, almost human looking people, though the differences would be visible in the frame of the body and likely the face.

More info can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations

This looks like a good starting point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...

And

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Neanderthal_an...

Neanderthals are thought to have split from Sapiens between 180K and 800K years ago.

It looks like the science is not settled on whether Denisovan separated from the common ancestors of Neanderthal and Sapiens or whether Denisovan are closer to Neanderthal.

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