Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years
science.org
science.org
These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing.
Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is kind of messy.
There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle."
In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't have fossils, but something has to be our ancestors. So if we are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien ancestors sapiens.
Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died out. But... there were people everywhere.
Humans existed over a vast range. From south Africa to Northern Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it's confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different species.
Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic diversity we have today. In some sense, we are the inbred ones.
Also... population estimates are pretty dicey. We don't really know. Could have been booms and busts. Could have been ideal habitats with higher populations.
We still have a fairly poor grasp of human "natural history"
Heidelbergensis is the last common anscestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and us.
We were all around for just as long, 400kya+, and before that, it was Homo Erectus.
All of them, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens were walking around at the same time. There's plenty of fossil records we've uncovered that show that to be true.
It was only in the last 100k years or so that we remained and the other variants "died out".
I think they probably mixed in and we just became one, sort of
Is the argument that the tribe of humans from Africa was good at repelling outside invaders, but themselves expanded outwards and assimilated (and then outnumbered) the other populations, or something else?
It just seems a bit bizarre given that all humans elsewhere have relatively similar amounts (but quite a low amount) of Neanderthal DNA, which seems to suggest a reasonable amount of migration, interaction and interbreeding between populations everywhere except Africa.
There were multiple waves out of Africa but Most early anatomical human groups never left Africa as a result, there’s more DNA diversity within the continent than outside Africa
Its confusing because the non-african group grew exponentially while the intra-African continent continued to mature
The anatomically modern humans that left Africa spread rapidly and aggressively across the world basically absorbing and destroying every proto-human group and ecological niche and
now the world is ruled by the aggressive narcissistic chimeral hybrid of human (African) Neanderthal (European proto human) and denisovian (Peking man) that survived the exit snd expansion
Feel free to investigate each claim independently and come to your own conclusions
https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-surpr...
It also doesn't hold for the African Diaspora, especially in the Americas (and probably flowing back into Africa as we speak). It's also worth considering that many of the actual traits that Neanderthal-associated genes codes for probably have analogues in the much-wider African genome.
Your follow-up doesn't appear to contradict that (of course this wouldn't hold when populations start mixing in modern times and wouldn't have ever held 100%) so I was confused.
However the article does in fact dispute my previous belief:
>The researchers found that African individuals on average had significantly more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about 17 megabases (Mb) worth, or 0.3% of their genome.
This is as opposed to 1-4% of genomes for populations outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.
>They also found signs that a handful of Neanderthal genes may have been selected for after they entered Africans' genomes, including genes that boost immune function and protect against ultraviolet radiation.
>The best fit model for where Africans got all this Neanderthal DNA suggests about half of it came when Europeans—who had Neanderthal DNA from previous matings—migrated back to Africa in the past 20,000 years.
"The past 20,000 years" is pretty broad and seemingly includes modern era exchanges, but AFAIK that can't account for selecting Neanderthal genes or for how widespread Neanderthal DNA already is.
There are a few still. One made it to President of the USA.
Most populations die out. Most sapiens. Most neanderthals. Most everything. The chance of becoming an ancestor is very, very low.
Neanderthals were not slowly observed. Most of our neanderthal DNA comes from a single mixing event/period.
Evolutionary history is a history of bottlenecks. Small populations that survive and become large populations. The rest don't make it.
The Sapiens lineage is now thought to have diverged significantly earlier.
Erectus existed, but in pockets.
Other lineages existed also. At the very least, Homo naledi. Probably other dwarf lineages, an African "ghost lineage" and probably others.
Neanderthals and denisovans are structured... With subspecies, hybrid zones and whatnot.
There are also many sapiens lineages with no descendants. Most of them.
For example, some paleoanthropologists classify most archaic humans as h. sapiens. Anatomically modern humans become h. s. sapiens, neanderthal become h. s. neanderthalensis. This incorporates the middle pleistocene hominins from mainland Asia pretty well to boot. Many of those same people also use the "conventional" binomial terminology when they're not making a very specific point, so you can't just look at usages to understand where they're coming from.
There's also a hundred other classifications, some giving neanderthals their own species, others including it with heidelbergensis, and so on. None of them has clearly "won" and probably won't while we keep publishing "new" transitional forms every couple of years.
