I would love to know what early Sapiens thought about the Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is very strong, but acts a bit foolishly sometimes? As we have been the only remaining member of the Homo species for thousands of years now, living side by side with creatures that are only quite like us is an experience that has been lost in the collective human memory. I think it is pretty likely that Sapiens back then just thought of a Neanderthal tribe in a similar way they thought about another Sapiens tribe. I read somewhere that the body proportions of Neanderthals are within the range of body proportions of modern humans, and research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals.
(As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0], they certainly looked a bit strange, but they were not repelling or appeared un-human.)
On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago. If anything, thousands of years of agriculture and living in large settlements removed the evolutionary pressure to be a quick and inventive observer of your environment. It is much more easy to somehow get by in an established farming community with thousands of members if you are a bit dense than it is if you are part of a small tribe of hunters.
As far as I know the commonly accepted meme of neanderthals as dopey slow caveman versions of us is not as well accepted as it once was. I've read that the current idea is that neanderthals were stronger, faster, and possibly even smarter than sapiens but that they were less efficient, suited more for quick sprinting and hard fighting in environments with plentiful food sources and less suited to long distance travel, endurance hunting, and calorie-starved environments.
In effect, we won the evolutionary race by being a honda civic instead of a Porsche 911.
If I were to bet my money I would bet it on social structure or a disease.
- Homo Sapiens had tribes 100-200 people when Neanderthals had 20-30. They were outnumbered. I'm not suggesting brutal wipe out, but competition for resources.
- we "won" because we were immune to a disease be brought from Africa.
A paleoanthropologist remarked that the most striking and reliable difference between finds at Neanderthal and contemporaneous sapiens sites was that Neanderthal artifacts were never from sources far away, which he interpreted to mean they had no trade network.
There are many ways to interpret that: xenophobic? susceptible to disease? militantly self-sufficient? not interested in decoration? (Most trade goods are decorative.) no language skills?
There is other evidence that Neanderthals had no reliable access to fire: that if their banked coals died, they could not start a new fire, or get a light from another band.
As someone with an abnormal amount of Neanderthal DNA (relatively speaking for modern populations), I do seem to run a higher metabolic rate. I'd never thought to associate the two though.
It's about 0% for sub-Sahara Africans, and in the 1% to 4% range for the rest. [1]
This may not mean exactly what you think it means though. Your non-Neanderthal genes are also almost identical to the Neanderthal ones, otherwise interbreeding would have been impossible. It's just that genes come with slight variances that can be used to trace ancestry.
E.g. you may also have heard that humans and chimpansee DNA is 98.8% identical, so there is obviously a different type of similarity metric being used there
Some of the very similar Neanderthal variants of genes are manifest as important phenotypic differences though. Traits ranging from hair straightness, sneezing after dark chocolate, to severe COVID risk. Some alleles are now suddenly quite deleterious due to modern lifestyles, like the CHRN3 gene variant, but wasn't before widespread smoking.
I believe Neanderthals were also less pack oriented, so humans just had bigger powers in numbers.
It's also fascinating that Neanderthals soundly beat us in the first round of incursions, and 50k years later humans presumably wiped them out entirely + all other variations of homonids
Neanderthals were better able to cope in colder climates than modern humans. The climate may just have pushed the immigration of them many several thousand years back.
From the comments above, I thought it was the other way around? More energy efficient metabolism resulting in greater range of biomes to permanently settle?
It is also quite possible that the Neanderthals were stronger, faster, smarter, and more moral/ethical, and that sapiens were simply crueler, more diabolical, more savage.
It is quite difficult to imagine a species that is more vicious to even its own members, let alone members of other species, than ours is.
The paper indicates that at times and levels of.social organisation our lethal violence rate increases well above the phylogenically predicted 2% — see Fig. 3c the contemporary band and tribe median estimates of 5±1% which are probably considerably more accurate than inferring from prehistoric remains). Other work suggests during resource scarcity hunter gatherer lethal violence shoots way up as well. I'm actually not sure what my point was, other than I suppose early humans under the conditions of contact with Neanderthals probably were on par with the most violent of phylogenetically similar animals.
