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Comment by jeroen79 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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