Neanderthals did not go extinct, we assimilated them | Hacker News Reader

Neanderthals did not go extinct, we assimilated them

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33 pointsgeox21 comments

I think the title is misleading. Indeed, no Neanderthal exist today. They are extinct as a species.

Sure, there's DNA still around in populations today. But that's true of many, many extinct animals - Mammoth, Auroch, many breeds of dog, even dinosaur.

There's a interesting question there. How often do species completely disappear and how often do they evolve into something else?

Almost every species that has ever existed on this planet no longer exists. Nothing “evolves into something else“. Evolution is simply constant change over long periods of time. Eventually, the thing that used to be no longer exists, whereas the new thing does. It’s a giant tree of change. This is literally what Darwin discovered.

Species can completely disappear because they can be hunted out of existence, climate change can kill them off, natural disaster's can wipe them out.

https://www.onezoom.org has a neat viewer for the tree of life (one past the home page to the tree itself - https://www.onezoom.org/life/@biota=93302?otthome=%40_ozid%3... )

Note the settings thingy in the upper right for some different views.

"Species" is an arbitrary designation. Maybe arbitrary isn't exactly the right term, but it's a label which says 'right now, this is different from that' , whereas over evolutionary time actual organisms will interact and intermingle in ways which (as seen in these comments!) aren't adequately captured by the categories into which we divide them.

Sounds similar to red hair. Looking at current demographics red haired people will disappear "soon", but the DNA for red hair will still be around.

That's a myth. It's not how recessive genes work.

Depends on how you look at it. We are descendants of Neanderthals (at least if we have European or Asian ancestry). And we are still here.

It’s like dinosaurs, are they extinct? Tiny dinosaurs are chirping in the trees in my garden right now.

I would not call 1-2% dna descendants. We are a sister group from which we share a partial genetic heritage.

Why did they get so diluted? Or does that mean they were just 1-2% of Homo Sapiens total population by assimilation time, so the original proportion was just kept instead?

The dinosaur to birds comparison isn't a particularly good one. Birds are cladistally dinosaurs, that is, the common ancestor of all birds was a dinosaur. In that sense, there are no birds that are not also dinosaurs.

That's not true with modern humans and neanderthals. A tiny amount of their dna remains in some human populations, but neanderthals are not the common ancestor of all humans. We are all descended from early homo sapiens and the tiny amount of neanderthal dna that persists is totally swamped by the homo sapiens dna.

Dinosaurs are also not extinct[1]. I think the confusion just comes from people assuming they know what words mean when they don't.

For example, a bat is a mammel, if all other mammels died except for like 1,000's of species of bats, would you say that mammels went extinct? The title is correct, but you have been misled by the Dunning-Kruger effect.

1. Here is a beginners book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaurs-Are-Not-Extinct-Facts/dp/00...

the potential spin here is endless.. rhetoric fueled by immensely deep tribal associations in the greater unconscious mind of each reader. IMHO Science is welcome but, step away from the science at all and the results will be socially explosive.. x10 on "social media"

I'll start: Homo Sapiens-cultural appropriation is what we do

Did we assimilate them or did they assimilated US?

Neanderthal hands typed this article /s

23 and me says Im 3% neanderthal and only 1% "african" so yes. You are correct. There is probably someone out ther with up to like 10%.

edit: just looked it up, seems 3% is the highest, so guess im max cave man! And mine was actually like, 2.3 not 3%

I will always believe, based on nothing but my own gut feel and experience dealing with Homo Sapiens, that the answer is much simpler.

They were different, so we killed them.

Why choose to believe this in spite of actual evidence to the contrary? People have Neanderthal DNA inside of them. We're in a thread about an article demonstrating that. We didn't kill them because they were different, the truth (as it always is) is more complex than that.

I understand being cynical about humanity this kind of performative misanthropy doesn't benefit you or anyone else.

Our recorded history shows how hostile we are to each other often over very minor differences. And also we know we wipe out other animal species routinely, after we arrive in their locations, they cease to exist.

>Our recorded history shows how hostile we are to each other often over very minor differences.

And yet people with very minor differences still exist, and many people are not hostile to the point of murder towards them.

>And also we know we wipe out other animal species routinely, after we arrive in their locations, they cease to exist.

Sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes we work very hard to save endangered species. If it were the case that we simply wiped out all animal species we encountered, when we encountered them, we would not longer be here.

Because again... we didn't wipe out the Neanderthals simply because they were different. If like GP you cannot allow yourself to believe otherwise because your view of human nature doesn't accept that amount of nuance in human behavior, then the problem is not human nature but your own nature.

>They were different, so we killed them.

I don't know why they are extinct, but your theory could just as well be reversed.

Neanderthals were much stronger than us with a more robust body that can withstand hits that would be deadly to us. In addition they had weapons and probably lived in organised societies.

They were definitely a potential threat to humans. Who's to say that they didn't rape, kill or eat humans and we just defended ourselves? Maybe the DNA found is humans is the result of women who were raped and managed to escape before they were eaten? I agree that humans are good at organizing for war, but it may have been a case of them vs us.

I don't really see the Neanderthals as necessarily worse than humans, but I also don't see any reason why they should be more "noble" peace loving creatures who just stood by when humans decided to wipe them out.

For all we know humans and Neanderthals lived next to each other with all the potential conflict and alliances that we find in human societies. We should be careful about applying our modern perspective to ancient history.

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