What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us? | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us?

discovermagazine.com

26 pointsgmays42 comments

This article is ancient (pun intended) in terms of paleoanthropology research and apparently comes with some criticism from people in the field:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man#Criticisms

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/return-amazi...

Recommend this story and discussion instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6849223

I'm no anthropologist, but it all sounds like a big succession of unfounded claims following from a single fact (the large skull). Brain size is weakly correlated with IQ, structure is far more important: otherwise, people with size abnormalities should have been geniuses [1] There are mammalians with huge brains out there --- whales and elephants, and they're behind apes cognitively.

Modern processors are laid out in a few square centimeters, and not because we are involuntarily constrained by size, quite the opposite -- we're voluntarily constraining them. Making them bigger is actually inefficient: signals couldn't reach the whole die in a single clock cycle, losses increase, and so on. Many diminishing returns architectural changes are required for scaling up [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people -- most of those are sports players, not mathematicians or whatever

[2] http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7003/IntelDieSize_575px.png -- die size remains fairly constant through generations

It's not the size of the brain, it's the "brain-to-body mass ratio" that matters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio

They may have had a philosophy of nonviolence and were slaughtered by violent humans.

They may have been too gentle to kill another humanoid.

Or if they fought back, they may have been massively outnumbered by humans.

Obviously, humans love to kill and wipe out entire species. They may have had an agreement of peace with the neanderthals and then simply lied about it and killed and tortured them all. They may have raped their neanderthal children, which would have led to the gene transfer.

update: I'm sorry if I've offended anyone. Humans don't rape. I take that part back. And humans aren't that violent (except against native americans, maybe, which is pretty minor.)

Not sure why you are being downvoted. This was my very first obvious conclusion.

i think because in a way i've insulted them by insulting all humans.

they can't face the reality. Which is even happening today. We hunt animals for sport and wipe them out. And we've wiped out even other humans that we've come into contact with and raped their women and children. Everyone has ancestors who were rapists and murderers. We have those same genes. It would not surprise me at all if it turns out that we hunted neanderthals for sport and wiped them out this way.

it is grim, but it's the truth.

> They may have been too gentle to kill another humanoid. (...) Obviously, humans love to kill and wipe out entire species.

Wow, projection much?

History tells us that native Americans were just as capable of killing other native Americans as other individuals of homo sapiens. That doesn't make the crime made by European settlers lighter, but that does make the anachronistic idea of "Noble Savages" look like a lame attempt at feeling morally superior to other people of non-native American descent. (Not to mention objectifying native Americans: those peace-loving, naturalist sages.)

Also, "an agreement of peace with the Neanderthals", seriously? We are not talking about Napoleon, we're dealing with many different cave-dwelling tribes, mostly moving around by walking, scattered over Europe that displaced a different population in the course of thousands of years. Your statement makes no sense.

i don't know where you read that i believe native americans were NOT capable of killing other people. I believe that ALL groups of humans are capable of murder and rape. That's not something that I only believe in, but probably is just a simple fact.

I'm sorry if I was unclear when I say "they." I mean "they" as in the hominids the article says "may have been smarter than us."

Well, sorry about my unclear writing. I was trying to say that your argument is just a variation of "bad Europeans killed peaceful Indians" narrative, only applied to a bigger picture.

And just like that narrative, your story doesn't tell why those hominids would be less inclined to kill competitors (after all, having big brains than chimpanzees didn't make us saints). You just assumed it because it suits the narrative you chose.

i don't make any real conclusions here. I'm sorry if I sounded like this is the only thing I can accept. It's not. I only suggest a possibility. There's a possibility that this group of hominids killed each other in some kind of civil war or died in some drought.

And i hope this isn't a revelation, but the narrative is real. Bad europeans did kill peaceful indians. That doesn't mean that all europeans are bad and all indians were peaceful. But largely, that narrative is hard to deny. All kinds of humans have done bad things to people who really just wanted to be left alone. To me, though it may not be the whole story, it's a true fact. I merely suggest that it is a very real possibility that humans hunted this hominid group down and slaughtered them all while the hominids wanted to be left alone. I don't see how you can not consider that scenario if you are wondering how a group of hominids became extinct.

i include native americans in the group which i call "humans."

There is no Neanderthal mtDNA in modern humans, so any raping was going the other direction. And, if indeed humans were regularly attacked by Neanderthals, that would explain why they disappeared, as pre-civilization humans would have had motive to exterminate them and no modern sense of temperance nor stigma against genocide.

if a human and a neanderthal had a child, hybrid offspring may have been less fertile, or even rejected by both societies, or even killed.

any humans that raped the neanderthals would probably not integrate those neanderthals into their human societies. any hybrid (with neanderthal mother) would probably remain in neanderthal societies.

