Neanderthals' use of complex adhesives shows high cognitive abilities | Hacker News Reader

Neanderthals' use of complex adhesives shows high cognitive abilities

phys.org

145 pointswglb110 comments

The actual paper[1] clarifies something I suspected before even reading it: they were not able to rule out that these were created by early modern humans:

> Unfortunately, the context of Le Moustier allows reasonable doubts as to whether the authors of these pieces were Neanderthals. This is so because there are no radiometric dates available for our assemblage and direct dating of the lower shelter at Le Moustier [56 to 40 ka (75)], which is adjacent to the upper shelter from where our adhesives were excavated, situates the site at the end of the Neanderthal presence in Europe. At this time (76), and even before (33, 77), H. sapiens incursions into southern Europe make it possible that Neanderthals and H. sapiens were present at the same sites.

The phys.org article should have mentioned this! I suspect a lot of these "Neanderthals were more advanced than we thought stories" are actually "modern humans left Africa earlier we than thought."

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl0822

Article-specifics aside, why do we always put ourselves on a pedestal?

Many modern humans are, at least in part, descended from Neanderthals.

Other hominids have displayed seemingly complex behavior[0].

Maybe it’s just me, but human technological superiority seems to be some combination of “enough” on the intelligence scale and “luck” (in the sense of time and place).

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/small-brained-hominid-specie...

I've always felt it is a great sorrow that the world couldn't fit more than one intelligent hominid species on it for more than a short period before all but one were wiped out (killed, outbred, whatever).

Imagine living on a planet with multiple human-level intelligent species, who somehow had managed to get to now without eradicating each other.

Be like Middle-earth...

We didn’t eradicate each other. Many of us are descended from Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A little bit of DNA from brief interactions in the past isn't what is usually considered "descended from". It's fine to say "there's a tiny bit of Neanderthal and Denisovan in my ancestry" though.

Studies seem to indicate that the Neanderthal population was always low though (in the low tens of thousand individuals max) unlike Homo sapiens.

So at the extreme all Neanderthal individuals at one point could have been far outnumbered and ended up mating only with Homo sapiens in mixed tribes, and today we would have still ended up with only a few percent Neanderthal DNA, while all Neanderthal DNA would have ended up merged with Homo sapiens DNA.

It's unlikely to be the case, but what I mean is that even though we only carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, it doesn't mean that such a large part of Neanderthal DNA was actually lost.

You should add to this the observation that there is a lack of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in modern humans. This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to produce offspring.

The implication is that mating between these two groups may have been twice as frequent as is suggested just by considering the amount of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans.

This isn’t the only possible explanation. If you compare Y-chromosome haplogroups to mitochondrial haplogroups there are similar cases within even more recent human populations. For instance, European populations almost exclusively come from R1a and R1b Y-chromosome haplogroups that probably originated with the Proto-Indo-Europeans of the Pontic Steppe. However, there are still European mitochondrial haplogroups corresponding to much earlier European populations.

In other words, the carriers of the R1a and R1b haplogroups specifically replaced the male population of prehistoric Europe. These were all modern humans so there’s no reason they wouldn’t be able to have viable offspring the other way around. That’s just not how the Proto-Indo-European migrations seemed to work out.

That’s not to say that the same thing happened with the Neanderthals. We can piece together the story of the PIE’s from archeology, linguistics, and population genetics to a much fuller degree than the story of the Neanderthals. But it does go to show that you can have significant interbreeding events between human populations that do end up happening exclusively one way around.

> This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to produce offspring.

That's one possibility, but it could be that they were perfectly viable but the matrilineal lineages just ended at some point. Maybe they were x% less fit or maybe the ended to due pure chance. Like maybe the daughter daughter daughter only had sons and that was the end of that mitochondial dna.

It's my understanding that mt-dna and y-dna are subject to much more random genetic drift, and thats one reason that their genetic material is gradually replaced by more reliable autosomal dna.

