Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54k years ago at Mandrin
bbc.com
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(As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0], they certainly looked a bit strange, but they were not repelling or appeared un-human.)
On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago. If anything, thousands of years of agriculture and living in large settlements removed the evolutionary pressure to be a quick and inventive observer of your environment. It is much more easy to somehow get by in an established farming community with thousands of members if you are a bit dense than it is if you are part of a small tribe of hunters.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Reconstr...
(Some) humans are willing to mate with just about anything. There would be human-dog hybrids if it wasn't genetically impossible, as unsettling as that thought is.
Seems more likely that we treated Neanderthals as humans do with other outsiders: we exterminated them and took their resources.
Word has it that you can find their descendants on Wall Street though.
Why not? Lots of our ancestors are extinct.
I like that Homo habilis translates to "handy man" since they were the first to use stone tools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Evolution_of_g... is also an interesting read.
Even Kurzgesagt mentioned in passing that we're not sure if it was due to "a series of minor genocides."
- https://youtu.be/dGiQaabX3_o?t=79
- https://youtu.be/CWu29PRCUvQ?t=165
If anyone knows of breadcrumbs to follow, please chime in. Genetic testing implies it should be possible to figure out how much interbreeding took place. We seem to be able to trace extinction events with some degree of accuracy, so it would be surprising if a genocide-type extinction event was easy to confuse with interbreeding.
5000 years is a blip - if humans find a sufficiently habitable environment, we apparently can settle for a pretty low quality of life.
It only works until it doesn't, though. Neanderthals or humans could have initiated an incident, in which traditions were distrusted or discarded or lost on either side, resulting in hostility, or they lost their elders to disease and the knowledge to survive.
Just like megafauna extinction, "bad humans were bad" probably doesn't come close to what actually happened.
Neanderthals were likely as or more intelligent than humans, implying susceptibility to all the same conflicts, biased thinking, and bad incentives that affect human cultures. It could be environmental or biological or a pure fluke that Neanderthals didn't outlive humans, but whatever the reason they're gone, it's going to be just as convoluted and nuanced as the rise and fall of millenia old human cultures.
Artefacts were left in caves because they're the only place where the artifacts can persist for hundreds and thousands of years, and ancient man knew this just like the modern man.
Troglodytes were relatively rare, and most prehistoric humans were probably of the nomadic or small village types of hunter gatherer cultures.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-humans-wea... - the toba catastrophe was one such event that likely forced humans to live in caves extensively.
But with few exceptions, when I read between his lines, I see that ugly word tacitly, time and time again. Exceptions include some Celtic migration events, but in most cases the DNA results indicate major breaks in DNA haplotypes that are consistent with an unhappy end to one group.
And of course recent “sapiens” history gives us our own backyard examples—unrelenting!
If you read Napolean Chagnon’s “Nobel Savages” or Polly Wiessner’s and Akii Tumu’s “Historical Vines” you can get a good=bad gut feeling for what “replacement” probably meant operationally in pre-literate cultures. Sadly not much different since the invention of Greek orthography, Gutenberg’s printing press, TV and the internet. Us versus the Other is apparently the name of the human game.
If we could get everyone to absorb Richard Rorty’s pragmatic approach to a life well lived starting in grade school, now that would be real progress.
For an example of non-genocide, look at African bushmen. While their relations with other humans aren't always great, African bushmen populations haven't really experienced any genocidal decline. But if/when they fully interbreed with other humans and get incorporated into the gene pool (after evolving as a separate branch from mainline homo sapiens for over a hundred thousand years), their genes will be an even smaller fraction of the human gene pool than the neanderthal genes.
They are confined to a few small areas in South Africa and a few small areas much, much further north than that. The obvious implication is that they used to cover the area in between, too.
This doesn't make for a very compelling example of non-genocide.
