What's Behind the Evolution of Neanderthal Portraits
sapiens.org
sapiens.org
The fact that we have proof that interbreeding occurred between Sapiens and Neanderthal should open the possibility that they quite simply were blended into a larger Sapiens population instead of mysteriously disappearing.
I believe that the idea of blending by peaceful interbreeding is just wishful thinking based on modern ethics.
Some Neanderthals have probably blended into modern human tribes, most likely some children or women. Other hybrid humans may be the result of random encounters.
The majority of the Neanderthals have disappeared during a relatively short time span, of a few thousand years. Some of them might have died as a result of direct fights with the expanding modern humans, the others might have been forced to retreat into worse territories that provided less food, so their population has dwindled.
I don’t see stephc_int13 writing anything about the peacefullness or non-peacefullness of the blending.
What I am suggesting is that Sapiens won by numbers, that they were more numerous.
So it's entirely possible that Neanderthals were assimilated into Sapiens tribes.
Mexicans are roughly half Native American, half European.
>The majority of the Neanderthals have disappeared during a relatively short time span, of a few thousand years.
People did something that killed off the megafauna, and made people deformed at the same time. Genetically we are one species.
After most conquests, which have established a new ruling class in some territory, there has been a mixing between the former invaders and the previous native population.
In many cases, the former invaders were less numerous than the natives, so after a few generations the mixed population has begun to resemble more the previous natives than the new incomers.
Nevertheless, I do not consider that these are examples of peaceful blending. In all cases the original war has inflicted serious losses on the natives and the reason why in more recent times no more of them were killed than necessary was because they were needed as a work force.
Before the organized states, which were able to tax the work of everybody, and before the use of slavery, there were no reasons to keep alive any vanquished tribe, which would compete for the food resources of the territory.
The losers would have been forced to run away to other territories, to stay alive. Except perhaps for women and children, they would have never been adopted by the victorious tribe, to blend in it.
Sapiens are Neanderthals.
One thing we're very confident in is that anatomically modern humans (i.e. us) are not neanderthals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_phylogenetics
The most striking example is from the Taï forest, where the 19 haplotypes show greater diversity than the entire human clade, even though they occur in a single breeding group.
We’re not neanderthals, but they are largely no longer considered a separate species. Neanderthals are now commonly known as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis in the literature. Their genetics are not that different from sapiens and the difference is only about twice as much as the variation in the global gene pool so they’re more an extinct branch of a much more diverse species which suffered a genetic bottleneck leaving only us.
> What's behind the evolution of Neanderthal portraits
the answer is:
> Science braided with sociopolitics.
But I would say the answer is only a little to do with science... It's really just acts of imagination. The idea of 'Neanderthals' allows for an opportunity for different human groups to help guide how humans think of themselves. So it's an interesting narrative pivot point.
You could take a chimp skull, use the same techniques used to ‘reconstruct’ Neanderthal faces, and you’d get a similar result - a smiley fellow with a tad narrow forehead, big teeth, and long hair.
Why can’t we just accept that we have no idea?
Take fur for example. We have a species of primates that evolved in frigid conditions, who seem to have had skeletons indicating adaptations to cold, who most likely couldn’t make clothes, nor the type of shelters that can be efficiently heated, yet they didn’t have fur.
We have woolly rhinos and mammoths, but Neanderthals didn’t have fur because obviously lol, they’re our cousins after all. We don’t even know why we don’t have fur, and at what point we stopped having it. The leading explanation is basically just conjecture.
Someone's already tried that!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/19/science.scie...
>"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."
>The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States.
>An inquiry later established that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.
>"Their stories about him were increasingly bizarre. After a while it was hard to take it seriously. You had to laugh. It was just unbelievable. At the end of the day what he did was incredible."
>During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.
>Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made things up.
>In one case he had claimed that a 50 million-year-old "half-ape" called Adapis had been found in Switzerland, an archaeological sensation. In reality, the ape had been dug up in France, where several other examples had already been found.
I wasn’t really talking about passing a chimp skull for a Neanderthal one. I was dissing the method of reconstruction itself. It basically assumes a Homo Sapiens like soft tissue morphology and works from there. And then you get those very modern looking guys and girls. I’d really like to see someone do the same just with a chimp skull. I doubt anyone would though, as that’d effectively undermine their work.
This is absolutely not true. The popular consensus, however, is so steeply biased towards anything labeled "homo sapiens" that there's no consideration given to how other humanoid species might have lived.
You assumption is correct, that they could not have survived in the freezing cold if they were also just stupid. In reality, if they were to survive in the freezing cold in small groups (most Neanderthals lived in groups of 8-40 individuals) they would have had to be
- incredibly conflict-avoidant
- very emotionally stable
- would need to have a great amount of calories to last the winter, which means they would need to start preparing at least a year in advance
- would also need to be strong and be able to work together in a group well
- maintain quality over quantity -- mouths to feed that can't contribute to the group would be disastrous.
- The last point implies that they had very stable social situations and likely little to no arguments over who should marry whom. Probably also had a very stable social hierarchy
The tools Neanderthals have built have been found to have through multiple stages of preparation and multiple layers of coating. They domesticated many, if not most, of the animals that we now keep as pets. They also revered their elderly and gave proper consideration to their dead.
