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More evidence that Neanderthals were ‘absorbed’ by humans, not wiped out
- airhead969 6y ago"Absorbed" implies humans out left finger emoji plus okay sign emoji'ed Neanderthals either by better game or higher reproductive rates. Perhaps Neanderthals of both genders found humans of the opposite gender generally more attractive than their own kind? (Hybrid vigor hypothesis?)
- simlevesque 6y agoOut of curiosity, are you avoiding a filter with the emoji thing ? It took me a while to get it...
- rriepe 6y agoLet's see: outfucked
- _jal 6y agoTo my knowledge, the only filters here are human.
- threatofrain 6y agoWho in turn likely use automatic means to shrink the space of possibilities, but I really doubt the mods care about emoji.
- airhead969 6y agoI have no idea. Binary never seemed to work all that well on HN and I'd rather people have to use their imaginations now and then. It's not quite 100 Years of Solitude but hopefully it's more like No Exit.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThere are some limits on characters which can be posted, notably various emoji and some Unicode charactersets. Though I did find an example of someone achieving bold text on HN (ordinarily only italic is supported via enclosing content in *asterisks*)[1] by way of some Unicode character points. That's frowned on but not explicitly coded against, mostly because explicitly coding against stuff takes time. HN uses a lot of soft social pressure for behavioural control. Largely to good effect IMO. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Backslash escapes seem a recent addition to that markup. They're automatically added in cases of unbalanced asterisk usage, which is how I'd noticed them.
- decebalus1 6y agoI just tried to copy paste only the emojis and my comment didn't go through. This current comment had the emojis but apparently they were filtered out. Interesting
- mc32 6y agoIsn’t there a claim that known evidence shows it was mostly Neanderthal females + human males that resulted in offspring and not much of the other combo?
- nobody9999 6y ago>Isn’t there a claim that known evidence shows it was mostly Neanderthal females + human males that resulted in offspring and not much of the other combo? There may well be such a claim, although I hadn't heard it before. However, IIUC, there isn't really evidence for Neanderthal genes in mitochondrial DNA[0] which is passed, unchanged, through the maternal line. It's certainly possible that at some point, all female descendants of female Neanderthal ancestors somehow didn't reproduce. Perhaps there was some incompatibility between human and Neanderthal X chromosomes? Or perhaps it was that Neanderthal males procreated with human females at a much higher rate? We'll likely never know for sure. [0] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals/neanderthal-mitochondrial-and-nuclear-dna https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an...
- exolymph 6y agoDude you can just say sex
- somerandomness 6y agoIt seems a bit arbitrary to call Neanderthals a separate species if we bred with them? Why classify them as another species?
- fasteddie31003 6y agoThey were by definition a different human race, but saying that brings in modern day politics.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoYou're right that there is a definition by which “a different human race” is a sensible designation, but personally I think the concept of “race” belongs in the bin. There are many things we could sensibly call “æther”, yet we avoid the terminology because historical science papers used the word to describe a concept that's now so obviously wrong it's amusing that anybody ever thought it was the case. Science always brings in modern-day politics. Science, in its purest form, doesn't know of silly human foibles like “ethical restraint” or “but that's almost certainly fatal”; if scientists acted purely on scientific inquiry, the scientists who didn't kill themselves in a hair-brained scheme would either be in prison or on the run. The classification of humans into “races” is historically associated with pseudoscientific drivel that was never particularly based on reality (much, much less so than the idea of æther); even if you've found a “race” classification that actually does have an element of truth in it, giving it the same name as the Göttingen school's scientific racism is probably not a good idea.
- konjin 6y agoIt would depend on if the average offspring was sterile. We have evidence that at least some weren't, but we don't know in general.
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- BurritoAlPastor 6y agoDiscovering a new hominid species gets you on the cover of National Geographic. Discovering a new specimen in a previously-identified hominid species does not. So, in general, the field of biological anthropology has leaned towards identifying new species when possible.
- marcodiego 6y agoSuggestion of non scientifically accurate related movie: La guerre du feu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) Available in: https://archive.org/details/QuestforFire.1981.720p.BluRay.X2647SinS https://archive.org/details/QuestforFire.1981.720p.BluRay.X2...