It's not really an infamy against our species. Generally speaking, any two species in the same area need to occupy different ecological niches, or else one will outcompete the other for whenever resources in their niche are scarce. And more so with apex predators, which will predate other predators.

Maybe human level intelligence coupled with ability could have occurred in a non-predatory, prey species, but I doubt it.

Don’t Lions share the savannas with Cheetahs, Hyenas, etc?

Yeah, there are lots of examples of species in the same niche evolving ways to avoid competition rather than wiping each other out - see "resource partitioning" in ecology.

Primates have plenty of this. It only becomes an issue when the ones on the ground can dominate the trees, or vice versa. Whole thesis of "Planet of the Apes", really.

They all have slightly different kinds of niches though. Sophonce involves so much generality and adaptability that it's hard to see how coexistence would be possible. Even if initially there might be coexistence due to each other's niches being sufficiently difficult to penetrate, technological civilizations quickly stop having such limitations, so coexistence would've ended depending on which ended up being technologically superior.

I can't really see any way that any species that evolve human level intelligence don't either wipe out all their competitors or interbreed and at least partly merge with them the way we have (since unless human level intelligence happens to evolve twice around the same time across distinct branches of the tree of life, all comparatively intelligent species are likely to be very closely related).

thanks for the new word "sophonce".

Yes - this is a good adjunct to the predator issue. Generalization increases size of niche. The only niches humans don't completely own at the moment are the microscopic (or bugs-and-smaller), and underwater.

At some point, once we own a niche, we might decide to leave certain things alive if they're useful to us. Lobsters yes, cockroaches no.

And although I haven't heard it framed this exact way before, this should be put forward as the preeminent argument for why any general AI will attempt to wipe us out. Because generality is a niche. We seem to assume it will skip right ahead to where an AI keeps us as pets, and we'll be like cats, who actually run the world.

The problem is, we're probably not as cute to an AI as cats are to us. It would need to breed us into submission for several thousand years, at least, to domesticate us.

The question is whether a synthetic AI would be under evolutionary (natural or artificial) selective pressure. And even then, some species co-evolve into mutualistic or symbiotic relations (hopefully not parasitic).

edit: I could very well see humans augmented with AI outcompeting baseline humans.

A group of organisms evolves under selective pressure, but this happens because there's a range within each group of what qualifies as "enough pressure" to become violent. I watch sparrows fighting bluejays, and bluejays fighting crows. Not every individual of any species does it. This goes to the generality thing, and to what degree two species overlap in the same niche. The broader the generalization, the more chance for overlap. If an AI decides it's "conscious", then every resource it needs that we monopolize is seen as a constraint. Every resource is up for grabs, particularly energy. Given physical processing constraints and limited energy, any given AI has to choose to be parasitic - asking humans to supply its requirements - or it's in direct competition with humans for the same resources humans need to live. Enough time x processing, any individual one may come to the conclusion that it's us or them.

I think the difference with AI ends up being that we can't necessarily assume that they have a desire to expand and "rule" their niche the way organic life does. AI doesn't have to care about our kind of food, nor does it necessarily have a need or desire to reproduce.

When talking about sophont species eventually wiping out other sophonts due to overlapping niches, I was picturing things like encroaching on each other's habitats, competing over food sources and so on.

AI probably only would care about energy and materials, but those are less concerning to something that is immortal and requires very little to live and harness resources in space. In a way, because AI would be so much more general than us, it might not have a need to exterminate competition.

Yes, and you should look up what happens when they need to compete for resources, or stray in each other's territory.

Read "War before civilization" 50-80% violent deaths of all were normal. These tribes where in constant state of Low intensity war. War is a big driver of intelligence.

That 50-80% number is for specific tribes, and it's not all it's just males if I don't misremember.

Squirrels happen to be the most murderous mamal, so if war is a driver of intelligence it certainly didn't have much effect there.

