Hacker News Reader

Comment by KarlKemp | Hacker News Reader

Growing up 250m from where the Neandertals were found, I got to watch in real time as the common (or communicated) thinking on it evolved, from the image of the primitive brute to the model that, wearing a suit, wouldn't seem out of place sitting across the table from you at Starbucks. Assuming the later view to be closer to the truth, and also including the genetic evidence that quite a bit of mating happened between these branches, I believe the relationship would have been more familiar than the rare sightings of physically intimidating strangers that seem to form the core of the Sasquatch myth.

View on HN

Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing, and also lived an extremely active lifestyle (they were bigger, stronger, and had lots of broken bones that healed), the Sasquatch doesn't seem like that bad a fit.

As for quite a bit of mating, current estimates say a maximum of dozens of times over a period of 12,000 years. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ for verification. This is, "once every few hundred years someone got pregnant." This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.

It seems interesting that even that much of their (our?) DNA has been conserved. Do they have a guess at how much of it has been lost due to lack of benefit?

It seems ancient unused dna just sticks around https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-gr...

> Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing

Don't read too much into that. Native Americans (homo sapiens from the whole American continent) didn't master wheels for transport. Aztecs did have toys that used wheels, the concept wasn't foreign, but somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport. Yes, we can argue that they didn't have draught animals, but there are plenty of human powered uses for wheels, and some regions did have horses, llamas or buffaloes.

Maybe Neanderthals just weren't interested.

Horses and humans i the Americas at the same time is a post-Columbus thing. Buffaloes can't be domesticated. Llamas are mountain animals and wheeled wagons in mountains are extra hard to do well. Even in the old world, wheels where primarily a steppe thing.

Edit: I was wrong about the horses, there is a overlap.

No.

Before 12800 years ago, North America was home to both horses and camels, along with ~30 other now extinct genera including mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, dire wolves, giant sloths, and a bear much larger than the grizzly. All of those were obliterated at that geological instant, along with the Clovis culture, apparently by a meteorite or comet strike. It also melted many cubic miles of glacial ice in an instant, scouring out the Scablands of eastern Washington state in a flood hundreds of feet deep, carving out the whole Columbia Gorge in only days. It ignited continent-spanning fires that destroyed everything anyone might have built.

Nothing would have prevented the people who lived before then from domesticating horses and using them to pull wagons. None has been found, but remarkable little remains of the people who were in North America for at least 10 millennia before then.

Horses were domesticated between 3500 and 2000 BCE. The probability they could have been domesticated 10 000 years before in America is quite low

That happened in Eurasia. Events in the Americas were decoupled from Eurasia.

The fact is, we don't have any evidence for or against any domestication, or wheels, in North America. Any evidence that might have existed was burned up along with everything else, in the YD conflagration. So, any estimation of probability is 100% guessing, with a decorative and misleading frosting of "science".

What we do have firm evidence for is domestication of tree species in South America before 10,000 years ago. So, domestication did happen there before similar events in Eurasia.

Plant domestication seems to be on quite similar timelines on both continents.

Tree domestication takes a lot longer than for pulses and grains, which hints they might have started rather earlier. The Amazon basin was never as heavily affected by ice ages as temperate regions smothered under ice, miles deep, although of course it went through major climate shifts of its own. I would not be surprised to learn that, 20kya, much of it was savanna.

Where are you getting this theory that there was an impact event that.killed off both the megafauna and the Clovis people's off?

Everything (credible) I'm able to find suggests/theorises that the Clovis differentiated into different groups of Native American populations, and that gradual climate change did most of the megafauna in.

There have been many interglacials and only in one did the megafauna die out en masse. This is a good argument against it simply being from climate change.

Instead look to what was different in the most recent one. A weird species on 2 feet with hunting techniques that the megafauna had never encountered before. Such as using fire to drive whole herds of horses off of a cliff.

Not plausible. Humans at much higher density had been able to drive island populations to extinction, but had not succeeded on a continent. Furthermore, they had been in the Americas for many millennia already.

Horses and camels were all over Asia, coeval with humans, and did fine. Lions survived in in Europe well into recorded history. Africa, of course, retained about everything for hundreds of millennia, except for 3 genera right at 12800 years ago. The only notable extinction in Eurasia was the woolly mammoth, which survived only on Wrangel Island. Humans had been in the Americas for many millennia, but populations of these animals did not decline during that time.

Instead, the 30+ genera and the Clovis people all vanished at identically the same time, coincident with the layer of radically elevated platinum dust, shocked quartz, and soot.

Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago.

Authors: Wendy S. Wolbach, Joanne P. Ballard, Paul A. Mayewski, [+24 others]

Journal of Geology, 2018, volume 126, pp. 165–184

http://sci-hub.se/10.1086/695703

Abstract: The Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) cosmic-impact hypothesis is based on considerable evidence that Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating ≥100-km-diameter comet, the remnants of which persist within the inner solar system ∼12,800 y later. Evidence suggests that the YDB cosmic impact triggered an “impact winter” and the subsequent Younger Dryas (YD) climate episode, biomass burning, late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, and human cultural shifts and population declines.