In the scientific parts of the ethnographic record (there is a split in anthro between scientists and non-scientists, see e.g. Napoleon Chagnon[0]; basically, he pointed out that the Yanomamo were breeding themselves for violence and was punished for it) the idea that our M.O. in small-scale societies when encountering outsiders, or when invading other groups, is to kill the men and take the women and children (often as slaves) is not all that controversial. See e.g. http://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758
It's not necessary to posit a catastrophic change. There were simply more of the new kind, so there were more of their genes in the mix and fewer Neanderthal.
The relations between tribes near each other would have been as nuanced and varied and sophisticated and weird as any collectives of humans in relation to each other in modern life. "Those asshats downriver are rude, but they trade fair"
Modern life has given us profound advantages over previous generations, but we are basically the exact same kind of creature as plains walking humans from 300k years ago.
The notion of primitive simple hunter gatherer tribes doesn't account for the innate complexity of individuals. Their experience going through life would be the same as ours, we just have better (on most measures) tools and knowledge.
(To be clear, not all hunter-gatherer societies are like that. Some are more peaceful than others, and there are extremes like the Moriori. But the average is what it is.)
I would think so as well, although the Neanderthal tribes were much smaller than Sapiens tribes, weren’t they?
Evolution of our species continues and some changes in our anatomy are being observed even in the last 100 years of our history. The evolutionary pressure never stopped, it just changed its form. We are no longer competing with nature, we are competing with ourselves, adjusting our diet, exposure to seasonal weather, sun and fresh air, physical activities and mental challenges. I would say yes, we may have become more intelligent, even if we lost our connection to nature. We just use our intelligence for different things: our society, our language are much more sophisticated, our abstract thinking and creativity have advanced, some of us may have got more control over our bodies (I’m pretty sure modern athletes are more developed than our ancestors).
Can we be so sure? Our tools have evolved and become more sophisticated thanks for our industry for sure, but that says nothing of intelligence per se.
How much more or less sophisticated and creative were humans only 150/200 years ago? Yet, technologically... things have moved quite a bit. Technology that has built upon a lot of precedents.
If we look at history back until the industrial revolution, I would guess that less people had to work on food production and thus could go into creative fields.
Intelligence is better measurable through IQ tests and we can see IQ score rising in societies today. (Flynn Effect)
I'm not sure high IQ people from today would make it far in more ancient times, and not because smarter or dumber, but only because they are unadapted.
It's not though. It's the opposite, and that's what makes it interesting, and why it's being measured. The g factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
General intelligence is related to the ability to learn new things in general, no matter the context.
And today's humans, would, if they got to start as babies 20k years ago, learn all there was to know, about that world. And they'd start feeling bored. Maybe they'd try to build and invent things, just to escape the otherwise for-the-brain empty days.
(You somehow got it the other way around :-) I wonder how you formed your opinions / beliefs about intelligence? If it's ok if I ask)
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If, in your comment, replace IQ with "wisdom" and "knowledge", then it makes sense. A grown up human of toady -- yes, definitely unadapted, knowledge wise.
Likely not. Agafia Lykova is not bored, she‘s still not using any of the modern technology and she’s still living like her ancestors lived 500-100 years ago. And she was young when her family was discovered.
In this case, though, she might agree with me, I'd say -- in that she spends part of her time reading and constructing things, from the article you linked: "reading and construction".
Modern tech? I think there's lots of cool not-modern tech, ancient tech.
Edit: She's an amazingly cool person! Thanks for linking the article, I might have a closer look at her & her life (now done. I wonder how many books she has to read, and after how long she's forgotten them so she can re-read)
Edit2: Sorry if my first version of this post sounded a bit grumpy. Now edited
Success in education is correlated with high IQ. Much the same way high IQ is correlated with many forms of success.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29911926/
…Whatever that means. It's meaningless to say fluid intelligence can't be improved with education, that's a tautology.
We have enough studies on the impacts of nutrition in the womb and the impact of experience and neglect on brain development in children that we can be sure that intelligence is more advanced. More complex languages leads to more complex thoughts. Better nutrition leads to greater intelligence. Both for our normal communication but also for languages to describe abstract ideas like mathematics.