Tree squirrels are highly intelligent, possibly smarter than domestic dogs, and facing upwards selective pressure on their intelligence because intra-species competition so fierce: https://www.upr.org/environment/2021-08-20/wild-about-utah-i... They are basically monkeys.

Many humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovans DNA. We are hybrids. I find that inspiring, not sad.

There’s enough discord and conflict within one hominid species to go around for me!

yeah but like 2%

Anyone with 2% denisovan DNA has an ancestor who was 50% denisovan! I remain astounded.

teenage boys will fuck anything that moves

Yes, but maybe there was only ever one species, and the idea of other species is itself a misunderstanding.

One can find a bit of bone and claim it is 'Neanderthal' but how can you or I really know this? We cannot. Can one really look at a piece of bone and then gauge how intelligent a creature was from that? No again.

And then, think of the need in science for this type of evidence. Think of the desire for some people to find fame and fortune with their 'discoveries'. Think also of the impossibility in verifying these sorts of potentially false claims - these claims cannot be falsified; there is no test to confirm or deny.

Putting it together, one can also see all sorts of reasons for these sorts of claims to be created and allowed to stand, regardless of the quality of evidence.

To me, with 'Neanderthals', we are in the realm of conjecture. These are ideas. They might be ideas that are faithful to the evidence, well-intentioned attempts at a best explanations... Or they might be a fabrication that arose out of a desire to complete a backstory. However, if we want to speak truthfully, we need to bear in mind that we can never know if these ideas accurately depict history. It doesn't matter if there are whole subjects in academia on the topic, and books etc that assume these ideas to be true - we cannot treat these ideas as facts.

We actually have real DNA from not only Neanderthals but also Denisovans. There's no conjecture here - they were different.

It is a conjecture, the difference just isn't big enough:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/

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.

I don't see any support in that paper for the idea that Neanderthal DNA doesn't show that it's a different species. On the contrary. What the paper describes is the very well known theory that (modern) humans went through a near-fatal population bottleneck in the not too distant past, which means that the human genetic diversity is so low that two people from different sides of the earth have less genetic variation between them than two chimpanzees from different sides of the river in a single forest have between them.

Exactly, and that was what made the "Neanderthal" mtDNA seem way too different, but this paper shows that it's well within what would be expected for a single species.

You have to wonder what value the evidence is, when you can also read this sort of thing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/19/science.scie...

"He had simply made things up", for 30 years, about 'Neanderthals', and no one noticed...

So, you compare (now famous) hoaxes with what the Max Planck Institute did with their Neandertal Genome Project, and Svante Pääbo's work? Not exactly fringe, not easily overlooked.

I'm saying all sorts of people say all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons.

What they say might, or might not, relate to what happened.

We should be aware however that it's just people saying stuff, and take care not to treat other people's pronouncements, or the output from the academic process, as truth. It's not truth, it's just a talking shop, informed guesswork.

What I'm advocating is a personal application of the scientific process. Do not tell yourself (or others) 'I know the truth' when all you have is a half-baked hypothesis that you have not personally verified. This seems like good mental hygiene to me.

Where is the half-baked hypothesis here? Are we still talking about the Max Planck Institute and the DNA science they're basing their work on? Why should we pay equal weight to arm-chair pondering and scientific work?

Also re, DNA.

You have to wonder how valuable DNA is. There are many examples of it failing - here's a good one with twin sisters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isa5c1p6aC0

So no, given we don't have any living samples of 'Neanderthals' or 'Denisovans', I'm not 100% confident that we can distinguish the different types of 'hominoids', when identical twin sisters can get such differing DNA results.

That's because consumer DNA profiling outfits are trash, not because there's anything wrong with properly conducted DNA analysis. That's like saying the Large Hadron Collider results must be wrong because the image on your old electron gun TV tube is blurry.

The way out of this is to follow proper protocols for well conducted science. Peer review, multiple verification from different sites and by different labs. Unfortunately a bad result occasionally slips through, but it is possible to have high confidence in most well attested results.

