10 ms·

Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

82 points by okket 9y ago

mirimir 9y ago
> But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. Weren't they more like parents than cousins? Except for Africans, modern humans have apparently inherited genes from Neandertals and their non-European contemporaries.
- gadders 9y ago
  I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from inter-breeding.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Yes, inter-breeding. But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No?
    - pegasus 9y ago
      No. You're being overly literal, an occupational hazard for us hackers. Human language works differently from computer languages. I suggest working out your right hemisphere - read some poetry, sing some songs etc. Good luck!
      - mirimir 9y ago
        This is an article in Science. Science is literal. I'm as much a scientist as a hacker. And my right hemisphere is just fine :)
    - itsameta4 9y ago
      No, both Neanderthals and humans are generally believed to have each evolved from Homo habilis separately, and then later interbred to varying degrees in various locales.
      - toasterlovin 9y ago
        Right, the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians include Neanderthals.
        mirimir 9y ago
        Yes. And while "ancestors" is technically correct, I'm honoring my Neanderthal ancestors by calling them great^N grandparents. In other places, they had different names, but they were closely related.
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        Exactly. Though it's more complicated because if you go back even more generations, they're extremely distant cousins as well. The thing we're discovering about human ancestry is that it's not really a tree. Instead, it's more of a directed acyclic graph, where things branch off only to re-merge downstream. For instance, the Denisovans are another archaic human population who split off from a common ancestor and then interbred with humans later on. And there was a recent paper which detected archaic DNA from an unknown source in West Africans. Given that species can typically interbreed for at least a million years after splitting from a common ancestor, combined with the fact that Africa had tons of hominids who coexisted with anatomically modern humans, we're probably going to discover that the story of human ancestry is highly convoluted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_modern_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_m...
        mirimir 9y ago
        Yes, it was highly convoluted. I mean, in some unregulated bordellos, non-human primates (and other species) are available. Some of which are also food animals. Off topic, I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar Galactica. Yes?
    - masklinn 9y ago
      > But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. What? Cousins are descendants of a recent common ancestor (grandparent for the colloquial first/full cousin), you can breed with them but not doing so doesn't make them non-cousins. > There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No? Yes? But that didn't spawn a new species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis were already separate and well-defined things when that happened.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens (~50 kiloyears ago) were cousins, both descended from Homo habilis. But modern European Homo sapiens sapiens are descendents of both. So Neanderthals are not their cousins, but rather grand^N parents. That is, it all turns on who "our" refers to. In the article, "our" clearly refers to you and me and other humans who lived during the past few thousand years. So the article should say that Neanderthals were "their" cousins, referring to Homo sapiens sapiens living ~50 kiloyears ago. There really should be new species names. I mean, if you're going to distinguish Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, shouldn't you also distinguish hybrids? As we do for mules, "E. asinus × E. caballus". But damn, that would distinguish those modern humans without Neanderthal ancestry, which probably wouldn't be a good thing.
singularity2001 9y ago
>> The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says. A two-off accidental stranding would be another explanation
andyjohnson0 9y ago
I wonder what it was like for them to live in a world that was so big and unpopulated and unknown. Someone must have been the first to cross the Bering land bridge into North America, or walk the Nile delta out of Africa into the Levant. Pre-history is deep and wide.
- saalweachter 9y ago
  One question I suspect the archaeological evidence is insufficient to answer is how far from the last village/roving band of hunter-gatherers the next band into the wilderness would settle. When you broke off would you stay within a day of your old village or would you walk hundreds, thousands of miles before stopping, completely alone? As far as the mindset goes, I’d say keep in mind that when Europeans landed in the Americas and Australia, they considered those continents to be “empty”, free for the taking. Their world may not have been so different from the first human to walk out of Africa.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    In some cases they actually were empty. Because all the inhabitants had recently been killed by diseases spread by the Europeans. One proposed mechanism for this is that infected pigs roamed wild "ahead" of the colonizers, killing the indigenous population.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    1491 by Charles Mann goes into this a bit. Some estimates put the die-off of aboriginal North Americans at 90% from the arrival of Europeans (in ~1500) and the early permanent settlements (Jamestown was in 1607). The first descriptions of what's now the US east coast from explorers describe coastlines lined with fires as far as the eye could see, and suggested a fairly densely populated continent. The descriptions from the early settlers (as you've noted) describe a loosely populated land of "savages". I've always considered the 16th century a time of essentially apocalypse for North America. Imagine what would happen to our society if we had a 90% die-off over 100 years; even in the modern era we would probably find ourselves regressing to "savagery".
nukeop 9y ago
Neanderthals had advanced jewelry drills, could make their own clay dishes, could treat diseases with herbs and simple surgeries, and they even had some knowledge of dentistry. They were able to construct furnaces, had advanced (at the time) weapons, social structures, and created underground settlements and tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers. The popculture image of grunting, snorting primitive cavemen is more fitting for Homo Sapiens than Homo Neanderthalensis.
- amorphid 9y ago
  >> tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers Do you mean tunnels that are hundreds of kilometers long? Sounds interesting. Can you point us to some reading on that?
  - nukeop 9y ago
    Here's an article on one such underground site: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291 The tunnels themselves were not that long or linked up, but apparently all those that were found under Europe add up to hundreds of kilometers.
    - amvalo 9y ago
      What do you mean by the word "tunnel" here? They seem to be talking about an arrangement of stones on a cave floor.
  - amvalo 9y ago
    No way that's true. Maybe he have meant trade routes?
  - samfriedman 9y ago
    It might be more accurate to say that they used tunnels spanning that distance in total: cave systems.
- kewafb14 9y ago
  Agreed, and apparently we killed them all. We're the savage ones :D
80386 9y ago
I think there's a trend in archaeology of us realizing we've been underestimating the past. The Polynesians were capable of voyaging across the Pacific to South America, and another Austronesian group made it all the way to Madagascar. This was pretty controversial until Kon-Tiki; even now, Polynesian-South American contact isn't fully accepted. (IIRC, we weren't sure how the Polynesians even found so many islands, until an archaeologist asked a few of them and discovered that there's a simple algorithm for it: follow the birds.) Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once, possibly intentionally. Stone tools can be pretty good, especially obsidian. There are surgeons today who use obsidian knives. Roger Blench has a paper on Greco-Roman lamps turning up as far afield as Palau, which implies more complex trade networks at an earlier stage than most people would think: http://www.academia.edu/9237516/The_Romans_in_Palau_how_did_early_Mediterranean_ceramics_reach_Micronesia http://www.academia.edu/9237516/The_Romans_in_Palau_how_did_... And now, Neanderthals with boats. This isn't really new -- Homo floresiensis (the ebu gogo, maybe) had to have gotten there somehow. But it's part of an important trend.
- chx 9y ago
  > The Polynesians were capable of voyaging across the Pacific to South America, and another Austronesian group made it all the way to Madagascar. This was pretty controversial until Kon-Tiki; Too funny: Kon-Tiki went from South America to the Polynesian and it's only more recent research which indicates it might have been the other way around. What we realize now is how little we know.
  - 80386 9y ago
    Fair point - the expedition was intended to prove that the Polynesian migration (or at least the migration to Easter Island) could've come from South America.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once, possibly intentionally. The Torres Strait is full of small islands bridging the 150km gap between PNG and Australia. Not only that, but much like the Strait of Dover or the Bering Sea it was most certainly a land bridge until the holocene, and it remains extremely shallow.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

