What the debate about Neanderthals reveals about us
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It may be that describing our victims as villains (itself such a word) is an adaptive trait.
In that vein, "anyone who downvotes this is a moron"!
People were violent and death was a much more normal thing.
When we look at it in modern time with all our accumulated knowledge we seek to not cause it. Even tyranical and psycotic individuals hold nihlistic or anarchic philosphies.
Truely to understand the worlds pardigm change over history is multifaceted in regard to demographics, and skills aquired, and scarcites and suppluses come into effect too.
Hostile othering of populations doesn't stop interbreeding among anatomically modern human subpopulations, so I doubt it would between other interfertile parts of the human family.
When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them,
the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased.
Then the LORD said: My spirit shall not remain in human beings forever, because they are only flesh. Their days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.
The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
Numbers 13:32-33
They spread discouraging reports among the Israelites about the land they had reconnoitered, saying, “The land that we went through and reconnoitered is a land that consumes its inhabitants. And all the people we saw there are huge.
There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakim are from the Nephilim); in our own eyes we seemed like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”
cf. The Gnarly Man[0][1] by L. Sprague de Camp. It's fiction, but addresses that facet of potential interactions between hominid species.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gnarly_Man
[1] https://www.galacticjourney.org/stories/600411gnarly.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC368159/
We don't know why, but that would suggest we didn't conquer them, maybe our males didn't find their females attractive enough to have sex with. Neanderthals are more masculine looking than us, so their males would be attractive, but their females maybe looked too much like males to us.
That seems like an extraordinarily unlikely hypothesis, given the mating behavior I observe to be a close analog to the USPS Flat Rate service: "If it fits, it ships!"
On the other hand, Spainiards and Portuguese killed around 90-95% of the indigenous population when they conquered South America. Contemporary Homo sapiens seems to be a rather aggressive monkey horde.
Choose your odds. I think it was a mixture of both.
I did notice that the popular transition to recast Neanderthals from primitive troglodytes to advanced peers seemed to coincide closely with the revelation that all Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA.
See the timeline on the archaic humans wiki page [1]. The first migration out of Africa and the first use of fire were all millions of years ago. The first stone tools made by Australopithecus predate archaic humans altogether. It really just depends on where you draw the "human" and "civilization" lines.
"Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. "
Neanderthals shared more alleles with Eurasian populations (e.g. French, Han Chinese, and Papua New Guinean) than with sub-Saharan African populations (e.g. Yoruba and San).[8] According to the authors Green et al. (2010), the observed excess of genetic similarity is best explained by recent gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans after the migration out of Africa.[8] They estimated the proportion of Neanderthal-derived ancestry to be 1–4% of the Eurasian genome.
A bit over-simplistic, we find a couple of bones in a cave and so a few pieces of evidence. From this, we patch up a full picture of the Neanderthals (flawed) and we do it in a way to convince ourselves how great we are (entitled).
With "our thinking" I'm talking about the not-so-scientific public. I guess the scientists get this right. They know about their unknowns. But these subtleties are lost on their way to the general public.