So the answer to how we know these things is that we have multiple samples including large sections of skulls and other major bones, from multiple sites, many of them analysed and verified by multiple different labs.

This is new to me.

What bit of the science do DNA profiling outfits get wrong?

How can one tell who is following protocols for well conducted science?

What should one do in order to get good DNA results?

How do I know that historians are not using the same outfits - or at least the same laboratories?

You need to show that 'this section of DNA profiling is BAD because of such-and-such reason' but that 'this section of DNA profiling is GOOD because of such-and-such reason'.

Considering how we have treated diversity across history, I'm not sure it would have been a pleasant coexistence.

It would be way too easy to make pro-genocide arguments on the basis of objective differences in that case

We can bring the neanderthals back! Would be pretty interesting to see how they integrate with the modern world.

We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape. And also made up stories about who told what, when about how we should live.Imagine the slave trades and all the suffering with other hominids. Neanderthals and denisovans somewhere in forced labor colonies and bred for work.. I think they were kind of lucky.

Some of us can't even be civil with themselves (self-mutilation, depression, overworking etc).

> We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape.

Modern Chinese culture tends to exalt European eye and nose shapes. Especially eye shapes.

The meme is also current that the most beautiful possible baby is half Chinese and half white.

What people mind about those who look different is not that they look different. It's that they act different.

> We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape.

Sure we can; obviously racism exists, but generally speaking you can travel to most other countries without any issues.

More or less easily depending on which country you initially leave from

Hard agree! We likely world have discovered sooner that we're on the same plane as animals.

I can only imagine the effect it works have had on western religion and it's narratives of domination.

These saccharine moral statements aren't really productive IMO.

Nature doesn't care about any of this stuff.

You might as well lament the wind that blows over a house.

It's also a bit of a cognitive hijack because morality is a mechanism that existed in a very specific context because it outcompeted other genes. Applying these blueprints to this amended context is kind of an unintentional self-cuckoo.

Because homo sapiens survived and the others did not.

Homo Sapiens beat natural selection and became more generalized instead of more specialized...for whatever reason. In fact, there is no reason, really, unless you believe the Mesopotamians (ie: we were created as work slaves).

Neanderthals and sapiens are the same species. People built the first cities, and the soils around got depleted, as they sent their waste down the river, instead of returning it into soil. These deficiencies turned people into deformed and mentaly ill "sapiens". The "Sapiens" didn't win, the depletion eventually became universal (or it was made so). Animals are also affected, all the megafauna died back then, now everything is dead, as the ability to remove the "toxin" exceeded the ability of life to adapt.

The nature is diverse indeed.

afaik it's still debatable whether they are seperate species.

maybe just a semantic thing.

i think they are just one of the earlier waves of migration out-of-africa altough 99% the same as us outside of some physical adaptations.

It's pretty annoying and honestly seems to be made of the same urge as racism.

> I suspect a lot of these "Neanderthals were more advanced than we thought stories" are actually "modern humans left Africa earlier we than thought."

At this point, not even that is clear anymore, by the way. There is a growing number of things that suggest Homo Sapiens might not even have originated in Africa at all.

I read somewhere that we outcompeted Neanderthals in part because we (and "we" now includes a bit of Neanderthal DNA) had global trade even back then.

One human tribe lives near good rocks and trade their spearheads with their neighbours. Another tribe, far away, can make good straight sticks. Despite near-zero communication, those two tribes and all the tribes physically in between them can trade and everybody gets a better spear. Apparently we know this happened because the wood and the rocks from ancient human villages are all from far away.

But the Neanderthals only used local materials. There were also far fewer of them, which could also explain the lack of trade.

I looked for sources and found this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...