But given that there isn't, we should at least maintain internal consistency. That's what I was commenting on above. You can't use one conceptual framework for Neanderthals/Eurasia and another for Sapiens/Africa. It's confusing... and you end up with statements that are essentially false.
Neanderthal and Sapiens exist approximately concurrently. The "classic neanderthal" form doesn't predate sapiens. It only predates Sapiens if we define "Neanderthal" from the point of divergence. If we do that, we need to define Sapiens the same way. It can't be the establishment of a founder population for one and the emergence of a distinct form for the other.
I'm not advocating for one system or another... or even for the establishment of one consistent system necessarily.
It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history.
What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.
IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…
In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.
I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.
The American west coast is probably the most famous example of where they were widely used, with all three methods of processing in use according to local resource availability.
Long-term storage was achieved by drying and grinding into flour, oak groves were actively managed, and yields were enhanced by regular burning of undergrowth.
They were a nutritious, reliable, and low-risk source of calories with widespread availability, and the processing was time-consuming but not particularly difficult. Before the genocide, they'd have been the staple foodstuff for most people in an area stretching from the Cascades down to roughly where San Diego is today.
E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...
I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.
It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues.
Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.
Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).
It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.
Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168 men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds etc.
The scale of this is absolutely insane.
To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night–vision–equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.
Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.
That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.
We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.
Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.
I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?
Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
The particular epidemics in question killed both natives and Europeans. Furthermore, the manifestation of the disease was unfamiliar to the Europeans.
You are assuming facts not in evidence. This is actually pretty interesting because it suggests there is a latent pathogen with a very high fatality rate in the Americas. It wouldn’t be the first.
We saw this with the hantavirus. The Old World hantavirus species were never dangerous enough to even deserve a footnote, but the New World hantavirus species are essentially like Ebola. But outbreaks are very rare and hantavirus doesn’t seem to be communicable between humans, so the damage is localized. The hemorrhagic fever that killed millions of people in the desert-y parts of the Americas a few centuries ago was something else.
Disease we can't explain that spread a few decades after European ships full of plagues arrived.
I mean, yeah, sure.
The fact that Europe didn't have the same catastrophic population decline suggests that either that didn't happen (possible, but a stretch) or that Europeans already had immunity.
Which would only be true if there was some freak genetic immunity (also a stretch) or the disease was already in wide circulation (far more likely).
They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.
Everyone gets caught up in the wheel thing, but how many people have tried rolling a non-pneumatic tire loaded with weight up mountains or even just across broken terrain? We still got people carrying fridges and shit on their back up mountains in Nepal because wheels are still not useful on that terrain. Not to mention something we think of as old like the wagon wheel is the culmination of over 1000 years of innovation.
What they mostly lacked were antibodies against the numerous diseases brought by the Europeans. Measles, Mumps, Cholera, Tuberculosis, and so on.
If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.
Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering, and a very large implied economy built so long ago the name of the people group is not recorded.
Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops, yes. The rest? I would be cautious.
Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon
https://medium.com/luminasticity/predicting-the-worst-and-st...
Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.
But most of them are tac nukes, and they don't come with the support hardware needed to deliver them to large areas of the planet.
Reality is that Europe, Russia, the US, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and parts of the Far East could have a really bad time.
But most of South America and Africa would likely survive with only economic and political damage rather than physical destruction.
See your favourite massive volcano outbreak, or look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
(The impact of the disaster at Chernobyl is much smaller in area than a nuclear explosion would be, of course. But life has re-conquered everything there.)
In any case, I largely agree!
The survivors of nuclear war would have a really bad time, but humanity would survive.
None of this is to suggest we should be careless about it; it would be a massive disaster. But not the end.
https://www.sifrun.com/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-ea...
You would never feel like you have time to just, be. Instead you're focused on getting your next meal, and finding a place to sleep.
It only took a few ice-ages to force us to get smart about how we organize and then here we are.
It’s neat what we do to each other…
Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent and food.
> Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.
Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.
> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.
Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.
We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!
It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science. Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.
Which, taking into account that their chores were quite physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.
That said they probably socialized more than us for many reasons, just not instead of work.
Well, yes, climate and ecology matter a lot. Still, I believe that figure is including things like making sure a pot doesn't boil over, ie low intensity chores; and includes 'social' tasks which look and feel very different to, say, factory work.
Still, the idea that life was "nasty brutish and short" for most of human history is thoroughly debunked. Life wasn't constant misery for everyone, despite what many people learned in school.
