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Did Neanderthals go to war with our ancestors?
- tpmx 6y agoThe original article (linked at the bottom) seems better illustrated. "This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence" https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-how-our-species-battled-for-supremacy-for-over-100-000-years-148205 https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-... I really like this way of doing heavy hyperlinking, btw.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agoanti-neanderthals articles are popping up everywhere. Why the haaaaate brah? - AR15s are their gift to modern humans!
- 1123581321 6y agoIs it not now commonly accepted that Neanderthals were sexually compatible and merged into our modern genetics? And that they may have been seen as human by our ancestors?
- AlotOfReading 6y agoYes, it's been conclusively demonstrated that there was Neanderthal introgression into the modern human genome. There's no little to no evidence (or theory for how to operationalize what we have to that end) for how they would have been perceived though.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoSure. I remember a respectful burial of a 1/8 Neanderthal youth in a Cro Magnon site. So not only were Neanderthal worthy of sexual relations, their offspring were kept in the tribe, and their grand-offspring.
- mongol 6y agoI think that question requires an in-depth analysis of what it means to be "seen as human". I argue that humans have only seen all other humans as humans for a very short time. In times of slavery, I think the concept of humans must have been different than today.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago>In times of slavery, I think the concept of humans must have been different than today. I think with regards to slavery you are bringing in modern views of humanity. I think it was the modern African chattel slavery practiced by the West that introduced the concept that slaves were less than human. Prior to this, slavery was just considered something unfortunate that happened to a person. A person could become a slave because of debts. A person could become a slave if they lost a battle or their city was conquered. For sure, it sucked, and they did not have any rights, but again, there wasn't really a concept of human rights. In addition, there was no real concept of equality. These were very hierarchical societies. Thus, a slave, I think, would have been considered human, but at the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. In addition, there was no real ethnic component to slavery. There were Greek slaves and Greek masters. Slaves also were not considered intellectually inferior - see for example the Greek physicians and tutors that Romans would have as slaves. Ironically, it was the push for equality and human rights that made African slavery so toxic. In the past, without concepts of human rights or equality, slavery was just what happened to people who were really unlucky somehow. However, with the concepts of equality and human rights, people realized that slavery was incompatible with that. However, they still wanted to enslave Africans. The way they dealt with this dilemma was to say that Africans were not really human, which magnified the damage caused by slavery a 100 fold, since that horrible idea persisted even after slavery ended in the West.
- ColanR 6y agoI'm surprised you're being downvoted. This is an important facet of the history of slavery that people tend to forget / ignore today.
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- nradov 6y agoWe modern humans have been trained to classify living creatures using Linnaean taxonomy, but ancient hominids didn't necessarily apply the same conceptual framework. In other words that question might not have even been relevant or meaningful to them.
- simonh 6y agoIt does seem likely they did, we were both territorial predatory species (or sub-species if you like). However I doubt Homo Sapiens and Neanderthalensis were monolithic groups. There would have been patchwork local rivalries and maybe alliances over time. It’s also interesting just how long we lived alongside each other. I wonder if there were ever any mixed communities. Human Hunter gatherers are know to take captives and slaves, which over generations could lead to a level of integration, just as one possible mechanism, although there are plenty of other plausible scenarios over that amount of time.
- tpmx 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_... > In Eurasia, interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans with modern humans took place several times. The introgression events into modern humans are estimated to have happened about 47,000–65,000 years ago with Neanderthals and about 44,000–54,000 years ago with Denisovans.
- adolph 6y agoThe BBC headline is interestingly different from the original article's more equanimous "War in the time of Neanderthals: how our species battled for supremacy for over 100,000 years." The phrasing implies Neanderthal volition and cohesion against a non-aggressive and similarly cohesive "us." https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-how-our-species-battled-for-supremacy-for-over-100-000-years-148205 https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-...
- disown 6y agoAlso this article posted here 2 days ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983589
- war1025 6y agoOne of my pet theories is that Neanderthals were the "Nephilim" [1] referred to in Genesis. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim
- ddalex 6y agoI think this idea definitely deserves a historical fiction book.
- sparsely 6y agoNot quite the same but The Inheritors by William Golding explores the coexistence of the two groups.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoSo does Robert J. Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/40828-neanderthal-parallax https://www.goodreads.com/series/40828-neanderthal-parallax
- sampo 6y agoHere's one more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Tiger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Tiger
- tshaddox 6y agoAronofsky’s “Noah” has some pretty interesting depictions of what I believe were fallen angel stone giants intended to represent the Nephilim. I also found it interesting how the depraved human society God sent the floods to destroy was depicted as an industrialized society harvesting some sort of strange resource that was destroying the planet.
- ColanR 6y agoI wonder where else the Neanderthals might be mentioned in old stories.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agoNeanderthals OF WARRRRRR!!
- SubiculumCode 6y agoNeanderthals ARE our ancestors. Each of us likely have genes originating from Neanderthals to one degree or another. What an odd headline.
- dragandj 6y agoIf I remember correctly, this is only true for European population. That's where Neanderthal lived, and several times bred with Homo Sapiens.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FooBarBizBazz 6y agoAlso most of Asia, particularly in the north. This includes everyone who crossed the Bering land bridge into the Americas.
- kmartkimjong 6y agoneanderthals might be our ancestors, atleast in part.
- 99_00 6y agoHumans fought Neanderthals. Humans fought humans. Neanderthals fought Neanderthals. The most interesting question is, did humans and Neanderthals form coalitions against humans, Neanderthals, or other human and Neanderthals coalitions?
- jgilias 6y agoI once met a girl who among other interesting ideas was dead convinced that ancient humans were not warlike at all and that there is no archeological evidence of war from a time before written records. And that the natural human instinct when meeting strange human groups is to mate, not fight. Her main argument for why that is obviously true was 'just look at all the screwing going on in youth hostels'. Having had the pleasure of growing up in a town that had, let's say, 'territoriality' as an integral part of its youth culture, I begged to differ.
- Yhippa 6y agohttps://time.com/5137272/condoms-at-olympics/ https://time.com/5137272/condoms-at-olympics/
- ddalex 6y agoPut together one thousand of the most fit young people on the planet, what do you expect to happen ? :)
- lou1306 6y agoI guess Ötzi [1] would also beg to differ. Too bad he was brutally murdered about 5k years ago (long before written record). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
- ddalex 6y agoLet's not forget that Otzi also killed at least two individuals before his death (one of the arrow heads has traces of two different types of human blood, and he managed to retrieve his arrow both times)
- tpmx 6y agoSo she somehow missed the lesson from her presumably ~9+ years of schooling that the history of humanity until quite recently is that of famine and brutal war over land to produce enough calories to survive for another year. (my pet peeve: history ed in school spends too much time on details, and not enough time on the macro perspective)