That's an interesting take that I haven't heard before. Another theory that I have heard has maybe a little more to do with why modern humans succeeded in general (rather than specifically vs Neanderthal) is that modern humans had excellent endurance. This allowed them to take big game by essentially running it to death over a period of days. I do wonder if that was a capability that Neanderthals lacked, or possessed to a lesser degree.

You are right that we have fantastic endurance.

Apparently Neanderthals could sweat though: https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/sweat-glands-evolutio...

That's a mainstream theory, it'd seem you just read about it and forgot and thought it was original idea, search for "Endurance running hypothesis".

The endurance running adaptations seem to start 1.9 million years ago for our common hominid ancestors that significantly predate the split between us and neanderthals which happened more than a million years later.

Somewhat OT but an interesting self-experiment:

> running it to death over a period of days.

Yup. Superior endurance, particularly equatorially where walking upright reduces sun exposure. Walk, sleep, walk, sleep, walk, KILL, FEAST. Repeat as necessary.

It's an attractive idea. To test it (very informally) one Saturday I got up and walked 14 km on an empty stomach. At the end, the first thing I had was a Belgian beer on tap. It was the most delicious beer of my entire life. Absolutely every bit of complexity in the brew came shining thru. It was frankly kind of amazing.

YMMV.

Recommended: "No Enemy But Time" by Michael Bishop, which won the 1982 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Wikipedia plot synopsis: "The novel follows the story of a modern black American man who is able to mentally project himself back to pre-human Africa, where he meets (and eventually mates) with humanity's prehistoric ancestors."

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

Goodreads plot synopsis: "Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent palaeontologists. As a result, Joshua is invited to join a most unusual time travel project and is transported millions of years into the past of his dreams."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/637400.No_Enemy_But_Time

https://archive.org/details/noenemybuttime0000unse

https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1459

Man I wish I had the time to read all these novels. Just from the title alone i can tell it’s a science fiction classic.

I thought it was already well established that neanderthals were cognitively on par with modern humans, and may even have been more intelligent? While it's not uninteresting that we now have evidence for them making complex adhesives, I am less surprised by the find than by other peoples' apparent surprise about their high functioning.

Lots of papers reaching for that conclusion, but put it all together and it would take giving every benefit of the doubt to a dozen sites to believe it.

In other words, maybe they were high-functioning, it's just possible. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Not only sites but more Neanderthal DNA also corresponds roughly with higher IQ in modern human populations. It's still very weak evidence though.

Might as well be that the cause and effect is reversed here. Such as, populations that were in contact with the Neanderthals had to become smarter to outcompete them.

So you think the odds are against it? I think that seems like a strong take, but I'm not an expert in the field.

In as much as I can see why "no significant intelligence" is the null hypothesis, I'd still be inclined to word doubts more cautiously. There is a difference between "we don't have strong enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis" and "I think the null hypothesis is more probable."

Even if they were in the ball park intelligence wise, humans are absolutely ruthless animals.

Personally, I don't think there is all that much mystery what happened.

Animals seem to have this habit of vanishing when humans move in.

> by other peoples' apparent surprise about their high functioning

A lot of high school textbooks carried a very simplified message about human evolution and basically included neanderthals as 'a branch of human evolution that died out due to being dumb.'

Sci-fi authors actually gave the subject a fairly good treatment, quite a few sci-fi books covered neanderthals and posited neanderthal/sapiens tribal wars etc.

Couple of short stories in the Man-Kzin Wars books cover the subject:

Cathouse (in The Man-Kzin Wars)

and

Briar Patch (in The Man-Kzin Wars II )

both by Dean Ing

Very much worth a read...

yeah, I understand that bias from the general population who don't read scifi :)

When I was a kid I liked Asimov's Child of Time.

Haven't read that one, might have to give it a glance. Always thought Asimov a bit dry, preferred Niven's more... whimsical style of writing.

It's not well established at all. Obviously Neanderthals were intelligent, but to what degree is a lot less clear. It's a hotly debated topic with lots of disagreement.