- ardit33 6y agoIt is a great movie! Even though not accurate, the authors have stated that they tried to do the best they could with the knowledge of the time
- idoubtit 6y agoThe original title is "La guerre du feu" (The war of fire). The film is enjoyable and generally faithful to the book of Rosny l'aîné. "La guerre du feu" was written more than a century ago, and the author was more interested in romance and adventure (and selling books) than in scientific accuracy. The film removes or softens the colonialist and dated perspective (tribes of inferior humans, fully domesticating mammoth, fighting for a woman...) and portrays the cooperation between tribes.
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- 29athrowaway 6y agoNeanderthals were assimilated by humans because they had an immune system that was better adapted to the pathogens in the areas they lived in, i.e.: Europe. If you were an anatomically modern human from Africa, and you are migrating to Europe (neanderthal territory), if you bred with neanderthals, your offspring had a higher chance of survival due to a better adapted immune system. But once those hybrids were everywhere, the ones with fewer neanderthal variants would prevail, eventually leaving out only the variants related to immune system.
- koheripbal 6y agoThis theory is impossible to provide evidence for.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThe neanderthal genome has been sequenced. The human genome has also been sequenced. The rest is simply diffing.
- koheripbal 6y agoI can't tell if this is a sarcastic comment or not because it's so so unrealistic to think that a sequenced DNA would tell you anything about the robustness of an immune system.
- roywiggins 6y agoYou could perhaps look into whether the DNA that we derive from Neanderthals is more likely than you'd expect to code for immune system functionality.
- adolph 6y agoYou may David Reich’s book “Who We Are and How We Got Here” interesting. One of the assertions is that while modern Europeans have some Neanderthal genes, the Neanderthal population is one from Asia, not Europe. I “read” it by checking the audiobook out from the library and found it absorbing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_We_Are_and_How_We_Got_Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_We_Are_and_How_We_Got_Here The assertion that some modern humans have traits tied back to ancient interbreeding of distinct populations is backed by research like below with Denisovans. At least one archaic trait has clear benefits in contemporary humans. Last year (2014), Nielsen’s team reported that the Denisovan-like version of a gene called EPAS1 helps modern Tibetans to cope with life at altitudes of 4,000 metres, by preventing their blood from thickening. https://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-had-outsize-effect-on-human-biology-1.18086 https://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-had-outsize-effect-...
- dukeofdoom 6y agoIsn't this the racist trope on sites like 4chan, which races carry more of these genes.
- koheripbal 6y agoMost science on human evolution is considered racist these days.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoHave you worked in anthropology professionally or at a graduate+ level? My experience is exactly the opposite. The views typically espoused by 'racists' (like the concept of biological races itself) are extraordinarily far from modern anthropology. Is there something you're specifically referring to?
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- Mediterraneo10 6y agoMuch further along in human history than the Neanderthals, but I can give some examples of the OP's claim from my own experience in academia. Over the last decade, genetic studies have broadly confirmed the mainstream view of the spread of the Indo-European languages, that Proto-Indo-European existed in the Pontic Steppe and the Indo-European languages were spread in various directions by populations that can now be identified not just archaeologically but also genetically. This is seen as racist by many Indians, because the popular view in India is that Sanskrit is the perfect, divine language, and all the Indo-European languages descend somehow from Sanskrit speakers leaving India for Central Asia and Europe, and spreading their civilization along the way. Also, the uninformed layman may assume that any discussion of “Indo-European genes” is a rehabilitation of Aryan-race fantasies from the early 20th century. Genetic studies have also sparked some disputes among indigenous peoples of the Americas, because group X says it had been there since time immemorial, but genetic findings find that the earliest buried inhabitants are genetically unrelated to the present people.
- aaron695 6y agoThey would need to explain this. 100 times as many humans, randomly mix in the lesser number of Neanderthals for breeding and they would be 'absorbed'. Except you can't randomly mix them in. Why would I allow a Neanderthal man come to my tribe and mate with my tribes women? Why would I not just kill him? I get I'd also be at war with other tribes killing their men, but Neanderthals I assume are easy to kill tactically and emotionally and I wouldn't expect them to be good allies. You can't just make these theories without explaining the mechanisms.
- rdtwo 6y agoWhat about the females...
- koheripbal 6y agoI imagine the blending would occur during moments of slaughter. One tribe attacks another - kills all the adults/men and takes the children/young women - and vice versa. Over many many generations, over many tribes across europe, this would ultimately lead to blending.
