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Neanderthals were people too
- j0e1 10y ago> I’ll start with a confession, an embarrassing but relevant one, because I would come to see our history with Neanderthals as continually distorted by an unfortunate human tendency to believe in ideas that are, in reality, incorrect — and then to leverage that conviction into a feeling of superiority over other people. And in retrospect, I realize I demonstrated that same tendency myself at the beginning of this project. A humbling confession.
- mbroncano 10y agoIt seems he didn't learn much from the experience. Gibaltrar conflicts with Spain are not exclusively about the territorial aspect but rather it being a prominent haven for human and drug trafficking. Their locals are a constant embarrassment source for the U.K. government and for the most part treated like corsairs, tolerated in public but rather frown upon in private. Possible the worst of both Spanish and British 'maritime' traditions. The coastal towns in the area are splendid though, and worth visiting indeed.
- s-phi-nl 10y agoAccording to the US State Department > Gibraltar is adjacent to known drug trafficking and human smuggling routes, but the territory is heavily policed on land and at sea due to the risk of these activities occurring within its borders or territorial waters https://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2014/supplemental/227786.htm https://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2014/supplemental/227...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nubol 10y agoGibraltar is a good example on low tax rates to Spain.
- randyrand 10y agoclearly we are more superior than neaderthals or else they'd still be alive. So he's not wrong.
- kagamine 10y agoSir, if you were superior you would not have written "more superior than"! A neanderthal would simply have written "superior to". I tell ya, these homo sapiens they come over here they take our jobs, talk all foreign and mangle our grammar. When I were a lad all this were pygmy and dinosaurs.
- oblio 10y agoFrom what I read we outbred them. If that really makes us "more superior", I cannot say...
- randyrand 10y agoThats generally what superior means when talking about survival of the fittest. so yes. All life is constantly trying to out-bread others. The ones that are bad at out-breading are called extinct.
- themgt 10y agoI've been interested in paleoanthropology as a layman for a few years now. I find the Mousterian [1] culture / tools quite interesting, because it appears to be part of the history of hominid technological progress, the stepping stone to Châtelperronian tools, and yet also seems almost wholly attributed to Neanderthals. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but to me this suggests Neanderthals were actually more technologically advanced than humans at this time, and that as anatomically modern humans finally began to replace Neanderthal "civilization" they also adopted and used Neanderthal technology as their foundation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian
- cema 10y agoNeanderthals were actually more technologically advanced than humans I understand why this choice of words, but I think it is important to remember that Neanderthals were humans too. And, as we now know, not just "technically" human, but in many ways.
- themgt 10y agoYeah, I should have stuck with homo sapiens / AMH / AMHS [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human
- typaux 10y agoOne thing that many don't realise is Neanderthals aren't gone, because many of us are part Neanderthal. The distinction between what is Neanderthal and what isn't has just been blurred. It would be kind of like saying your mother's lineage went extinct because she had a child with your father.
- jboggan 10y agoNot exactly, Neanderthal admixture of 1-4% of the genome is present in all populations except sub-Saharan Africans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_modern_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_m...
- rootbear 10y agoWhat I found interesting is that, while any given modern human has no more than about 4% Neanderthal DNA, it isn't the same 4% in everyone. About 20% of the Neanderthal genome is found in humans. I'm not sure what this says about interbreeding. And then there's the Denisovans... I gotta get my DNA done...
- juskrey 10y agoI think this says a lot about spurious correlations in DNA "science".
- Symmetry 10y agoIt says that 80% of the Neanderthal genome produces a selective disadvantage?
- miguelrochefort 10y agoI got my DNA done. 3.3% Neanderthal. That's 99th percentile. Not sure if that means anything.
- Camillo 10y agoIf 1-4% of the Eurasian genome comes from Neanderthals, but sub-Saharan Africans have no Neanderthal genes, does that mean that the EA genome differs from the SSA one by 1-4%? And even more so the Melanesian genome, which has 4-6% Denisovan DNA. But at the same time, chimpanzees and humans supposedly share over 99% of their genome. How is that possible? Are these all percentages of the same whole, or is there something else going on?
- dkarapetyan 10y agoScience got it wrong because there isn't much science to it at all. It's like bone reading and the article manages to say that in a much more eloquent way.
- bobsgame 10y agoCan we clone a Neanderthal yet?
- FreeFull 10y agoNo, we don't even have a full Neanderthal genome.