> I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago.
Evolution of our species continues and some changes in our anatomy are being observed even in the last 100 years of our history. The evolutionary pressure never stopped, it just changed its form. We are no longer competing with nature, we are competing with ourselves, adjusting our diet, exposure to seasonal weather, sun and fresh air, physical activities and mental challenges. I would say yes, we may have become more intelligent, even if we lost our connection to nature. We just use our intelligence for different things: our society, our language are much more sophisticated, our abstract thinking and creativity have advanced, some of us may have got more control over our bodies (I’m pretty sure modern athletes are more developed than our ancestors).
> our society, our language are much more sophisticated, our abstract thinking and creativity have advanced,
Can we be so sure? Our tools have evolved and become more sophisticated thanks for our industry for sure, but that says nothing of intelligence per se.
How much more or less sophisticated and creative were humans only 150/200 years ago? Yet, technologically... things have moved quite a bit. Technology that has built upon a lot of precedents.
We have enough studies on the impacts of nutrition in the womb and the impact of experience and neglect on brain development in children that we can be sure that intelligence is more advanced. More complex languages leads to more complex thoughts. Better nutrition leads to greater intelligence. Both for our normal communication but also for languages to describe abstract ideas like mathematics.
If this still doesn't sound definite, then I think we are getting into the issue of what is intelligence and how do you measure it in a person or a population. But then we would need to get into answering just how can we be sure humans are more intelligent than a wide selection of animals and even non-animals. Same for creativity and sophistication.
I think a lot of this discussion can evolve around definitions.
If we look at history back until the industrial revolution, I would guess that less people had to work on food production and thus could go into creative fields.
Intelligence is better measurable through IQ tests and we can see IQ score rising in societies today. (Flynn Effect)
Intelligence is also highly context-specific. Context today is not the same for the average human 200 years ago, even more different 2000 or 20k years ago.
I'm not sure high IQ people from today would make it far in more ancient times, and not because smarter or dumber, but only because they are unadapted.
General intelligence is related to the ability to learn new things in general, no matter the context.
And today's humans, would, if they got to start as babies 20k years ago, learn all there was to know, about that world. And they'd start feeling bored. Maybe they'd try to build and invent things, just to escape the otherwise for-the-brain empty days.
(You somehow got it the other way around :-) I wonder how you formed your opinions / beliefs about intelligence? If it's ok if I ask)
**
If, in your comment, replace IQ with "wisdom" and "knowledge", then it makes sense. A grown up human of toady -- yes, definitely unadapted, knowledge wise.
Likely not. Agafia Lykova is not bored, she‘s still not using any of the modern technology and she’s still living like her ancestors lived 500-100 years ago. And she was young when her family was discovered.
But there's around 10 billion people on the planet, you can always find some unusual person to make a point.
In this case, though, she might agree with me, I'd say -- in that she spends part of her time reading and constructing things, from the article you linked: "reading and construction".
Modern tech? I think there's lots of cool not-modern tech, ancient tech.
Edit: She's an amazingly cool person! Thanks for linking the article, I might have a closer look at her & her life (now done. I wonder how many books she has to read, and after how long she's forgotten them so she can re-read)
Edit2: Sorry if my first version of this post sounded a bit grumpy. Now edited
My point is, our intelligence requires some activation. It is context-specific in the sense, that pure brain cannot develop it alone, in isolation or in a low tech culture. Configuration of our brain takes time and education, so modern human in prehistoric context may not reach the same IQ as if this person would have studied in one of the best schools on this planet. Agafia is modern human being, but she never had a chance to learn all the things that others had access to. When she met the civilization, she was already an adult person and her ability and desire to learn more was limited. She ran away from civilization back to her hut in taiga, and never wanted to live another life. She does not read a lot and, if you watch the documentary about her, she‘s reading Bible or books for children, so it’s not the same being fond of reading as for someone with university degree. She is unusual, yet she is normal, and she is a good illustration of what would happen if modern human had to become a hunter-gatherer, losing almost all cultural baggage except faith.
