> Perhaps that is a surer way to restore them to dignity than any other: to see them not as falling prey to our ancestors but as our ancestors.
I did notice that the popular transition to recast Neanderthals from primitive troglodytes to advanced peers seemed to coincide closely with the revelation that all Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA.
This a bit short sighted (both the view that Neanderthals are primitive troglodytes and also that that are sophisticated) as all (or nearly all? I'm not 100% sure here) human populations show evidence of admixture with other hominids. Whether or not that's a _good_ thing largely has to do with being able to understand the genes we received. We're not quite there yet, but research keeps advancing.
Funny response and probably true to some extent although all human groups seem to have archaic hominid admixture whether it's neanderthal, denisovan or "ghost" dna (Why did they choose that name?). I think ultimately, controversy by controversy, the academic community will gradually admit that 'humanity' has a much longer "pre"history than we like to admit. Likely on the order of 1-2 million years. If I had to bet, within the next century some archeological evidence will be unearthed that shows some level of Civilization (tm) among humans that lived over 100 kya.
This has to be (roughly) true because the energy to power the size of brain found in hominids post 2Mya can only come from cooked food (or living in the very small number of places where there's enough fruit available year round to provide equivalent diet).
Huh? The academic community has been clear on that for decades now. The problem is the oversimplification taught in schools, which is often decades behind the cutting edge science.
See the timeline on the archaic humans wiki page [1]. The first migration out of Africa and the first use of fire were all millions of years ago. The first stone tools made by Australopithecus predate archaic humans altogether. It really just depends on where you draw the "human" and "civilization" lines.
Indeed, something along those lines was announced just the day before yesterday:
"Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. "
The acknowledgement that GP's obersvation is significant might lead to further reevaluation of "set" attitudes, based on the recognition that self-serving bias was involved in their formulation.
A brief wikipedia search suggests a lot of humanity has Neanderthal DNA, not just Europeans.
Neanderthals shared more alleles with Eurasian populations (e.g. French, Han Chinese, and Papua New Guinean) than with sub-Saharan African populations (e.g. Yoruba and San).[8] According to the authors Green et al. (2010), the observed excess of genetic similarity is best explained by recent gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans after the migration out of Africa.[8] They estimated the proportion of Neanderthal-derived ancestry to be 1–4% of the Eurasian genome.
That is because Homo Sapiens "returned" to Africa after the invention of animal husbandry and agriculture. They out-competed and drove away many traditional hunter-gatherer tribes.
I think the debate reveals how flawed and entitled our thinking is.
A bit over-simplistic, we find a couple of bones in a cave and so a few pieces of evidence. From this, we patch up a full picture of the Neanderthals (flawed) and we do it in a way to convince ourselves how great we are (entitled).
With "our thinking" I'm talking about the not-so-scientific public. I guess the scientists get this right. They know about their unknowns. But these subtleties are lost on their way to the general public.
Something I liked from Sapiens is this idea of how all these other hominids existed and we whacked them. In some sense, we had aliens among us and we killed them and vilified them. It would have been so cool to have seen alternative related species, but I suppose this was a winner-take-all market.
It may be that describing our victims as villains (itself such a word) is an adaptive trait.
In that vein, "anyone who downvotes this is a moron"!
I assume you are from the US with little knowledge of history. Neander (ever wondered where the Neanderthals got their name from) was German. Early anthropologists were German or French. So yes, early anthropologists were all (really) white Europeans.
BTW I'm actually surprised you wouldn't think of Jews as "white". But I'm not familiar with US American raceology. Are you from the white supremacy fraction?
Well... if it is any solace to you, as time moved forward the way we valued life, saw mortality and death in ouraelves and others, what we value, has changed.
People were violent and death was a much more normal thing.
When we look at it in modern time with all our accumulated knowledge we seek to not cause it. Even tyranical and psycotic individuals hold nihlistic or anarchic philosphies.
Truely to understand the worlds pardigm change over history is multifaceted in regard to demographics, and skills aquired, and scarcites and suppluses come into effect too.
Technically those 'aliens' were humans too. Different species, same genera. We had interbreeding with them, though it's a small proportion of neanderthal and some other species dna that were discovered.
According to whom? Doesn’t seem out of the question for people to both have viewed them as demons or monsters and for certain people to have mated with them
>According to whom? Doesn’t seem out of the question for people to both have viewed them as demons or monsters and for certain people to have mated with them
cf. The Gnarly Man[0][1] by L. Sprague de Camp. It's fiction, but addresses that facet of potential interactions between hominid species.
When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them,
the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased.
Then the LORD said: My spirit shall not remain in human beings forever, because they are only flesh. Their days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.