Wikipedia says they were probably a fantasy and really just above-average skull size humans similar to what we find today. I wonder if they were found in groups which would suggest they were consistently different, or just randomly appearing among normal-skull people as the final paragraph seems to say (but tries not to).

I saw that wikipedia article too. The articles smells like BS. But, who is to say that intelligence is favored by evolution. If humanity is not careful, our ancestors could end up being intellectually inferior. For a more entertaining story that this article read "Galápagos" by Kurt Vonnegut.

> But, who is to say that intelligence is favored by evolution.

Well, define "intelligence".

Evolution seems to favor technology very strongly, and our models imply that it would. But more detailed senses for example isn't as strongly favored.

i don't know about that. considering the n=1 on intelligent species on the planet (perhaps ever lived) and every other species (that has ever lived) is not intelligent, it seems like we would be an accident.

evolution seems to favor volume over quality, not to say there aren't exceptions but roaches and rats seem to be doing pretty well.

i don't think Einstein back then would have had a higher chance of surviving than some other random person.

Possibly there was very little advantage being a genius would give you back then? Especially if you count the life expectancy.

If everyone had a spear and you were the genius that invented the bow and arrow, then one day later, everyone would copy you.

Also, an older society of average people would have created more technology than a newer society of geniuses. Or even if a society of thousands developed, they would be able to create more advanced weaponry than a village of 40 geniuses. So maybe the group of humanoids with the genetics that made them a super social species with the predilection for massive groups would give them a huge advantage over a genius group without the genetics to seek massive societies.

A city of 10,000 people all with "IQ" of 90 that has been around for 500 years would annihilate technologically a village of 40 all with "IQ" of 150 which has been around for 100 years.

Is there a correlation now between intelligence and having children?

not being in a city doesn't necessarily mean you'll have fewer children. but it may mean you don't like cities, and your children won't like cities, and you may prefer living in a small tribe.

There are any number of possibilities, all of them seemingly more likely than the "Boskop Man" theory. Hydrocephalus. Deformities. Even intentional cranial manipulation to produce specific head shapes.[1]

Cf. the "Starchild" skull that conspiracy theorists still love to speculate about, long after it was shown to be the skull of a hydrocephalic individual.

It's not impossible that this was a lineage of large-brained hominids, distinct from our own. Evolution favors local optima; it does not follow a teleological pattern. If big brains weren't advantageous to the local circumstances, they wouldn't have survived. But the big-brained, distinct-species theory speculates quite a bit on very little evidence.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation

And another possibility is that the large brain size just didn't result in greater intelligence or a larger amount of the right kind of flexible intelligence. One could guess that humans need a properly designed brain to behave as we do, not simply any old larger brain.

They evolved into sperm whales which have the physical capacity to support such a massive brain. Sperms whales also think the research and link bait article are full of shite.

For all we know, the morphological differences could have rendered them severely autistic. Isn't it about quality, not quantity?

For all we know they would be considering us the severely autistic ones.

Check out Last Ape Standing by Chip Walter for more speculation on why homo sapiens were more successful than other hominids,

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Ape-Standing-Seven-Million-Year-S...

What do you mean? They're still here -- they're called "Hungarians." :)

Isn't it possible that they were us and we just happened to get smaller brains?

yes, i believe our brains have shrank by 10% in the last 5,000 years alone. so a 20-30% lift isn't a big leap. also, if you read the wikipedia article it mentions that they were not a separate species, but human and the size is highly debated

who is us?

Homo Sapien. The article uses Human to refer to the Homo genus (Homo Erectus, etc).

We ate them.

With fava beans

and a nice chianti

Maybe their women found homo sapien men more attractive.

I can almost hear them thinking "Oh look at that nice small-headed boy, I could possibly bear three or more of his children before dying in childbirth"

(Note: not sarcasm)

All of humanity descended from a single female 100,000 years ago, so every other female from that time didn't have any descendants alive today either...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

That isn't quite the right way to put it. For example, if Eve's daughter reproduced with Phillis's son, Phillis likely has some descendants. The chain of mothers ends at Eve though.

Edit: changed phrasing a bit.

Nothing in the article suggests we interbred with them.

You don't think some humans raped neanderthals?

Not quite. Every straight matrilineal chain goes back to her. So other female from that time has surviving mitochondria. But many have plenty of descendents through chains of descent that include having a son at some point.

> so every other female from that time didn't have any descendants alive today either...

No, plenty of other females from that time probably have lots of descendants alive today. The difference is the Mitochondrial Eve is the ancestor of every living human today.

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