200 years is not long time ago, the changes may be subtle. I’m not aware of any research in this field, but mass education improves our cognitive abilities and I won’t be surprised to see if natural selection favors those who respond to education better. Our species developed new ways to pass „genetic“ information to next generations beyond DNA. We may be almost the same as ancient human right after birth, but we acquire and encode in our behavior and body much more extra information as we grow. Our biome adjusts to our food habits, our hormonal system adapts to our level of stress, our immune system gets upgrades via vaccines etc etc. And all of this is controlled by our intelligence.
Most of the newer research on this topic suggests that it's neural connection complexity, and specifically frontal lobe volume, rather than overall brain size that determines intelligence or brain power.
>Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity. This view is supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses between different species suggests that what makes up synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
If size of brains were any measure of IQ, elephants and whales would be the smartest animals on this planet.
Brains consume a lot of resources, so evolution had to optimize their efficiency. They need energy, they need cooling, they need removal of waste, they must deliver signals faster - all those things are pushing for miniaturization.
> We are not smarter than our ancestors. Human brain size is down 20% from peak, and is continuing to shrink.
Processors in 2000 were ~42nm in size, now they’re ~5nm in size. Not only did they get faster as they grew smaller, they became more efficient as well.
If that were true, I'm not sure we'd use the term "extinct" to refer to Neanderthals.
(Some) humans are willing to mate with just about anything. There would be human-dog hybrids if it wasn't genetically impossible, as unsettling as that thought is.
Seems more likely that we treated Neanderthals as humans do with other outsiders: we exterminated them and took their resources.
Word has it that you can find their descendants on Wall Street though.
Isn't it possible that humans simply outbred them? You don't have to "get rid" of a population if you can interbreed and outbreed a given stock, no? It's not like one day they exist and the next they don't; rather, they slowly get absorbed into the larger, faster breeding pop. Or even disease they had no natural immunity for. I presume there would be some conflict as even among human pops conflict is a given --but not necessary one to the end.
A clearer view might be, the population distribution changed. Fewer 'purebred' anything existed over time, and more mixed individuals. Until today we have a large fraction of humanity with both genes.
It's not necessary to posit a catastrophic change. There were simply more of the new kind, so there were more of their genes in the mix and fewer Neanderthal.
It's possible. It's just one of those explanations that we'd really love to believe, since the alternative is so unthinkable. It's been a hobby of mine to be skeptical of it.
Even Kurzgesagt mentioned in passing that we're not sure if it was due to "a series of minor genocides."
If anyone knows of breadcrumbs to follow, please chime in. Genetic testing implies it should be possible to figure out how much interbreeding took place. We seem to be able to trace extinction events with some degree of accuracy, so it would be surprising if a genocide-type extinction event was easy to confuse with interbreeding.
We did in fact interbreed. Some modern human populations are as much as 5% neanderthal in their DNA. That much gene content to me suggest that this population was absorbed; a one off breeding here or there would not persist to 5% of the genetic material millions of years ago today unless hybridization was occurring frequently.
Neanderthals and humans co-existed for some 5,000 years. Think of that in terms of our modern history, and how many ethnical groups was there in that time span - and almost all of them perished completely, either destroyed or assimilated by others (usually a combination of both). Thinking of it, neanderthals actually lasted for quite long time, probably thanks to the overall scarcity of hominid populations and vast territory available to them.