I think it's important that we remember what we've lost, as much as what we've gained. Whether we worked 3 hours a day or 7.5, no one (outside slavery) was working 60 hours a week and just keeping their heads above water despite thousands of years of 'progress'.
That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.
In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.
Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers, but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to disease after the agricultural revolution.
The stakes are lower, but not the work level required, and they all do it for funzies, essentially.
If you wanted, you could ask any of the people living like that today what it’s like. You can find them even in any American city.
Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't imagine their life could have been considered stressful in that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has "more" regardless of how hard you work.
You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in modern society, not even considering that if there's any major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and starved within months if not weeks, with very little individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't operating somewhat smoothly.
Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.
Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.
Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe yoga was inspired by them too.
It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.
And then there's the profound cultural significance of Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually) calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...
There are certain personalities that are often attributed to modern sources, but haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte) living in a shack that has a predilection to collect herbs/mine rocks/watch the skies/you name it, that isn't thought much of or seems productive until someone gets sick/needs ore/wants to know the weather/etc?
All that said, what did crazy cat people do before cats???
I would bet the first human to do lots of stuff was that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes, domesticate a wolf, etc.
> what did crazy cat people do before cats???
I have no idea, but that's a great question.
Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all these are means for achieving higher goals. How many people think about that today? Quantity is not followed by quality.
Horses also have semi similar more specialized analogues - you could argue Camels filled a similar niche for very dry areas. And other animals like Goats/Llamas/Alpacas for mountainous areas.
We like to say that dogs are wired to understand human language patterns, but who's not to say that we're not wired to emit canine 'linguistics'?
Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Mosquitos carried pathogens, the other food sources were also of random quality.
If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I could keep going on, but the point is, being a self-aware mammal would have been absolutely torturous.
Yes, people back then suffered a lot of broken bones, even fractured skulls. But just like their bones tell that story, we also know that they often survived those injuries and their broken bones (and even skulls!) healed. People lived in groups and cared for injured.
Also a scratch is probably not going to kill you. It could, but likely won't.
> Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
Going after the children of an organized group of apex predators is probably not going to end well for the attackers.
And yes, sometimes women died in childbirth, but not that often (otherwise you wouldn't be here to type that). Also there's still a decent risk of that if you live in the US.
> Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Extremely rare on a hunter-gatherer diet. Our ancestors lost the ability to produce their own vitamin C internally millions of years ago, because they just didn't need it. Most other mammals still can.
> Mosquitos carried pathogens
Human-adapted mosquitos hadn't evolved to the degree they have today, so bites would have been much rarer, but pathogens causing fun diseases such as malaria did already exist.
> the other food sources were also of random quality.
You mean the food sources we evolved to consume? Are you talking about parasites? Most of the nasty ones really only started becoming an issue when humans gave them breeding grounds in their settlements.
> If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I guess?
> I could keep going on,
Please don't. You are clearly just guessing and making stuff up as you go.
That said, of course hunter-gatherer life was much riskier than modern life, but that was just their normal. Hedonic adapation and all that.
A few things AFAIK anyone has to grant about this period:
- Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived all over the world, under vastly different climates, for ~100,000 years.
- These humans were anatomically modern in every sense. They had lives every bit as complex as ours.
- Human cultural, political, and social structures are and have always been inherently diverse.
- Humans have always impacted and managed their environments for better and for worse.
- The Neolithic Revolution occurred independently in multiple places over generations as a series of choices by individuals at least roughly as intelligent as we are.
- Humans who adopted agriculture came to out-populate those who didn't.
The idea that hunter-gatherers lived consistently affluent lives and enjoyed plenty of leisure time as a general rule doesn't neatly fit this picture for me. How is it more likely than the idea that these people lived basically evenly along a spectrum of fluctuating and diverse conditions, at the mercy and grace of natural systems and social trends?
Perhaps depending on the context some human groups lucked into a life of luxury, while others lived painful lives consumed by the anxiety of dwindling supplies, all as an accident of climate patterns, the spread of disease, or even human-caused overconsumption.
Even in early societies that won a Garden of Eden in the geographic lottery, what's more human than to invent new complex problems to stew over based on generational trauma, or simply wild speculation about a world we will always have limited understanding of? Perhaps some group of humans highly valued their downtime hobbies while others were obsessed with arbitrary hierarchies, wars to obtain slaves, or settling petty disputes between powerful families.
