Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

They would need to explain this.

100 times as many humans, randomly mix in the lesser number of Neanderthals for breeding and they would be 'absorbed'.

Except you can't randomly mix them in.

Why would I allow a Neanderthal man come to my tribe and mate with my tribes women? Why would I not just kill him?

I get I'd also be at war with other tribes killing their men, but Neanderthals I assume are easy to kill tactically and emotionally and I wouldn't expect them to be good allies.

You can't just make these theories without explaining the mechanisms.

View on HN

Why wouldn’t you? The natural state of humanity isn’t to kill on sight indiscriminately. A good chunk of Latin America are descended from both native and European ancestry, in some cases more than half of some Latin American countries’ population.

There’s also a whole lot of loaded assuming here; who is to say the mixing is not of Neanderthal women and homo sapiens men?

The study simply observes evidence of interbreeding. There doesn’t really need to be a theory about why if we can observe the characteristics and genetics directly.

I imagine the blending would occur during moments of slaughter. One tribe attacks another - kills all the adults/men and takes the children/young women - and vice versa.

Over many many generations, over many tribes across europe, this would ultimately lead to blending.

If you are killing off all the Neanderthal men you are not "absorbing" them.

If Neanderthals also could do the opposite, I guess it'd be called 'absorbing', since it's more fair.

But this also would need humans accepting 50/50 children in the tribe.

When you spell it out, it doesn't make sense. This is why I'd want to know how you do this.

Adding Neanderthal women to your slaves and killing the men, and keeping them there multi-generational until they become blended makes more sense to me for instance. But that's wiping them out, not absorbing them.

I mean, would you do these things now? We live in a different time with now widely considered social conscience, but those ideas came from somewhere to start with.

> Why would I allow a Neanderthal man come to my tribe and mate with my tribes women? Why would I not just kill him?

> I get I'd also be at war with other tribes killing their men, but Neanderthals I assume are easy to kill tactically and emotionally and I wouldn't expect them to be good allies.

You scienced this one like a pro.

What about the females...

Yeah because rapes not a thing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com