We also lived in caves for several tens of millenia across multiple stretches of time, without written language. There may have been some sort of ephemeral symbolic transfer (knots, beads, wood carvings,) but it looks like those cultures used primarily oral traditions. We know many non literate cultures develop memory palace techniques, so rigorous oral traditions can be incredibly durable and stable, with lots of information passed down accurately. All that to say, human tribes could have had detailed and specific knowledge of interactions with Neanderthals over millenia, and developed peaceful tradition that maximizes cooperation, or at least borders that kept conflict minimized. Neanderthals could likely do the same memory tricks.
5000 years is a blip - if humans find a sufficiently habitable environment, we apparently can settle for a pretty low quality of life.
It only works until it doesn't, though. Neanderthals or humans could have initiated an incident, in which traditions were distrusted or discarded or lost on either side, resulting in hostility, or they lost their elders to disease and the knowledge to survive.
Just like megafauna extinction, "bad humans were bad" probably doesn't come close to what actually happened.
Neanderthals were likely as or more intelligent than humans, implying susceptibility to all the same conflicts, biased thinking, and bad incentives that affect human cultures. It could be environmental or biological or a pure fluke that Neanderthals didn't outlive humans, but whatever the reason they're gone, it's going to be just as convoluted and nuanced as the rise and fall of millenia old human cultures.
Artefacts were left in caves because they're the only place where the artifacts can persist for hundreds and thousands of years, and ancient man knew this just like the modern man.
Cavemen are a trope, for sure, but there were cave dwellers, known as troglodytes. There were extensive periods of time where caves represented a really good solution to environmental and climate changes over the last 300,000 years.
Troglodytes were relatively rare, and most prehistoric humans were probably of the nomadic or small village types of hunter gatherer cultures.
There are plenty of caves that show evidence of long-term use of fire and burials, a good indication of habitation. However, it's true that caves were never a primary mode of habitation, just one that was convenient when it could be found... and pretty much the only one that we can see now due to differential preservation.
In the scientific parts of the ethnographic record (there is a split in anthro between scientists and non-scientists, see e.g. Napoleon Chagnon[0]; basically, he pointed out that the Yanomamo were breeding themselves for violence and was punished for it) the idea that our M.O. in small-scale societies when encountering outsiders, or when invading other groups, is to kill the men and take the women and children (often as slaves) is not all that controversial. See e.g. http://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758
It is interesting to read David Reich’s wonderful book “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past”. He deals carefully and cautiously with the processes of human population “replacements”. So cautiously that the word “genocide” is not even in the index.
But with few exceptions, when I read between his lines, I see that ugly word tacitly, time and time again. Exceptions include some Celtic migration events, but in most cases the DNA results indicate major breaks in DNA haplotypes that are consistent with an unhappy end to one group.
And of course recent “sapiens” history gives us our own backyard examples—unrelenting!
If you read Napolean Chagnon’s “Nobel Savages” or Polly Wiessner’s and Akii Tumu’s “Historical Vines” you can get a good=bad gut feeling for what “replacement” probably meant operationally in pre-literate cultures. Sadly not much different since the invention of Greek orthography, Gutenberg’s printing press, TV and the internet. Us versus the Other is apparently the name of the human game.
If we could get everyone to absorb Richard Rorty’s pragmatic approach to a life well lived starting in grade school, now that would be real progress.
The genetic data is clear that interbreeding took place, and neanderthals contribute a few % of modern human DNA in many Eurasian populations. The lack of surviving neanderthal y chromosomes could be suggestive of genocide though, but it's also possible that the neanderthal y chromosome lineages in humans disappeared due to subsequent expansions by newer lineages in human populations.
For an example of non-genocide, look at African bushmen. While their relations with other humans aren't always great, African bushmen populations haven't really experienced any genocidal decline. But if/when they fully interbreed with other humans and get incorporated into the gene pool (after evolving as a separate branch from mainline homo sapiens for over a hundred thousand years), their genes will be an even smaller fraction of the human gene pool than the neanderthal genes.
> While their relations with other humans aren't always great, African bushmen populations haven't really experienced any genocidal decline.