82 points by okket 9y ago

> But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. Weren't they more like parents than cousins? Except for Africans, modern humans have apparently inherited genes from Neandertals and their non-European contemporaries.

gadders 9y ago
I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from inter-breeding.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Yes, inter-breeding. But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No?
  - pegasus 9y ago
    No. You're being overly literal, an occupational hazard for us hackers. Human language works differently from computer languages. I suggest working out your right hemisphere - read some poetry, sing some songs etc. Good luck!
    - mirimir 9y ago
      This is an article in Science. Science is literal. I'm as much a scientist as a hacker. And my right hemisphere is just fine :)
  - itsameta4 9y ago
    No, both Neanderthals and humans are generally believed to have each evolved from Homo habilis separately, and then later interbred to varying degrees in various locales.
    - toasterlovin 9y ago
      Right, the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians include Neanderthals.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Yes. And while "ancestors" is technically correct, I'm honoring my Neanderthal ancestors by calling them great^N grandparents. In other places, they had different names, but they were closely related.
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        Exactly. Though it's more complicated because if you go back even more generations, they're extremely distant cousins as well. The thing we're discovering about human ancestry is that it's not really a tree. Instead, it's more of a directed acyclic graph, where things branch off only to re-merge downstream. For instance, the Denisovans are another archaic human population who split off from a common ancestor and then interbred with humans later on. And there was a recent paper which detected archaic DNA from an unknown source in West Africans. Given that species can typically interbreed for at least a million years after splitting from a common ancestor, combined with the fact that Africa had tons of hominids who coexisted with anatomically modern humans, we're probably going to discover that the story of human ancestry is highly convoluted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_modern_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_m...
        mirimir 9y ago
        Yes, it was highly convoluted. I mean, in some unregulated bordellos, non-human primates (and other species) are available. Some of which are also food animals. Off topic, I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar Galactica. Yes?
  - masklinn 9y ago
    > But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. What? Cousins are descendants of a recent common ancestor (grandparent for the colloquial first/full cousin), you can breed with them but not doing so doesn't make them non-cousins. > There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No? Yes? But that didn't spawn a new species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis were already separate and well-defined things when that happened.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens (~50 kiloyears ago) were cousins, both descended from Homo habilis. But modern European Homo sapiens sapiens are descendents of both. So Neanderthals are not their cousins, but rather grand^N parents. That is, it all turns on who "our" refers to. In the article, "our" clearly refers to you and me and other humans who lived during the past few thousand years. So the article should say that Neanderthals were "their" cousins, referring to Homo sapiens sapiens living ~50 kiloyears ago. There really should be new species names. I mean, if you're going to distinguish Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, shouldn't you also distinguish hybrids? As we do for mules, "E. asinus × E. caballus". But damn, that would distinguish those modern humans without Neanderthal ancestry, which probably wouldn't be a good thing.