The cosmic impact deposited anomalously high concentrations of platinum over much of the Northern Hemisphere, as recorded at 26 YDB sites at the YD onset, including the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core, in which platinum deposition spans ∼21 y (∼12,836–12,815 cal BP). The YD onset also exhibits increased dust concentrations, synchronous with the onset of a remarkably high peak in ammonium, a biomass-burning aerosol. In four ice-core sequences from Greenland, Antarctica, and Russia, similar anomalous peaks in other combustion aerosols occur, including nitrate, oxalate, acetate, and formate, reflecting one of the largest biomass-burning episodes in more than 120,000 y.

In support of widespread wildfires, the perturbations in CO2 records from Taylor Glacier, Antarctica, suggest that biomass burning at the YD onset may have consumed ∼10 million km^2, or ∼9% of Earth’s terrestrial bio-mass. The ice record is consistent with YDB impact theory that extensive impact-related biomass burning triggered the abrupt onset of an impact winter, which led, through climatic feedbacks, to the anomalous YD climate episode.

Even a wheelbarrow is a big deal.

But making a practical wheel out of wood would take some significant woodworking and joinery skills. They may have tried, and just gave up after the wheel would fracture after a few moments use.

I.e. the concept of the wheel and making a successful implementation of it are very different things.

> somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport

If you weren't aware, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, a kind of larger version of Venice, so the most effective way to move goods around would by boat rather than any land-based transportation. The area outside of Lake Texcoco would have been quite mountainous, with lowland regions largely being dense jungles, both regions that are obviously poorly suited for wheeled transportation in general.

This is the kind of terrain where the modern US Army, with all of its technological access, will still rely on pack mules to move goods. Do you really think wheeled transport would have been a viable invention in such circumstances?

Even in Venice they use wheelbarrows and sack trucks.

where the wheelbarrow is concerned the question then arises, is the wheelbarrow a primary wheeled invention of a secondary one, that is to say do people invent stuff like carts because they are really necessary for moving things around in their area and then afterwards think hey what if we had a smaller cart for moving things in smaller areas?

I think it's a secondary invention, and then if you are in an area where the primary invention just doesn't make much sense neither one gets invented.

But were those wheelbarrows invented in Venice to handle problems that they encountered moving things around their local environment or did they get theirs from some traveler who agreed to tell them where they could get their own?

That's exactly the point that the GP is making. It's not that they were incapable of creating the technology, they just didn't see it as useful. Similarly, the Neanderthals may have been capable of sewing, they just didn't do it.

I seem to remember reading that in some areas of southern China the wheel didn't see widespread use until the twentieth century.

> toys that used wheels

Toy wheels don’t scale. A solid piece of wood is too fragile, it easily splits into rings.

A good wooden wheel is harder than it looks.

You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit. Secondly, you need good well fitted axels, which also requires precision tools.

> require good quality saws and a tight fit

The Aztecs and other South and Central American societies were capable of fine stonework so I think they at least had the potential to do fine woodwork.

Even a poor quality wheel and axle makes a useful wheelbarrow.

> You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit.

You don't need saws at all. Initial shaping with an adze, and subsequent flattening/fitting of the two pieces with friction and an abrasive like sand would give you closely fitted wood surfaces, though not necessarily all that flat.

Note that a somewhat similar technique was used to fit irregular stone blocks together with high precision by the Inca.

You could also create a flat wood surface by abrasion against a flat stone surface, but that is more labor intensive to produce.

You may be right, but that 2004 paper is on the wrong side of, for example, the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome by Pääbo, five years later: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1188021

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_... has some newer stuff and the trend seems to be progressively more archaic DNA being identified.

not necessarily uncommon just the fertility of such mating and their decedents might have been lower than replacement rate. if a such mating pair were only able to produce 2 or less fertile children on average then their line would eventually die out. Its also possible that it was like mules where the offspring are starile 99.9% of the time but every once in a while one is able to reproduce successfully for some reason.

> This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.

Interspecies sex happen a whole lot more often than that. Having viable offspring might have been the rare part.

Dr. Eugene McCarthy has a theory that humans are a hybrid between pigs and chimpanzees https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html

I do hope it's a April Fool joke...

I (not an expert) checked him out for 10 minutes just now.. He wrote a book about bird hybrids, and seems to see hybrids everywhere. Check out his pages on all kinds of hybrids, which reads like a crank website. e.g. the very wacky page on cabbits (cat + rabbit)

https://www.macroevolution.net/mammalian-hybrids.html

https://www.macroevolution.net/cat-rabbit-hybrids.html

But his pig+chimp theory is serious, and it seems it makes some sense in explaining numerous pig-like anatomical features of humans, but there can be no genetic evidence, so only he believes it, it seems.

Yeah, it is wrong.

First of all, the coincidences become a lot less coincidence when you look at convergent evolution. For example tooth shape is tied to what you eat. Since we and pigs are both omnivores, we wind up with similar teeth.

