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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

The first comment on the substack links to this article, from 2010, that basically refutes this theory and this book.

https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2010/10/killer-neandertal...

"Proves" and "refutes" are both pretty vague words in a historical context. In my experience when historians say "I will prove this to you" they typically mean "not only is it a good story, but unusually I have at least 1 piece of actual evidence". So in the loose world of history where nobody has any idea, maybe the idea is refuted.

Realistically, probably both posts are wrong but we'll never know about which aspects. 10,000 years is a long time, there should have been multiple occurrences of the impossible. History is huge, and we only have tattered records for 1 in ~3,000 years events.

The article linked by the parent is very clear about when things are unknown or suspected but unproven (from real but inconclusive archaeological evidence). In contrast, it shows that the book in question is completely speculative (not based on any archaeological evidence whatsoever) while presenting itself as unequivocally correct.

There is no need to beat around the bush. The linked article fully refutes the original one.

The book is a work of history. Of course it is completely speculative. The point of historical books is to convince people to read them, typically they have a fairly thick dose of spice and storytelling. Thucydides wasn't trying to bore people.

The first "evidence that they may have had the technology to make sewn garments" link [0] looks like some dude ran a model. Now it is certainly possible to claim that as conclusive evidence. But probably only in a debate between historians, I wouldn't bank on it.

50,000 years ago is a long time. There is not a lot of confidence about how things happened, and reality defies mixing generalisation and truth.

[0] https://anthropology.net/2009/06/26/neanderthals-dried-fresh...

Do you mean to construct a defense of the "cannibal rapist Neandertal orcs" idea on the post-factualist basis that, well, there's no actually knowing anything, so we may as well pick whatever just-so story we like?

That's a pretty weak defense, is why I'm asking. Almost anything else would be more convincing. So maybe it's worth asking whether you've got anything else to offer.

> there's no actually knowing anything, so we may as well pick whatever just-so story we like?

What do you think is going on here? There isn't enough evidence to create an accurate truth, we've got no way of deciding if an accurate truth has been uncovered and it doesn't matter at all anyway. The process by which "truth" is found has a heavy bias towards good storytelling and typically strong political overtones.

Do you feel HN is upvoting the story because anyone feels that accurately depicting the neanderthal lifestyle will have profound bearing on the course of the modern world? I doubt even the historians think that. Maybe something will come of it, but realistically everyone is in this for the fun of imagining what might have happened, and the joy of arguing about it confidently from flimsy evidence.

> What do you think is going on here?

Well, to go by your prior comments, you're confusing "pick whatever just-so story you like" with how history is done. Feel free to continue, of course; I've more or less given up arguing with post-truthers in general, and certainly see no point in doing so here.

Please don't give up. Give them something positive - they really have better options in life than a world of confusion and ignorance.

I'm not wholly without hostages to fortune, or at least people I love who don't know by default to mistrust everything they hear from the goddamned Internet. I worry about them first, friends after, and randos in HN comment threads with whatever's left over, which is nothing to speak of at the moment. I'm tired. So it goes.

I understand. But I notice that the people spreading ignorance are not giving up or tiring (because, I hypothesize, they have initiative and belief that they will succeed). They've radically changed the world, which means the world can be changed. Our ideas are stronger and better.

Anyway, I'm not trying to compel you, I'm just trying to include some important points in the discussion.

Thucydides has entered the chat:

"Now he that by the arguments here adduced shall frame a judgment of the things past and not believe rather that they were such as the poets have sung or prose-writers have composed, more delightfully to the ear than conformably to the truth, as being things not to be disproved and by length of time turned for the most part into the nature of fables without credit, but shall think them here searched out by the most evident signs that can be, and sufficiently too, considering their antiquity: he, I say, shall not err....

"To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable. "

Nonsense, look at the actual archaeological record from the time. Yes, anything could have been but then the person making those claims has to provide proper evidence for it, not the other way around.

If 10,000 years is too long to ever know what really happened, then we can dismiss the idea that stories from less than 10,000 years ago accurately reflect the reality of more than 40,000 years ago.

> when historians say "I will prove this to you" they typically mean "not only is it a good story, but unusually I have at least 1 piece of actual evidence". So in the loose world of history where nobody has any idea, maybe the idea is refuted.

Wow, that describes Internet posts (and HN comments), but it's utterly unlike the serious histories I've read, which are filled with primary evidence and incredible amounts of research, with the historians traveling around the world digging up new evidence in archives and museums.

If you want far better histories than what you've encountered, I suggest looking up the topic you are interested in on a college syllabus. The Open Syllabus Project[0], which collects millions of college syllabi and offers statistics too (most assigned, etc.) is a great resource. Or better, ask a reference librarian in the topic at a research library (e.g., a university) - I find they will often help people with recommendations if you are polite and show that you've made an effort to learn what you can without them.

[0] http://opensyllabusproject.org/

Yeah, I remember when this 'theory" came around the first time. It was silly even in passing, and supporters weren't even playing up the idea that the entirety of humanity had migrated to the Levant in order to be nearly wiped out by Neanderthals. Especially when there's a much more plausible alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

When someone gets introduced as a "heterodox thinker", there's always something badly thought-out coming.

Thanks for this, I didn't see the comment in the article.

The minute I saw "horizontal slit eyes" I was pretty much done. There's literally no way to know if that was true, for that to be a claim in a proposed theory rightly discredits that theory. I can see them being hairy. But deducing from having larger eyes that they'd be nocturnal and therefore have horizontal slit eyes...

And then there's the issue of the flat face. I'm no anthropologist but I understand the structure of the face and I have seen a few pictures of Neanderthal skulls, they absolutely had a protruding hooded nose just like us, no doubt about it.

Looking at a skeleton, they obviously are very similar to us in form. All this stuff about them being vastly different looking monstrous human relatives is just fantasy.

The suggestion that Neanderthal had a tapetum lucidum is also weird as that is a feature that has been lost in almost all extant primates, including nocturnal ones, except the bush baby.

I believe some tarsiers have it too, but yeah...this whole part seems like evolutionary fan-fiction.

I was wrong, some lemurs also have tapeta but, oddly, tarsiers don’t, in spite of having many more adaptations to low light.

What’s weird is that the advocate of the orc theory just throws in details without even considering whether they’re plausible. A full hair coat? Easy, we already have hair, and most of our “relatives” have full coats. Larger teeth? Sure. A gain of function that’s been lost to an entire phylum, including the apes he references? Unlikely.

I meant clade not phylum. Sleepy?

The facial description did sound like quite a stretch. If anything, a more human face would be even more terrifying. These creatures are often described as very close to human but with savagely exaggerated features. An ape with a snout is more understandable than a monstrous face with large, staring eyes, huge mouth and deformed nose. Look at any traditional depiction of human like monsters and those are the features you’ll see.

"There's literally no way to know if that was true" - we don't know now, but hypothetically in the future, wouldn't it be plausible to determine such traits from their DNA? We have a full DNA sequence, and wherever (and whenever, in the future) we know what impact particular genes had on some traits in primates, we can check how the neanderthals had it.

Heck, it would not get attempted due to ethical issues, but technically it might be even plausible to clone a neanderthal using a human surrogate mother, there has been some work in cross-species cloning.

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