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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

I've been watching too many Baldur's Gate Youtube videos on how to build a character, and one guy talks about the "power spike" when your character gets a particularly useful ability, like an extra bonus action per turn.

The biggest power spike of genus Homo may have been attaching a rock to the end of a stick. The spear changed our ancestors from sub-apex prey to predators ready to take on a lion in its cave. From meat to masters of all we surveyed. The next power surge of that magnitude may have been nukes.

Yet it couldn't save neanderthalensis from sapiens.

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I think the gun was probably a big one, prior to nukes.

A bullet is just a really fast spear.

A really fast javelin (throwing spear), technically.

Provided that the nukes really exist of course :)

> Yet it couldn't save neanderthalensis from sapiens.

This is what I don’t understand. Neanderthals were strong and smart. Did Homo sapiens kill them outright I.e. war? Or was it more of a outcompete and outbreed situation?

> Or was it more of a outcompete and outbreed situation?

There’s a lot of evidence we more or less absorbed the neanderthal population. Old school tribal genocide style – you win the war/battle, kill the men, take their wives. We don’t know if that’s exactly how it happened, but it stands to reason that pre-historic tribal warfare wasn’t much different than the more recent tribal warfare we do have records about.

1% to 4% of human DNA, for people with non-African backgrounds, is Neanderthal: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an... (cmd+f for “interbreeding”)

Mind you the whole “take their wives” aspect of human warfare is, uhm, pretty well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence

It must have been both, right? In the sense that higher populations would tend to be helpful when fights started, better resources lead to higher population, and winning fights leads to better access to resources.

Maybe the cave lions united together and hunted down all Neanderthals :)

AFAIK, there is a lot of evidence for climate change being a very large factor for neanderthals disappearing.

Neanderthals were built for the winter and for the colder periods of the earth's weather. Cold temperatures would also lead to smaller group sizes. It then seems likely that Neanderthal groups were picked off one by one by large groups of homo sapiens. If you have a 1:100 or even a 1:10 numbers advantage (when you opponent's group doesn't exceed ~80 people), it often doesn't matter how advanced or smart your opponent is. They're going to get flattened no matter what they do. Bloodlust combined with very large group sizes usually leads to lower individual quality but there's a limit to how many one guy could pick off. After the 15th or the 20th guy you're likely to get hit a couple of times, no matter how skilled you are. And after that you're done for, no strongman can stand even a 10-man dogpile.

Considering how low population densities were back in those days I’m not sure violent competition was really that necessary.

Even during the neolithic when farmers from the middle east started migrated into Europe they seemingly just lived side by side with the local hunter gathers for hundreds of years. As the farmer populations were growing at an extremely fast pace (for premodern times) eventually they started moving into the areas inhabited by hunter gathers but according to current evidence these societies just merged and there was no large scale genocide or something like that.

Back in the Neanderthal days population growth was much slower so this process probably took much longer but it’s not inconceivable that climate change and some sort of assimilation were the primary reason why the Neanderthals went extinct instead of violent conflict.

Oh, I don't mean conflict with other Neanderthals. I meant conflict with Homo Sapiens, who by all accounts seem to be much more comfortable with larger group sizes, and aren't cold-adapted.

Yes, violent competition isn't conducive to low population densities (especially in an environment as unforgiving as the Neanderthals') but that doesn't mean another larger group couldn't invade. After all, changing "humanoid" group sizes (aka "Culture") would take much longer than the introduction of the Holocene.

> conflict with Homo Sapiens

Yes, that was exactly what I meant (or tried to)

my laymen's understanding: the weather changed, and with it, forests retreated and plains came about. Neanderthals hunted with handheld spears, ambushing pray in the forest (evidenced by denser bones on one half of the body). Homo sapiens were more adept at plains hunting and throwing spears and one population outgrew the other. Cross breeding eventually eradicated the former as evidenced by the fragments of Neanderthal DNA present in the modern population. I've also heard it said that sapiens were more social, leading to better communication between groups.

I'm 2.3% Neanderthal.

We're still around!

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