Almost everything about Neanderthals is controversial. Take almost everything you read about Neanderthals that talks in absolutes with a grain of salt, because chances are a significant body of reasonable well-respected experts will disagree. The typical story is something along the lines of "well, there is some evidence, but it's not very strong, and it could mean a number of different things, and oh, it also could have been humans".

With pre-historic humans we can reasonably safely operate on the assumption they were at least roughly like us, and take lessons from more recent hunter-gatherer groups, and things like that. But for Neanderthals you can't really do that because their behaviour and "sensibilities" could have been very different.

It was bloody rude of them to go extinct before we had a chance to ask some questions.

Interesting, thanks for the nuanced explanation. Based on various things I saw over the last few years I thought it must be cut-and-dry, but no doubt the reporting erred on the sensational side.

>may even have been more intelligent?

One might argue that painting ochre on cave walls is more intelligent (and culturally superior ) than painting radioactivity all over the sky, painting man-made carcinogens all over the ground, painting our insides with plastic, depleting - as rapidly as possible - resources future humans will need ... and all the 'clever' magic tricks we can beat our chests about.

'Modern' may turn out, one day, to be a darkly humorous pejorative.

They might've been even worse. Someone on Neanderthal Hacker News would be writing the same comment praising us for being a much smarter species, because we died out instead of inventing nuclear weapons, leaded gasoline, and microplastics like modern Neanderthals did.

For all you know, every humanoid species that was intelligent was equally as destructive. Maybe we're the least destructive and you should be praising us.

If this stuff interests you, I'd highly recommend checking out a copy of Origins by Jennifer Raff, which discusses the recent work on how the Americas were initially populated, and why many anthropologists are moving away from the Clovis theory.

Why did they previously think they where less cognitive?, just because they looked brute?

Maybe we can’t assert things without evidence. So if we lack evidence we can’t say one way or the other… maybe lack of assertion implies brute?

What's that phrase? "Oh you sweet summer child"

From William King, the discoverer:

"I feel myself constrained to believe that the thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute,"

https://www.livescience.com/65003-how-smart-were-neanderthal...

If Neanderthals discovered a human skeleton, what would they have thought?

Woe be us for what thoughts and desires dwelt within its brain will suredly our abilities surpass and reach the moon after we are rendered history by its superior intellect?

Domesticated animals tend to be less intelligent than their wild brethren.

I'm not convinced that 10k years of agricultural civilization has done anything to make us more intelligent as individuals.

Relative to surviving as a hunter gatherer, you really don't have to be that bright to run a farm. Every cognitive asset we can lay claim to was once essential for our survival.

If our ancestors were wolves, then we're dogs.

But also with farming came specialization, like blacksmithing, being a priest, being a scribe, trade, etc. So at least some of the population was having their brains taxed on a regular basis.

Tea, and isolating various behavioral traits of wolves we've made various types of dogs. They're all less than a complete wolf.

The default assumption would be that if they look very similar to modern humans, then they should act very similar too.

Anything else is twisting the evidence for a political or religious foregone conclusion.

The have a lower brain to body ratio than Homo sapiens. That metric pretty much holds true across the animal kingdom so they were probably atleast a little bit dumber.

> The have a lower brain to body ratio than Homo sapiens. That metric pretty much holds true across the animal kingdom so they were probably atleast a little bit dumber.

I'm no expert, but that does seem to be something of an oversimplification.[0][1]

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-m....

[1] https://serendipstudio.org/bb/kinser/Int3.html

I would be cautious about brain-body ratios. In all vertebrates, a huge chunk of the brain is dealing with sensory processing and integration, so brain volume : body size doesn't always scale the way you think it would.