They are confined to a few small areas in South Africa and a few small areas much, much further north than that. The obvious implication is that they used to cover the area in between, too.
This doesn't make for a very compelling example of non-genocide.
They certainly didn't treat other humans anything different. In those days "us" meant the tribe or family group. Everyone else was "them", sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, depending on the situation, resource scarcity and the power of both sides. And those were the violent times, so when there was no enough food for everyone, competition (whether it's human, neanderthal or animal) had to be either scared away or destroyed. That's how all creatures in nature function, it's a matter of survival, there's nothing unethical about that.
It's important not to underestimate the intellectual life of ancient cultures. They were humans, with language, and probably had music, stories, traditions, religion, conflict, politics, and more. Methods of oral traditions have been identified that are essentially equivalent to modern memory athlete techniques, hundreds of thousands of factoids could be transferred with very little "bitrot" over generations. There are traditions in Australian aboriginal cultures that go back 40,000 years, and very sophisticated memory techniques that perpetuated their culture.
The relations between tribes near each other would have been as nuanced and varied and sophisticated and weird as any collectives of humans in relation to each other in modern life. "Those asshats downriver are rude, but they trade fair"
Modern life has given us profound advantages over previous generations, but we are basically the exact same kind of creature as plains walking humans from 300k years ago.
The notion of primitive simple hunter gatherer tribes doesn't account for the innate complexity of individuals. Their experience going through life would be the same as ours, we just have better (on most measures) tools and knowledge.
We are a lot less violent on average, though. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to war a lot. We don't see it as high-intensity conflict because of the low casualty numbers and lack of pitched battles. But when you look at it as percentage of the overall population, it turns out to be worse than our worst conflicts.
(To be clear, not all hunter-gatherer societies are like that. Some are more peaceful than others, and there are extremes like the Moriori. But the average is what it is.)
I think the assumption that past rivals are dumb, as we tend to roll over the details. I think overall there’s an assumption that modern humans = better.
Looking at contemporary history, there are dramatic differences in power dynamic between different human cohorts. There’s nothing that separates the biological abilities of any two populations on earth, but the one with the machine guns and artillery will always beat the guy with a bow and spear.
Look at the fate of the indigenous people of the americas. Europe didn’t send its best people, but disease, better weapons and toxic politics carried the age.
The muskets (arquebuses) used by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century were even slower than that. They were lucky to fire 2 rounds per minute. But they also had crossbows, steel weapons, armor, and horses — as well as tactical doctrine which completely outclassed any of the primitive New World civilizations.
But disease did wipe out the majority of their adversaries, so they had a relatively easy time dealing with the survivors.
Modern adult humans would absolutely score higher on all tests of human intelligence that we use today. We're not smarter, intelligence is context specific and it's not possible to objectively compare two brains that developed to survive in vastly different worlds.
> As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [...]
Apparently, this is not what happened. It seems that there are no neanderthal traces on human mitochondrial dna. This means that all neandertal legacy comes from neanderthal males mating with human females.
It's not a question of how attractive you found a neanderthal girl. Maybe as a human male you wouldn't be strong enough to seduce her!
The first is that how we think is deeply intertwined with language. There's tons of evidence of this, not the least of which is Helen Keller's description of her world before she learned language. We'll probably never know what language existed 50,000+ years ago, how sophisticated or simple it was and how it affected how our ancestors thought.
The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world, which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked. So would we even be able to relate to Homo Sapiens (or Neanderthals for that matter).
Some things we'd be able to related to (eg the earliest burial rites we've found evidence were from ~75,000 years ago) but I imagine a lot we simply couldn't.
Some Neanderthal DNA exists in the modern gene pool. That itself raises many questions. Was this violent? How was it viewed? Were these people viewed the same? How dominant were large family/tribal groups?
