50k-year-old three-ply cord fragment found at Neanderthal site
bbc.com
bbc.com
I don’t keep a finger on the pulse, but seeming advances in the study of Neanderthals have been noticeable from browsing HN alone this past decade.
Are there any books or resources that look to bring a layman up to speed on the changes to and current state of the field, similar to what Mann’s 1491 did for pre-Columbian studies back in the day?
I’ve turned up Pääbo’s Neanderthal Man before, but it was focused on genetics, and could be quite technical.
At the risk of being disdained by "science", I never bought the idea of pre-historic human subspecies.
The reason being is that I cannot fathom the evolutionary event that would cause our brain to develop in such a way that we evolved from "smart enough to outsmart all predators" to "completely dominate the earth and the elements".
There hasn't seemed to exist any such predator or environment where such a huge jump in brain capacity would be required.
I think that depends on how you look at it. If we're going by pure numbers, bacteria win by a landslide. Then we've got fungi which come pretty close to competing with bacteria for most numerous and widespread.
Ants probably have us beat too along with a few other insects.
But to address the point you were making. It didn't happen all at once. It was a long gradual process that occurred with huge overlap between different hominid species. The 'jump' in brain power wasn't a jump, but a slow process of selection where smarter individuals would outcompete the less intelligent ones.
For example, they would possibly hunt more efficiently, using tools and having a better memory for migration routes, they would have a better memory for dangers etc. Over time individuals better suited to this would mate and breed with others, this in turn would pass those traits on to offspring while individuals who couldn't compete would be left out and over millions of years of this and constant adaptations acquired because of this, humanity got smarter.
Sure, but those reasons aren't enough. The world has to change often enough to make that 0.001% smarter brain have an actual advantage. And slow enough that there is no extinction event. Judging by what we see nowadays, 13.8 billion years don't seem enough for those odds.
Unless the intelligence increases where such big leaps, and became the strongest dominant genes, that it didn't really matter how much time passed or how the world changed?
And hardly could they imagine the academic language used in analysing their handy work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61839-w
Hardy, B. L., Moncel M.-H., Kerfant C., Lebon, Bellot-Gurlet M. L., & Mélard N. (2020). "Direct evidence of Neanderthal fibre technology and its cognitive and behavioral implications." Scientific Reports. 10(4889).
They are similar in kind to us, in that they could master (simple) crafts. But evidence shows they often learned it from Homo Sapiens, and imperfectly at that.
I expect the genetic picture is far more complicated than we thought or think, and "interbreeding" is a simplistic way of talking about populations. Species are, after all, a taxonomical concept we invented, not an actual thing in nature. The lines are far more blurry.