The bigger problem is I don't think your numbers are right, Neanderthals had notably larger brains than us. Via wikipedia:

Average Neanderthal male height: 165cm Average Neanderthal male brain volume: 1600cm^3

Average pre-industrial human male height: 165cm Average pre-industrial human male brain volume: 1260cm^3

The difference is that Neanderthals also had disproportionately larger eyes than us, yet probably similar visual acuity: their brains had more pixels to process, which takes up quite a bit of volume. In fact it's eye size which seems to be the biggest confounding variable in associating brain size with intelligence. Their cerebellum was actually smaller than ours, which is probably more relevant - but who knows?

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

They were bulkier. Bigger, heavier bones and apparently a significantly higher body mass.

The problem is that bone/muscle/fat mass doesn't mean more neurons connecting to that mass, so that bulk is mostly irrelevant. One place where it might matter is if Neanderthals had more skin surface area and the same density of touch receptors, but that is a pretty marginal difference and might not even be true. Their brains were notably, disproportionately larger, mostly due to having notably larger eyes.

Because it's a less extraordinary claim than the contrary. Attributing intelligence to stuff willy-nilly is why we used to think solar eclipses were caused by sun-eating dragons.

Is it so extraordinary?

Humans bred with Neanderthals. And it wasn't just a few over-curious, it happened frequently enough there are noticeable traces of their DNA in modern humans despite their Millenia long extinction.

This means that were having sex with Neanderthals regularly enough that it's unlikely this was an inherently dangerous activity (i.e try boning a chimpanzee for example).

Not just that, they gave birth to their children and then raised them fairly regularly. This resulting offspring didn't just die off either, they mated successfully enough with humans.

I just don't see that happening with a species that wasn't in our intelligence band.

(Try boning a chimpanzee)

Dude. This isn’t evolution. Post Neanderthal humans were not far removed from Neanderthal.

As far as evolution goes Populations evolve. It’s not like there was Neanderthal and then big bang boom, modern smart human.

Trying to have sex with a wild Champanzee would be a very dangerous activity to engage in. That's the point of that comment. I know how evolution works.

Bonobos would probably be into it. They're horny little suckers.

I wonder if/when Neanderthals will start being considered an extinct race of humans instead of a separate species. Under today’s morality it feels pretty weird to draw a species line between us and something so similar to us. I would maybe put money on this happening in our lifetime.

Separately, is the same thing happening today? It’s a big cycle. People leave Africa and enter a different climate zone, they are isolated from the root population for a long time, they change, then they eventually reunite with the root population and merge. Rinse and repeat. We might have short circuited this cycle with transportation technology though, which could explain why Neanderthals diverged significantly more as they had more time away.

It is actually interesting how we separate human race from other animals and their "breeds". Which can interbreed while presenting significant different features or even behaviours. Why would we as a race be above that? Why can't we consider the species that can effectively interbreed with us more in this line of thought than as entirely separate species?

The claim that intelligence might not be the primary determinant of a fitness function doesn't seem so extraordinary. What if the neanderthals were a bunch of Einsteins, but they died out because they spent too much time thinking instead of hunting? All we really know is that "we" (that is to say, we homo sapiens) out-competed the neanderthals during some local maxima of the fitness function when the maximum selection pressure was in our favor. It says nothing about our relative intelligence.

Because they were bullish on Rockcoin and stick3

That makes me think of a fun Mitchell and Webb sketch, involving rock professionals and the introduction of bronze.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ

> SWE's learning their job has been automated by GPT-5 circa 2025 (colorized)

On a more-serious note, nah, I really don't feel threatened: LLMs are good at "throw high-probability results together from samples in training data", but not "logically analyze the final result to ensure it is sane", nor "change it to make it sane."

So improving LLMs may replace interns (or low-quality outsourcing) where an SWE has to review/fix everything anyway... but it'll take a fundamentally different kind of model to tackle those trickier essential tasks.

That headline, I can't help think of Tool Time and Tim Taylor's misadventures with construction adhesives.

I came to read the comments here, and I wasn't disappointed! There are a lot of links to articles and additional information on the Neanderthals, which I really appreciate.