singularity2001 9y ago

>> The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says. A two-off accidental stranding would be another explanation

andyjohnson0 9y ago

I wonder what it was like for them to live in a world that was so big and unpopulated and unknown. Someone must have been the first to cross the Bering land bridge into North America, or walk the Nile delta out of Africa into the Levant. Pre-history is deep and wide.

saalweachter 9y ago
One question I suspect the archaeological evidence is insufficient to answer is how far from the last village/roving band of hunter-gatherers the next band into the wilderness would settle. When you broke off would you stay within a day of your old village or would you walk hundreds, thousands of miles before stopping, completely alone? As far as the mindset goes, I’d say keep in mind that when Europeans landed in the Americas and Australia, they considered those continents to be “empty”, free for the taking. Their world may not have been so different from the first human to walk out of Africa.
- dboreham 9y ago
  In some cases they actually were empty. Because all the inhabitants had recently been killed by diseases spread by the Europeans. One proposed mechanism for this is that infected pigs roamed wild "ahead" of the colonizers, killing the indigenous population.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  1491 by Charles Mann goes into this a bit. Some estimates put the die-off of aboriginal North Americans at 90% from the arrival of Europeans (in ~1500) and the early permanent settlements (Jamestown was in 1607). The first descriptions of what's now the US east coast from explorers describe coastlines lined with fires as far as the eye could see, and suggested a fairly densely populated continent. The descriptions from the early settlers (as you've noted) describe a loosely populated land of "savages". I've always considered the 16th century a time of essentially apocalypse for North America. Imagine what would happen to our society if we had a 90% die-off over 100 years; even in the modern era we would probably find ourselves regressing to "savagery".

nukeop 9y ago

Neanderthals had advanced jewelry drills, could make their own clay dishes, could treat diseases with herbs and simple surgeries, and they even had some knowledge of dentistry. They were able to construct furnaces, had advanced (at the time) weapons, social structures, and created underground settlements and tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers. The popculture image of grunting, snorting primitive cavemen is more fitting for Homo Sapiens than Homo Neanderthalensis.

amorphid 9y ago
>> tunnels spanning hundreds of kilometers Do you mean tunnels that are hundreds of kilometers long? Sounds interesting. Can you point us to some reading on that?
- nukeop 9y ago
  Here's an article on one such underground site: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18291 The tunnels themselves were not that long or linked up, but apparently all those that were found under Europe add up to hundreds of kilometers.
  - amvalo 9y ago
    What do you mean by the word "tunnel" here? They seem to be talking about an arrangement of stones on a cave floor.
- amvalo 9y ago
  No way that's true. Maybe he have meant trade routes?
- samfriedman 9y ago
  It might be more accurate to say that they used tunnels spanning that distance in total: cave systems.
kewafb14 9y ago
Agreed, and apparently we killed them all. We're the savage ones :D

80386 9y ago

I think there's a trend in archaeology of us realizing we've been underestimating the past. The Polynesians were capable of voyaging across the Pacific to South America, and another Austronesian group made it all the way to Madagascar. This was pretty controversial until Kon-Tiki; even now, Polynesian-South American contact isn't fully accepted. (IIRC, we weren't sure how the Polynesians even found so many islands, until an archaeologist asked a few of them and discovered that there's a simple algorithm for it: follow the birds.) Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once, possibly intentionally. Stone tools can be pretty good, especially obsidian. There are surgeons today who use obsidian knives. Roger Blench has a paper on Greco-Roman lamps turning up as far afield as Palau, which implies more complex trade networks at an earlier stage than most people would think: http://www.academia.edu/9237516/The_Romans_in_Palau_how_did_early_Mediterranean_ceramics_reach_Micronesia http://www.academia.edu/9237516/The_Romans_in_Palau_how_did_... And now, Neanderthals with boats. This isn't really new -- Homo floresiensis (the ebu gogo, maybe) had to have gotten there somehow. But it's part of an important trend.

chx 9y ago
> The Polynesians were capable of voyaging across the Pacific to South America, and another Austronesian group made it all the way to Madagascar. This was pretty controversial until Kon-Tiki; Too funny: Kon-Tiki went from South America to the Polynesian and it's only more recent research which indicates it might have been the other way around. What we realize now is how little we know.
- 80386 9y ago
  Fair point - the expedition was intended to prove that the Polynesian migration (or at least the migration to Easter Island) could've come from South America.
masklinn 9y ago
> Australia had to have been sailed to from somewhere, possibly more than once, possibly intentionally. The Torres Strait is full of small islands bridging the 150km gap between PNG and Australia. Not only that, but much like the Strait of Dover or the Bering Sea it was most certainly a land bridge until the holocene, and it remains extremely shallow.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]