Second, only related species can form hybrids. Lions and tigers split probably a bit under 4 million years ago. Donkeys and horses split a bit before that. We don't know when humans and chimps split, but you can find estimates everywhere from 7-12 million years. The split between primates and pigs appears to be about 80 million years ago. And the result is that lions and tigers can interbreed and the child can be fertile. Donkeys and horses can interbreed and the child is usually NOT fertile. We have no evidence that humans and chimps can have children, and it has probably been tried. As for more distant than that, farmers have been having regular sex with farm animals since farms existed, with no babies.

So I'm going firmly with "crank".

The liger is a hybrid offspring of a male lion (Panthera leo) and a female tiger (Panthera tigris). The liger has parents in the same genus but of different species. The liger is distinct from the similar hybrid called the tigon, and is the largest of all known extant felines. They enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Notably, ligers typically grow larger than either parent species, unlike tigons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger

"We have no evidence that humans and chimps can have children, and it has probably been tried. " Indeed Ilya Ivanov spent a lot of time and money trying to do just that, with no success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanov

It's not a joke, but the evidence cited is being interpreted rather freely; the chromosomal and genetic evidence doesn't support the hypothesis at all.

I'd buy horizontal gene transfer via a viral vector (which is still damn unlikely for all those traits) over hybridization any day of the week.

it seems there were very few Neanderthals or humans around in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Population: “Like modern humans, Neanderthals probably descended from a very small population with an effective population—the number of individuals who can bear or father children—of 3,000 to 12,000 approximately. However, Neanderthals maintained this very low population, proliferating weakly harmful genes due to the reduced effectivity of natural selection”)

Given that Neanderthals were found from Spain to Libanon and even deep into Asia, chances are most humans never saw Neanderthals or vice versa.

Also, I don’t see how that article counts interspecies sex, pregnancies or even live births. It counts number of births who grew up to reproduce. I can easily see early humans stigmatizing or even killing kids of mixed descent or, even easier, children from such encounters being less fertile or even infertile.

Would the African bush pygmy people be considered as a separate human branch? What makes the Hobbit people different from the current pygmy people?

I think my question boils down to - if these separate branches of humans existed today, wouldn't we just consider them as Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Pygmy populations are ordinary humans with conserved genetic mutations, due to inbreeding, that limit the expression of things like growth hormones. They are anatomically modern humans, just much smaller. The ease with which these mutations can occur is evidenced by the existence of unrelated Pygmy populations in different parts of the world. There is no evidence of speciation or material genetic divergence in these cases. While we can't say anything for sure, the genetic divergence between modern humans and these other hominid species is significantly larger.

I agree with 100% of what you said, but if we didn't have access to the genes and were merely going by fragments of a few fossils - what then? Can one quantify the magnitude of difference between H. nalendi and H. erectus fossils, and compare it to the magnitude of difference between hypothetical Polynesian and Pygmy fossils?

You'd still notice a difference between two lineages diverging for a few hundreds or thousands of years and a two lineages diverging for hundreds of thousands of years or more.

It's not just size or deformity, but other features that will diverge.

I think the sense of the question was that as the most distant modern human branch, they're useful to compare relatively to potential new discoveries.

Pygmies are not the most distant modern human branch. The San are.

> from the image of the primitive brute

I kinda prefer the short stint in the 60s and 70s where they were imagined / portrayed to be a sort of nature oriented flower children.

Fun how culture influences things.

Maybe Homo Floresiensis devolved from Homo Sapiens the same way the Sleestak devolved from the Altrusians.

https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak

>At one time, in the distant past, the Sleestak were known as Altrusians. They were a very peaceful and intelligent race and eventually grew into an advanced civilization, mastering many (if not all) of the secrets of the Land of the Lost, creating cities and temples among other landmarks. Unfortunately, the Altrusians lost control over their emotions and destroyed their civilization becoming known as the Sleestak.

>In their decline, the Sleestak became are a degenerate warring race that lost much of their knowledge and culture. Now based on a distrust of strangers and struggle for survival, they have come out of the Era of Intelligence and into the Era of Solitude. The Era of Intelligence was the period in time when the Sleestak first arrived at The Land of the Lost. They built several temples now called Pylons which serve to regulate the life conditions, seasons and meteorological traits of the area. There was a period when there was only darkness before the Sleestak built the Time Pylon, which controls the light and dark cycles of The Land of The Lost.

>As the Sleestak moved into The Lost City they entered a more barbarian state as they reverted back to their more primeval conditions. They eventually became ruled by a Sleestak called Sol, who reorganized the Sleestak and taught them how to hunt and kill.

they ate ordinary amounts of meat, some sources say >70% of their diet was carnivore. Also they were sprinters rather than marathon runners and could outrun us and also had much more muscular build. Some theories suggest that they likely also consumed rotten meat if they had no choice.

There carnivorous lifestyle would mean different gut biome to us allowing their bodies to get away with eating rotten meat more often.

If you read a lot of ancient mythologies there is a pattern that the "gods" are regularly mentioned and read as a separate species or society that interacted with us.

Personally, I have a guess that it was interactions between Neandertals and early Sapiens that led to these myths. Two separate societies, viewed as independent.

I won't make any guesses as to which is which, but I think the possibility makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com