- MikeGale 10y agoThere are claims that an entire Neaderthal genome has been mapped, see doi: 10.1038/nature12886, from 2014. There are also some low coverage genomes. Not sure what has been done since 2014. (Many of us are actually part Neanderthal so talking about this gets fairly odd. The "pre-admixture" populations had maybe 99.7% shared DNA anyway.)
- HillaryBriss 10y ago> We’ve always classified Neanderthals, technically, as human — part of the genus Homo. I feel uncomfortable letting scientists decide whether an organism is 'human' or not. Shouldn't that designation be the province of a great human, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, someone like Mikail Gorbachev, Henry Kissinger or Yasser Arafat?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vixen99 10y agoThe fade technique is really PC. Make it difficult for folk to read opinions of which HN readers, on average, do not approve. A bann on 'hate' speech, lite!
- andrewflnr 10y agoIt's not PC, it's just not forcing people to read what, on average, they're unlikely to want to read.
- simonh 10y agoBecause success in one field, such as politics, is no indicator whatsoever of aptitude in an completely unrelated field, such as genetics or anthropology.
- hasenj 10y agoI don't know if this is appropriate, but why are extinct humans classified as different species while the still alive humans are all considered the same species? It seems political. Either some of the current races are different species, or the so called extinct human species are just different races.
- athesyn 10y agoPretty sure it's the latter
- woodruffw 10y ago"Extinct humans" are not humans. They're homo, not homo sapiens (or, more strictly, homo sapiens sapiens). The genetic differences between you and any other human being of any other race are vanishingly small both in proportion to the size of the human genome and to the (known) differences between sapiens and neanderthalensis. It's not politics, it's parsimony.
- hasenj 10y agoYour answer gives no explanation beyond "because they are not humans". How do you know that?
- simonh 10y agoBecause we have extensive samples of the Neanderthal genome extracted from bone fragments, and before that from morphological studies of the Neanderthal skeleton which display far greater differences from humans than any differences in skeletons between human races. Even 18th Century observers were able to see that. Yes there is no one universally agreed definition of species, but Neanderthals were vastly more different from living humans than and differences between living human populations.
- ptaipale 10y agoBTW is there a good comparison for how big the anatomical differences are between Neanderthals and modern Europeans, compared to the differences between modern Europeans and modern, significantly distinct populations such as Congo pygmies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Pygmies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Pygmies (Anatomic differences are perhaps not as important as cognitive and psychological differences, but the latter are very hard to find out about extinct populations.)
- sebow 10y ago"Race is a social construct". I thought i stopped browsing reddit for a better place. Stick to tech please.
- dang 10y agoPlease don't post like this here.
- danieltillett 10y agoI find it interesting that the "solution" to the scientific question if all living humans are the same species is to claim that all the ancestors of living people belong to the same species despite all the genetic evidence saying otherwise. Rather than deny reality, the alternative would be to say that current populations are not the same species, but that the differences are unimportant. Why does it matter if we are not all the same species if the differences are minor?
- mmjaa 10y ago>Why does it matter if we are not all the same species if the differences are minor? Because like it or not, we still live in highly volatile, dangerous political times, and scientists getting behind the idea that there are clear racial lines dividing us all will not contribute to the peace-making. Its an uncomfortable truth that sometimes science is really hindered by politics, and this is one of those situations where its a highly, highly charged subject with potential to create a significant degree of upset in the world. The human species is very rarely actually prepared for the truths of science.
- danieltillett 10y agoSo your solution is to pretend science hasn't found what it has found because of the fear it might be misused? Rather than corrupting science, isn't it better to say we have no evidence of any important genetic difference between the different populations of the world? There are better ways of avoiding the evils of racism without destroying science.
- mmjaa 10y agoScience isn't being corrupted - people can still write the papers they want, and the eugenics thing is all about that, as well as CRISPR, et al., - but would you be content with a tin-pot dictator in Europe using these kinds of "scientific facts" as a means of developing policies which encourage ethnic cleansing? Because, well, that's sort of still happening as a thing, and won't go away as a thing, until we find a scientific solution to hatred and intolerance. Which are still very much huge things.
- fdsaaf 10y agoIf neanderthals were alive today, respectable people would call them homo sapiens sapiens and it'd be racism to suggest otherwise. Any evidence that you could distinguish neanderthals on the basis of genetics or morphology would be called pseudoscience and people like Stephen Jay Gould would publish elaborate sophistries explaining why anyone who notices differences between neanderthals and humans is a wicked person.
- seppin 10y agoIf anyone is interested in this topic, read the book "Sapiens". It expands on how just 10,000 years ago there were 5 species of humans on earth.