If this still doesn't sound definite, then I think we are getting into the issue of what is intelligence and how do you measure it in a person or a population. But then we would need to get into answering just how can we be sure humans are more intelligent than a wide selection of animals and even non-animals. Same for creativity and sophistication.
Processors in 2000 were ~42nm in size, now they’re ~5nm in size. Not only did they get faster as they grew smaller, they became more efficient as well.
https://www.technotification.com/2021/06/what-is-nm-in-proce...
Brains consume a lot of resources, so evolution had to optimize their efficiency. They need energy, they need cooling, they need removal of waste, they must deliver signals faster - all those things are pushing for miniaturization.
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do...
>Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity. This view is supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses between different species suggests that what makes up synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
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Yes, this very clearly established with genetic studies now. Caucasians have around 1.5% to 2% Neanderthal DNA.
The first is that how we think is deeply intertwined with language. There's tons of evidence of this, not the least of which is Helen Keller's description of her world before she learned language. We'll probably never know what language existed 50,000+ years ago, how sophisticated or simple it was and how it affected how our ancestors thought.
The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world, which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked. So would we even be able to relate to Homo Sapiens (or Neanderthals for that matter).
Some things we'd be able to related to (eg the earliest burial rites we've found evidence were from ~75,000 years ago) but I imagine a lot we simply couldn't.
Some Neanderthal DNA exists in the modern gene pool. That itself raises many questions. Was this violent? How was it viewed? Were these people viewed the same? How dominant were large family/tribal groups?
Can you elaborate some more on these differences? I’d love to learn more.
Another example: the origin of the word "decimate". "Decimation" was a Roman military punishment to military units in provinces that rebel against Rome. I don't believe it was widespread but it was common enough to spawn the modern word. "Deci-" here is Latin meaning "10". The punishment was this: soldiers (typically) were put in groups of 10. Each group was responsible for picking which of those 10 would die and be responsible for killing that person. The general way Rome quashed rebellion in general was brutal.
The amazing thing we actually have first hand accounts on Rome's military conquests in the forms of the writings of Julius Caesar (eg with the conquest of Gaul, which was essentially genocide). Now first hand accounts aren't necessarily accurate (eg Herodotus tended to embellish) but there are other accounts that lend a lot of credence to Caesar's accounts.
Wasn't an American President killed in a pistol duel not 130 years ago or so?
My grandfather grew up on a farm and never went to high school (which was a perfectly fine life decision in that milieu) and fought in WWII at 16 by lying about his age cause there were no birth certificates to prove otherwise
I think we very much underestimate how different human reality is as far back as 4000 years ago, nevermind 50k
You're probably thinking of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who died of his wounds from a duel with Vice-President Aaron Burr. It was 1804.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr–Hamilton_duel
I believe Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel before he became President: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/andrew-jackson-k...
Of course there was interbreeding. Their smaller population was bred into the larger Sapiens population. This is why most of us (Caucasians) have some percentage of Neanderthal in us.
“Winter is coming. Should we migrate down to the coast? Last winter, there were lots of crabs, but my dad said many winters ago there was a terrible flood that killed many of his friends. We could stay here and try to gather as much wood as we can to keep warm and try to hunt the deer. The dumb people are wandering up the mountain. It’s always cold up there. They won’t survive.”
It's more likely they were successful but slowly bred into the larger Homo Sapien population over time, judging from everyone's genetics today. Caucasians have way too high of a percentage of Neanderthal for them to have been killed off. Most of their population bred in.
Interbreeding is pretty much proven.
Do you know why he thought they didn't have strong language skills and how he linked that to deception and such or was he guessing?
Because we have genetic tests nowadays, and it looks like they all bred in from the high percentages people have.
I recommend reading the book, and also I would not recommend dismissing a respected book in one sentence, but I will say that the argument is largely anthropological. that the millions of years of human existence without development into more advanced civilizations can best be explained by language and oral history. More specifically, the ability to think in abstract and communicate it to others.