I mean Ridley Scott's The Last Duel features the last instance in France of its eponymous jurisprudence technique which came from Germanic tribal law before they were even literate (Germanic tribal warlords becoming the aristocracy everywhere but Ireland in post-Roman Western Europe), and this is about 500 or 600 years ago, never mind how much further back into the Bronze or previous time periods that dueling as juridical adjudication came from and what the world looked like to make such an idea palpable.
Wasn't an American President killed in a pistol duel not 130 years ago or so?
My grandfather grew up on a farm and never went to high school (which was a perfectly fine life decision in that milieu) and fought in WWII at 16 by lying about his age cause there were no birth certificates to prove otherwise
I think we very much underestimate how different human reality is as far back as 4000 years ago, nevermind 50k
> The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world, which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked
Can you elaborate some more on these differences? I’d love to learn more.
Look into Roman and Greek history. Slavery, the treatment of slaves, the attitudes towards minors (slaves and otherwise) for sexual purposes and so on. It's actually pretty abhorrent.
Another example: the origin of the word "decimate". "Decimation" was a Roman military punishment to military units in provinces that rebel against Rome. I don't believe it was widespread but it was common enough to spawn the modern word. "Deci-" here is Latin meaning "10". The punishment was this: soldiers (typically) were put in groups of 10. Each group was responsible for picking which of those 10 would die and be responsible for killing that person. The general way Rome quashed rebellion in general was brutal.
The amazing thing we actually have first hand accounts on Rome's military conquests in the forms of the writings of Julius Caesar (eg with the conquest of Gaul, which was essentially genocide). Now first hand accounts aren't necessarily accurate (eg Herodotus tended to embellish) but there are other accounts that lend a lot of credence to Caesar's accounts.
Romans appeared to have a more casual acceptance of violence than those of us in modern Western civilization. We moderns might actually kill more people in wars (and related genocides), but we still regard those deaths as exceptional aberrations rather than a normal part of daily life.
I've always thought that the existence of the uncanny valley is interesting. For some reason, it was advantageous for us as a species to be creeped out and skeptical of things that looked very nearly human, but not human.
I'm sure that informed how early humans felt about neanderthals.
STRONG agreement! I think if we'd found a way to co-exist with Neanderthals, we'd be faring much better with toeing around the edge of the great filter of Fermi's paradox[1]. The contemporary ability ("contemporary" as far as life history goes) to craft stories about human vs animal/nature has stimulated catastrophic growth and "othering" of nature in really significant way. Every religion and belief system would be affected by having a "bridge" intelligence closer to our own. (Not saying we'd have a history free of shameful treatment though.)
While recklessly creating new intelligent life is ethically nauseating to me, I also fear the status quo of NOT needing to consider these dilemmas. In my mind it's a clash between my visceral horror (of creating an intelligent being that is not human) vs a very real fear of global human extinction (of continuing on our destructive track without hard, global-scale conversations about our relationship/responsibility/entanglement with animals and other forms of life)
I've always enjoyed the theory that the Wild Man figure is a cultural memory of the last days of the Neanderthal. It's a bit far-fetched, since they've been gone for a very long time, but recent realization of specific cultural memories on the order of 10,000 years (and of more schematic ideas like the Pleiades for even longer) suggests it may be possible.
There’s a theory that Neanderthals didn’t have very strong language skills. So just like you can communicate with the dog reasonably well, maybe we could have sort of communicated with Neanderthals. But nothing resembling the rich conversation that Homo sapiens is capable of. Bearing that theory in mind, the humans would have just been much more able to out-compete, deceive, and defeat Neanderthals little by little over time.
“Winter is coming. Should we migrate down to the coast? Last winter, there were lots of crabs, but my dad said many winters ago there was a terrible flood that killed many of his friends. We could stay here and try to gather as much wood as we can to keep warm and try to hunt the deer. The dumb people are wandering up the mountain. It’s always cold up there. They won’t survive.”
Doesn't seem like a very sound theory, it's just more "Neanderthals were more stupid" with a backwards reasoning why they lasted so long.