These are all signs of an advanced manner of cognition, certainly not animals. In fact you could certainly make the argument that with the high social trust and extended time spent "hibernating" (waiting for it to get warm enough) inside a cave, they were more like mad geniuses working on large problems for months on end. Considering just how long they survived, they would also have been great at passing down things from one generation to the next, which is yet another point in favor of them having a rich culture.
Specifically about clothes and shelters though. To my knowledge we really don’t have finds indicating that they could or would do this.
Regarding group size, I think you’re reading much too much into it. The group size is similar to wolf packs. Wolves are smart too, are great at hunting in groups, have stable social hierarchies, and have been around for a long time.
In general the needles are the oldest evidence for the existence of clothes in all human groups, because the clothes themselves are much more perishable.
I have never heard of any evidence for animal domestication by Neanderthals.
If they had any domestic animals, that would have been possible only for a single species, i.e. dogs. For all the other domestic animals all the evidence is consistent with a domestication only during Neolithic, i.e. during the last ten thousand years.
Moreover, except for dogs they would not have had with what to feed domestic animals. At most in rare cases some child could have raised a small pet, but it is very unlikely that they normally had such food surplus to afford to share it with a pet that did not provide any useful service.
Sure, maybe they just did something else. I think people have proposed them having used birch tar as an adhesive that could be used to craft clothing.
Or, maybe, you know, they didn’t need to do that in the first place.
The popular consensus is that Neanderthals did not domesticate animals at all. Slowly, the consensus is warming up to the fact that they were great hunters. I have multiple reasons why I think Neanderthals could have domesticated animals (IMO not a trait that has to be exclusive to a single species):
- Neanderthal civilization lived for much longer than Sapiens
- Long periods of time spent indoors
They could have taken an animal pair indoors, maybe for food or maybe just for fun, and ended up keeping them for a while. They likely figured out how to manage these animals and after a couple of thousand years we end up with dogs.
- High calorie requirements
Specifically, during six to eight months when it was too cold or food was scarce. They had to keep up muscle mass if they wanted to hunt in the summers. This means they had to have a source of nutrition that was high in protein and fats. This points to dairy. Raw dairy doesn't go bad, it changes into cheese and is incredibly versatile and keeps "fresh" for very long. They would have to necessarily been able to manage animals. Any possible solution would have to be generally applicable to most instances of the kind of shelter they lived in. After all, we aren't fixating on one single group of Neanderthals.
They were also hunters. So being able to release animals (domesticated or otherwise) at a whim when hunting bigger prey would have been an advantage.
>Specifically about clothes and shelters though. To my knowledge we really don’t have finds indicating that they could or would do this.
I think clothes are pretty simply explained: to live in the biting cold, even in the summers, you couldn't survive unless you had protective clothing. It's very plausible that they at the very least had clothes made of multiple layers animal skins held together by fragments of bone / rock. It's easy enough. They also killed large cold-adapted animals, so finding insulating hides wouldn't have been very difficult.
And as for shelters, nothing comes close to caves (on the surface or a ways underground) for insultation.
>Regarding group size, I think you’re reading much too much into it. The group size is similar to wolf packs. Wolves are smart too, are great at hunting in groups, have stable social hierarchies, and have been around for a long time.
I don't know what exactly you're criticizing but I think the group sizes would be small because:
- Cold climates limit movement, forcing your group to a certain region. And the region has to be allowed to "regenerate" resources, which caps the number of people it can support
- The more people you stuff inside a cave the more food you need.
- Consensus breaks down after 10 (8?) or so people. I doubt it would be possible to live conflict-free with too many people inside a crammed space. Plus, Dunbar's Number. To make even 20 people work for that long you'd have to be honest to a fault and guileless. I think it's likely that even though they lived in small groups in caves, they might have had some contact with other nearby Neanderthal groups. It's easy to conclude that this would help them basically live with their friends (aka people they don't bear animosity towards) for 6-8 months of the year.
And because it doesn’t it’s pretty clear they hunted all year round. This is substantiated by research pointing towards them having adaptations for having good vision in low light environments.
Also, bone collagen research indicates that at least the tested specimens ate meat almost exclusively.
Really implausible. You'd be pushing them one tier upwards if you claim that they hunted in the biting cold.
The Neanderthals survived at least one ice age.
> This is substantiated by research pointing towards them having adaptations for having good vision in low light environments.
They'd need that anyway.
I don’t know what’s your experience when it comes to animal husbandry, but just the amount of manure that this activity would generate somewhere in a corner of a cave is something that we would’ve found.
There’s no shortage of mammals surviving winters by hunting in biting cold. From foxes to wolves to lynx.
What makes you think they even had marriage? We've seen in pre-contact societies (such as on Hawaii) that many do/did not have the concept of monogamous marriage that modern people have. The whole idea of marriage and monogamy seems to have developed with the rise of agricultural societies and land ownership. Before that, kids were just raised by the tribe and people probably didn't care much about who fathered which kid.
Again, something we just don’t know.
The comment is downvoted for being utter rubbish, though.
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