Why did modern humans take so long to settle in Europe?

What most intrigued me about Jordania's theory is that it's one of the first and few I've encountered that provides a comprehensive model for the emergence and maintenance of strong, non-kin altruism within a classical genetic evolutionary model.

Jordania's complex, unified group singing and dancing displays operate to exclude free riders. If you don't strongly share both the ability to perform the display and to spontaneously exhibit the display in unison, you get eaten. (IOW, no group selection required--just basic selfish gene theory filtering out the non-cooperators.) Furthermore, the neurological mutations that developed to promote these displays would be fundamental to enhanced empathy and, in particular, the capacity and predisposition to strongly conflate group identity with individual identity--again, all with selfish gene theory.

Another way of putting it is that strong socialization evolved first and drove intelligence, rather than intelligence driving stronger socialization. This explains how the trajectory of hominin intelligence broke away from other apes and mammals--nature first had to overcome the altruism barrier, which is fundamentally limited by basic sexual fitness and kinship. (Closest examples of pervasive altruism elsewhere in nature tend to revolve around kin matriarchies--bonobos, naked mole rats, and of course colony insects--and are simply modulated by genetic relatedness as would be expected by selfish gene theory.)

I have no clue how probable is Jordania's theory, but it's relatively unique in comprehensively providing a plausible and distinguishable (i.e. exactly why it was serendipitous without being a miracle) pathway for the development of human altruism. And I tend to believe that strong altruism is the prerequisite for human-level intelligence. If it weren't, I fail to see how human-level intelligence wouldn't have quickly arisen many times over long before hominins. Strong, non-kin altruism and its capacity for socialization provides a unique ecological niche unto itself into which ever greater intelligence provides the enhanced degree of sexual fitness that it couldn't (and hasn't) otherwise.

While feral children are stunted they still have human level intelligence and self awareness even with understandable quirks from very different models.

For lack of better words "institutional knowledge" occurs even in deer - transplants and their descendants had worse survival rates than those who had grown up there but eventually survivors "caught up".

Feral children are also a real fringe case not comparable to a pre "full language" humanity as they by neccessity would still have models of learning via observation at very least. They aren't very evolutionarily significant because like other vulnerable orphaned young mammals they almost always died.

This is what I'm thinking. Neanderthals were genetically very well adapted to the climate, but they already mostly filled the niches.

Homo Sapiens came into an already crowded land, and had to take time to develop the cultural tools and knowledge sufficient enough to give them a large advantage over the more specialized genetics of the Neanderthals.

I could imagine another case were Neanderthals had technology or the wrong faith, were declared witches and heretics and consequently prosecuted until extinction. Age old story and a clear pattern in human history. Being out-competed sounds very unlikely because neanderthals probably were generalists too so at least some would have survived. You generally don't out-compete people by advanced technology. The opposite seems true with modern humans.

Well, as after the interbreeding the survivors have 1-2% of Neanderthals and 98-99% of humans, and none with the opposite proportion have survived, that counts as outcompeting and very one-sided assimilation.

We don’t really know very well how many humans (including Neanderthals) lived in Europe. We have pretty good estimates of effective population sizes from genetic data, but these don’t tell us much about actual population sizes beyond giving us lower bounds.

What we do know, though, is that hunter-gatherer peoples have very low population densities, and that these low population densities are a result of resource scarcity, and violent inter-group competition for these scarce resources. Other hunter-gatherer groups impact you even if they are miles from you.

Oh, and we do know that anatomically modern humans met Neanderthals, at the very least because they interbred.

This is meant in the context of genetic survival. Homo sapiens were, eventually, better equipped to reproduce and survive. And if you read the article, it mentions at the bottom that part of the Neanderthal genes have been... essentially assimilated into the Homo Sapiens gene pool. Hence why Neanderthals seized to exist, and other species that live in a vaccuum (island) did survive. Many Homo Sapiens today are also part Neanderthal.

What makes you think pre-agricultural stone-age Homo Sapiens with a sparse population would have been in any position to eradicate Neanderthals to extinction?

>Yes, calling them inferior or superior is merely another way of describing survival.

Genes survived either because some populations were aided by geography, as in they weren't challenged by foreign populations or because the individuals were smarter.

The modern humans are trying to reverse how nature worked until the recent past but I'm not sure it will work. Competition will always win.

Less adapted to the environment, which of course can include all of the above.

Natural selection is still very much alive, in various forms. Economic reasons (can you afford a car with 3 children's seats?), sexual selection, etc.

No, it is still nonsense.

The whole idea of "our people" being replaced by "those other people" assumes there are "our people" and "those other people" and skin color (or more broadly ethnicity of their ancestors) is the way you recognize which is which.

It assumes that culture is unchanging and tied to skin color. It assumes that birth rates are unchaining in time and tied to skin color. It assumes that demographics of birth rate are relevant in less than hundreds of years - during which culture can completely change (see US or Russia or China in 1821, 1921 and 2021).

The whole idea is based on stupid, racist thinking.