It's more likely they were successful but slowly bred into the larger Homo Sapien population over time, judging from everyone's genetics today. Caucasians have way too high of a percentage of Neanderthal for them to have been killed off. Most of their population bred in.
Interbreeding did happen but it’s probably not true that Neanderthals got wholesale assimilated into Homo sapiens. More that there was some low level of interbreeding.
I recommend reading the book, and also I would not recommend dismissing a respected book in one sentence, but I will say that the argument is largely anthropological. that the millions of years of human existence without development into more advanced civilizations can best be explained by language and oral history. More specifically, the ability to think in abstract and communicate it to others.
> Interbreeding did happen but it’s probably not true that Neanderthals got wholesale assimilated into Homo sapiens. More that there was some low level of interbreeding.
Why is it probably not true? It's the simplest reasoning. Why did they have to be deceived through language or annihilated, but slightly fornicated?
> I recommend reading the book, and also I would not recommend dismissing a respected book in one sentence
Seems reading the book wouldn't help me if you read it and can't argue the points on it's behalf.
I'll ask this again:
Do you know why he thought they didn't have strong language skills and how he linked that to annihilation via deception and such or was he guessing?
Wouldn't current percentages depend more on how adaptive those particular genes are than what the starting percentage was? How many generations between then and now?
Cave paintings are in many cases real artistic expressions of animal scenes. Some use the contours of the caves to almost deliver an animation effect. It seems unlikely that an entity capable of depicting a nuanced abstract scene would be unable to verbally express similar concepts.
> On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago.
because "intelligence" is a vague thing and it connects with education.
For example, the average person with a school education today can do math better than Leonardo da Vinci, which enables some stuff to be invented today more easily than before.
"I would love to know what early Sapiens thought about the Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is very strong, but acts a bit foolishly sometimes?"
If population density was as low as we like to imagine (was it? Or is it just sites where traces survived into the present being so rare?), perhaps a neanderthaliensis tribe was just as alien to them as any foreign sapiens tribe would be?
> I read somewhere that the body proportions of Neanderthals are within the range of body proportions of modern humans, and research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals.
Of course there was interbreeding. Their smaller population was bred into the larger Sapiens population. This is why most of us (Caucasians) have some percentage of Neanderthal in us.
Maybe you should use another word instead of intelligence. You don't need much intelligence to survive and thrive as a pack hunter. Wolves, lions, and other animals manage to do that, and they are not as intelligent as humans. Intelligence is something you need in a complex society rather than in the nature.
about intelligence, being in post agricultural has benefits, but it removes the constant stimulation and challenge of wild life indeed. The former allows for slightly more explicit and abstract thinking, the latter for intuitionistic skills (ability to find quick solution that work for critical situations). I'm interested in this topic because spending time in the woods made my brain operate very differently. Also crafting with no evolved tooling is very hard.
The whole story gets more and more interesting and complex over time as we uncover it. No single "missing link." No simplistic story of homo sapiens coming in and wiping out neanderthals. A recent documentary I saw painted this very messy picture of migration in-and-out of various parts of Eurasia, back to Africa, back out and a general genetic mixing all-around. Overall modern humans out-competed neanderthals but also bred with them and that DNA shows up in many of us today.
This was covered via a historic overview of genetics in Carl Zimmer's 2018 book She Has Her Mother's Laugh towards the end as he puts it all together and explains how scientists figured it out. IIRC some neanderthal and denisova bones still had DNA material.
Edit: it looks like your account is using HN primarily for ideological battle, or at least is coming close to it. That's the line at which we ban accounts, regardless of what ideology they're for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
(As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0], they certainly looked a bit strange, but they were not repelling or appeared un-human.)
On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago. If anything, thousands of years of agriculture and living in large settlements removed the evolutionary pressure to be a quick and inventive observer of your environment. It is much more easy to somehow get by in an established farming community with thousands of members if you are a bit dense than it is if you are part of a small tribe of hunters.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Reconstr...