Agriculture at the very least provided predictable trade-offs that smooth out the previous extremes, and we can't know if on balance it was a strictly negative or positive change. Since then, however, I think it's safe to say that the lives of everyone I know is better off than a practitioner of early agriculture.
Don't forget, there are pockets of our species living at this level to this very day (uncontacted tribes)!
The atlatl was undoubtedly earlier, and a bigger advance. It essentially doubled a hunter's arm length, and thus impelled speed - with force proportional to the square of speed. An atlatl can put a dart straight through an enemy's gut, or easily pierce a deer's hide.
Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence of primates, etc.
Maybe. I can imagine a dystopian Idiocracy type future where everyone is the "ideas guy".
It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained.
So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once they reach a threshold, as implied by the article.
It’s a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going “extinct”. And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the process, but it works.
On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become pervasive.
The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic diversity as a shield against new diseases.
And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.
Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.
But you are certainly right that the cross-overs are incomparably worse. And diversity becomes species extinction protection at that level.
For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0])
> Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.
Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out. Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza. Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an inter-connected population, requiring a critical community size in the hundreds of thousands.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/2011/202...
After all, as much as cross over illnesses are orders of magnitude more dangerous, they are also orders of magnitude reduced in threat distribution, for any low population species.
The integrated surface x time surface area for transfer just isn't there. Lots of low population species last millions of years, or tens. And even then, die off for other reasons. despite their extreme and persistent low-diversity vulnerability to any successful cross over parasite/illness. Neanderthals are not exceptional on that count.
To be clear, I am agreeing with you (and me!).
Fwiw... something similar also occurs with outbreeding/hybridization. Novel gene combinations can be maladaptive, just like double recessives.
These are all pretty normal population dynamics.
There are billions of us now... but that's not normal for a large animal, especially predators. How many leopards, or bears, or elephants are there at any given time?
These tend to be sparse, structured populations.
Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.
Then some idiots decided it's time to create an artificial one in their image. Enjoy your golden idol, pray it doesn't decide to turn you into biofuel.
I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very small population.
Seems as though it could have been an enclave of neanderthals who eventually integrated with humans.
The last time I looked in to this, the consensus was that it was most likely a version of otherwise-extinct ancient Celtic.
Now that doesn’t mean that the Basques don’t have a potentially outsized Neanderthal genetic influence, but the odds of their language being so ancient as to pre-exist modern humans entirely is unlikely.
We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.
This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me.
This article talks about the Basque language from before contact with the Romans, 5-1 centuries BCE. It also references a "pre-proto-basque" language, that would have been the one before the Celtic invasion of Iberia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtiberians).
The rabbit hole kind of ends there, as not much linguistic artifacts or history remain from BC unfortunately. But one can imagine the Basque society would live in relative isolation for a long time before that.
Although one of the references goes to a now dead "reptilian agenda" website which might have been even more interesting:)
The thing loaded instantly. What a breath of fresh air in 2026. Hats off to Dad.
Fossil evidence exists pointing towards large eagles scooping up 3-5 year olds. It’s been a long time since we had to think of our toddlers safety the same way we think of a lap dogs.
There's a 12h Collège de France course from Jean-Jacques Hublin that display new understandings that is really captivating. It's in French though
This is well past HS biology though so popular press just skips that nuance and equates it to true population size.
In my country, there is an area with archaeological sites of Neanderthal villages and their mammoth hunting grounds. In one area, there are thousands of mammoth bones. Imagine having only wooden spears and ordinary stones at your disposal. Maybe flint spears, maybe not. In this area, flint is too rare and is mainly used for cutting, because the nearest flint deposit is 400 km away.
LMAO did he never saw a dog or a cat in is live ? They don't speak but can still use sounds to communicate
I would assume there were local populations that lived for a long time. But then they were gone too.
Some DNA is in modern humans, so there must have been some inter-breeding, but that in itself alone can not explain why the Neanderthals went extinct.
Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.
The epic was written around 2000 BCE which was well over >> 10k years after agriculture and more than 4 times that much after neanderthals died out.
It's possible but much more likely that they refer to something more contemporary. There are always "wild men" around no matter who you ask.
Was it a knifes edge at times? Sure. Was it abundant at times? Also true.