The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
Numbers 13:32-33
They spread discouraging reports among the Israelites about the land they had reconnoitered, saying, “The land that we went through and reconnoitered is a land that consumes its inhabitants. And all the people we saw there are huge.
There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakim are from the Nephilim); in our own eyes we seemed like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”
> You don't get 1.5-2% neanderthal genes in modern humans by viewing them as demons.
Hostile othering of populations doesn't stop interbreeding among anatomically modern human subpopulations, so I doubt it would between other interfertile parts of the human family.
Was it an intentional genocide? Or was it repetitions of human/neanderthal clashes that resulted in us wiping out male neanderthals and breeding with the females until their genetic contribution got reduced to current levels (~2% on the high end). I guess technically we are still slowly killing them off every time someone with a high % procreates with someone who has none.
We don't know why, but that would suggest we didn't conquer them, maybe our males didn't find their females attractive enough to have sex with. Neanderthals are more masculine looking than us, so their males would be attractive, but their females maybe looked too much like males to us.
> maybe our males didn't find their females attractive enough to have sex with
That seems like an extraordinarily unlikely hypothesis, given the mating behavior I observe to be a close analog to the USPS Flat Rate service: "If it fits, it ships!"
On one hand, a small difference in the reproduction rate of two similar species competing for the same resources leads to extinction of the slower reproducing one in not so many generations. Even without hostilities.
On the other hand, Spainiards and Portuguese killed around 90-95% of the indigenous population when they conquered South America. Contemporary Homo sapiens seems to be a rather aggressive monkey horde.
Choose your odds. I think it was a mixture of both.
54 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadI did notice that the popular transition to recast Neanderthals from primitive troglodytes to advanced peers seemed to coincide closely with the revelation that all Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA.
See the timeline on the archaic humans wiki page [1]. The first migration out of Africa and the first use of fire were all millions of years ago. The first stone tools made by Australopithecus predate archaic humans altogether. It really just depends on where you draw the "human" and "civilization" lines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans
"Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. "
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9
Neanderthals shared more alleles with Eurasian populations (e.g. French, Han Chinese, and Papua New Guinean) than with sub-Saharan African populations (e.g. Yoruba and San).[8] According to the authors Green et al. (2010), the observed excess of genetic similarity is best explained by recent gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans after the migration out of Africa.[8] They estimated the proportion of Neanderthal-derived ancestry to be 1–4% of the Eurasian genome.
A bit over-simplistic, we find a couple of bones in a cave and so a few pieces of evidence. From this, we patch up a full picture of the Neanderthals (flawed) and we do it in a way to convince ourselves how great we are (entitled).
With "our thinking" I'm talking about the not-so-scientific public. I guess the scientists get this right. They know about their unknowns. But these subtleties are lost on their way to the general public.
It may be that describing our victims as villains (itself such a word) is an adaptive trait.
In that vein, "anyone who downvotes this is a moron"!
BTW I'm actually surprised you wouldn't think of Jews as "white". But I'm not familiar with US American raceology. Are you from the white supremacy fraction?
But all of this misses the point of my statement.
People were violent and death was a much more normal thing.
When we look at it in modern time with all our accumulated knowledge we seek to not cause it. Even tyranical and psycotic individuals hold nihlistic or anarchic philosphies.
Truely to understand the worlds pardigm change over history is multifaceted in regard to demographics, and skills aquired, and scarcites and suppluses come into effect too.
cf. The Gnarly Man[0][1] by L. Sprague de Camp. It's fiction, but addresses that facet of potential interactions between hominid species.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gnarly_Man
[1] https://www.galacticjourney.org/stories/600411gnarly.htm
When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them,
the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased.
Then the LORD said: My spirit shall not remain in human beings forever, because they are only flesh. Their days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.
The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
Numbers 13:32-33
They spread discouraging reports among the Israelites about the land they had reconnoitered, saying, “The land that we went through and reconnoitered is a land that consumes its inhabitants. And all the people we saw there are huge.
There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakim are from the Nephilim); in our own eyes we seemed like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”
Hostile othering of populations doesn't stop interbreeding among anatomically modern human subpopulations, so I doubt it would between other interfertile parts of the human family.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC368159/
We don't know why, but that would suggest we didn't conquer them, maybe our males didn't find their females attractive enough to have sex with. Neanderthals are more masculine looking than us, so their males would be attractive, but their females maybe looked too much like males to us.
That seems like an extraordinarily unlikely hypothesis, given the mating behavior I observe to be a close analog to the USPS Flat Rate service: "If it fits, it ships!"
On the other hand, Spainiards and Portuguese killed around 90-95% of the indigenous population when they conquered South America. Contemporary Homo sapiens seems to be a rather aggressive monkey horde.
Choose your odds. I think it was a mixture of both.