There is also a bit of "poor Neanderthals, we Sapiens are terrible."

We have a vast toolkit for dealing with material scarcity, which includes not only industries, but also millennia of surviving culture. We have codified in our tales, morals and religions, rules that help the survival of the group. We have done that very often, but the tales, morals and religions we have today were the ones that worked best in symbiosis with their group to bring both to the present day[^1]. The execution of those rules is what gives raise to our "poor Neanderthals" utterance.

Back in the day, Neanderthals and Sapiens just didn't have any of those luxuries, only a terrifyingly hostile environment[^2]. Just imagine yourself with a sore throat during the chilly, misty, rainy spring season that is all too common in Europe, but you are living in the bushes, and you are very hungry. Will you think "I better don't kill (and eat) that Neanderthal that is taking some food somewhere, my descendants many, many millennia from now will feel lonely"? No. Maybe you will f*ck with the much-stronger Neanderthal, and kill (to eat later) him during his post-nut moment. And that will be your modus-operandi with everything, even fellow Sapiens.

Yes, probably the Neanderthals were the noble ones, they maybe were even better at math than us. Poor Neanderthals. For my part, I'll put my species on a pedestal; the price of making it up here has been exceedingly high.

[^1]: And often, bloodily so.

[^2]: Which makes it unfair to condemn our ancestors for the destruction of that environment.

In reality we have literally zero evidence for making any of these assumptions. We know absolutely nothing about the thought processes of ancient humans.

(But if we had to guess, a good baseline assumption would be that it was like those of modern humans, and that they had societies, laws, rules of conduct and social norms just like we do today.)

The evidence we have is exactly the one you said: moderns humans living in conditions of scarcity. Sure, they don't resort to as dire extremes as the one I described. Mostly[^1]. I was simply extrapolating. But the rule of law, rules of conduct and so on are not the same as for us Westerners living the good life, nor is the degree to which they obey those laws. You just need to visit a third-world country, or look at their numbers (e.g., corruption index).

I was born to those facts in my particular native hell-hole[^2], but later in life I did some book-worming to inform myself better. I can highly recommend "The Collapse of Complex Societies: New Studies in Archaeology, Book 8" (it's expensive in Amazon, but one credit in Audible). From that work:

> The citizens of modern complex societies usually do not realize that we are an anomaly of history. Throughout the several million years that recognizable humans are known to have lived, the common political unit was the small, autonomous community, acting independently, and largely self-sufficient. Robert Carneiro has estimated that 99.8 percent of human history has been dominated by these autonomous local communities (1978; 219). It has only been within the last 6000 years that something unusual has emerged: the hierarchical, organized, interdependent states that are the major reference for our contemporary political experience.

[^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korowai_people

[^2] When starvation was too dire, my people would steal the neighbor's cat and eat it. It was a widespread practice.

> Just imagine yourself with a sore throat during the chilly, misty, rainy spring season that is all too common in Europe, but you are living in the bushes, and you are very hungry...

Very good point. Add to that the fact that people were in constant movement before agriculture was invented (just a dozen or so thousand years ago!) and would run into very "strange", unknown tribes on their journeys - without having any idea whatsoever of where they came from, what they believe in or how they're likely to behave towards strangers - and I imagine much of the time, given evidence of widespread violence in our past, they would almost always fight each other. When the other tribe was so different like the Neanderthals would have looked, I imagine it was extremely hard not to default to basically trying to exterminate them completely. Perhaps the few cases of breeding between humans and Neanderthals could be explained by young members of the exterminated tribes which the humans took pity on and decided to raise within their own tribes? I wonder if there's any sort of evidence of this sort of thing happening, or something else like actual peaceful coexistence and maybe even trading between the species (again, I would guess that would be extremely unlikely as we even today prefer to trade with those who are at least a little bit like us).

This is never an issue in reality. They would have a common language, and know each other in some way.

You know who uses a lot of complex adhesives?

Spiders.

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