Why is it probably not true? It's the simplest reasoning. Why did they have to be deceived through language or annihilated, but slightly fornicated?
> I recommend reading the book, and also I would not recommend dismissing a respected book in one sentence
Seems reading the book wouldn't help me if you read it and can't argue the points on it's behalf.
I'll ask this again:
Do you know why he thought they didn't have strong language skills and how he linked that to annihilation via deception and such or was he guessing?
Looking at contemporary history, there are dramatic differences in power dynamic between different human cohorts. There’s nothing that separates the biological abilities of any two populations on earth, but the one with the machine guns and artillery will always beat the guy with a bow and spear.
Look at the fate of the indigenous people of the americas. Europe didn’t send its best people, but disease, better weapons and toxic politics carried the age.
It was mostly disease. The muskets at the time were tragic. A properly trained infantry soldier could fire at most 4 rounds per minute.
But disease did wipe out the majority of their adversaries, so they had a relatively easy time dealing with the survivors.
In effect, we won the evolutionary race by being a honda civic instead of a Porsche 911.
This may not mean exactly what you think it means though. Your non-Neanderthal genes are also almost identical to the Neanderthal ones, otherwise interbreeding would have been impossible. It's just that genes come with slight variances that can be used to trace ancestry.
E.g. you may also have heard that humans and chimpansee DNA is 98.8% identical, so there is obviously a different type of similarity metric being used there
It's also fascinating that Neanderthals soundly beat us in the first round of incursions, and 50k years later humans presumably wiped them out entirely + all other variations of homonids
- Homo Sapiens had tribes 100-200 people when Neanderthals had 20-30. They were outnumbered. I'm not suggesting brutal wipe out, but competition for resources.
- we "won" because we were immune to a disease be brought from Africa.
There are many ways to interpret that: xenophobic? susceptible to disease? militantly self-sufficient? not interested in decoration? (Most trade goods are decorative.) no language skills?
There is other evidence that Neanderthals had no reliable access to fire: that if their banked coals died, they could not start a new fire, or get a light from another band.
It is quite difficult to imagine a species that is more vicious to even its own members, let alone members of other species, than ours is.
Hylobates lar - 8.93% Gorilla beringei - 5.00% Pan troglodytes - 4.49% Hylobates agilis - 4.17% Nomascus hainanus - 1.00% Pongo abelii - 0.82% Pan paniscus - 0.68% Nomascus gabriellae - 0.59% Nomascus leucogenys - 0.59% Nomascus siki - 0.59% Nomascus concolor - 0.36% Gorilla gorilla - 0.14%
Modern humans - 0.14% Medieval Age, Old World - 12.08% (± 7.15%)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf?referrer_ac...
Related: a past comment on article "Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104373
While recklessly creating new intelligent life is ethically nauseating to me, I also fear the status quo of NOT needing to consider these dilemmas. In my mind it's a clash between my visceral horror (of creating an intelligent being that is not human) vs a very real fear of global human extinction (of continuing on our destructive track without hard, global-scale conversations about our relationship/responsibility/entanglement with animals and other forms of life)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Great_Filter
The theory is out there that Neanderthals were furry; I believe that's because there isn't evidence of them wearing clothing.
If population density was as low as we like to imagine (was it? Or is it just sites where traces survived into the present being so rare?), perhaps a neanderthaliensis tribe was just as alien to them as any foreign sapiens tribe would be?
Apparently, this is not what happened. It seems that there are no neanderthal traces on human mitochondrial dna. This means that all neandertal legacy comes from neanderthal males mating with human females.
It's not a question of how attractive you found a neanderthal girl. Maybe as a human male you wouldn't be strong enough to seduce her!
I'm sure that informed how early humans felt about neanderthals.
because "intelligence" is a vague thing and it connects with education.
For example, the average person with a school education today can do math better than Leonardo da Vinci, which enables some stuff to be invented today more easily than before.