- aaron695 6y agoIf you are killing off all the Neanderthal men you are not "absorbing" them. If Neanderthals also could do the opposite, I guess it'd be called 'absorbing', since it's more fair. But this also would need humans accepting 50/50 children in the tribe. When you spell it out, it doesn't make sense. This is why I'd want to know how you do this. Adding Neanderthal women to your slaves and killing the men, and keeping them there multi-generational until they become blended makes more sense to me for instance. But that's wiping them out, not absorbing them.
- bobthepanda 6y agoWhy wouldn’t you? The natural state of humanity isn’t to kill on sight indiscriminately. A good chunk of Latin America are descended from both native and European ancestry, in some cases more than half of some Latin American countries’ population. There’s also a whole lot of loaded assuming here; who is to say the mixing is not of Neanderthal women and homo sapiens men? The study simply observes evidence of interbreeding. There doesn’t really need to be a theory about why if we can observe the characteristics and genetics directly.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago"Absorbed" does a lot of work, suggesting that there was not a lot of violence, since the DNA is intermingled. But war in the ancient times, would result in DNA intermingling. The men would be killed, and the women kept alive. An example from the Bible: Dueteronomy 20:12-15 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. Regarding female captives - Deuteronomy 21:10-14 10 When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, 11 if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails 13 and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. 14 If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her. This what war and conflict was like in the ancient world, in recorded history. It was likely very similar to this in pre-history when there was conflict between modern humans and Neanderthals. The males would be killed and the women takes as wives/(sex)slaves. The DNA evidence does nothing to dispute violent conflict between humans and Neanderthals.
- rukuu001 6y agoThank you for this comment. Articles like this always have a kind of ‘huh, I wonder what really DID happen to all those Neanderthals?’ vibe to them. We’ve all seen what human societies do to each other, especially if one considers the other inferior.
- hntrader 6y agoYeah, the discovery does not provide support for the article's title. We already knew that Neanderthals and H. Sapiens interbred. While their finding of teeth is cool, that just reinforces what we already knew. It doesn't say anything about how this interbreeding occurred or about the relationship between the two species.
- Razengan 6y agoI mean yeah, if there ever was any other intelligent species or subspecies on this planet, we either killed them all or fucked them all.
- didibus 6y agoThe comments here are of especially low quality for some reason. Anyways, the article simply says that they found teeths with Neanderthal like roots, but Human like shape. This can possibly be fossil evidence of interbreeding and thus hybrid. They haven't checked the DNA yet, but there's prior art in modern human DNA that show some 2% coming from Neanderthal. So the difference is we might now have fossil evidence as well as DNA that interbreeding was possible. There's no proof of any explanation of why Neanderthal and Human would have interbred. Or if that is the single cause of pure bred Neanderthals disappearing. The discovery doesn't even make any claim to it from what I could tell. Finally, there's a possibility the fossil isn't from a hybrid at all, but from some independently evolved specie or Neanderthal who developed Human like traits on their own. Though that seems less likely since they know the area the fossil comes from was connected to the rest of the continent.
- edgyquant 6y agoWhat explanation should there be? Humans and Neanderthals weren’t removed enough to really be different species so it’s likely that Humans and Neanderthals, while very distance cousins, may have considered each other attractive and even the same species (note that they definitely didn’t think about species back them, but you get what I mean) so us theorizing on why they would have interbred doesn’t make much since to be. Like most ancient cultures they probably had tribal fighting with the victor taking the women from the losing tribe.
- im3w1l 6y agoWe prefer not to think so much about it, but it's a fact that people have sex with dogs and goats and primates.
- bashinator 6y agoNeanderthals were humans. Sex with them would maybe have been weird, but certainly not bestiality. I don't understand why you're comparing it with that - please elaborate?
- nexthash 6y agoI personally am not surprised this happened - the definition between concrete species is terribly fuzzy depending on how far back in time you go. There's different ways the evolutionary tree can fork, from geographic to functional to reproductive isolation. Usually the environment selects for random mutations that differentiate two similar groups of organisms. What takes longer is for prezygotic (functional) and postzygotic (cellular biological) reproductive barriers to form to prevent direct genetic mixing. Their absence would allow human and Neanderthal populations to mix DNA pools and merge even with some biological differences, especially if the human population arrives in overwhelming numbers.
- dragonwriter 6y agoNeanderthals were humans. The common generally accepted term that captures the intended contrast from Neanderthals is “anatomically modern humans”. (The article, unlike the headline, gets this right.)
- adolph 6y agoHere is the cited article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248420302001 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Abstract Thirteen permanent fully erupted teeth were excavated at the Paleolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey in 1910 and 1911. These were all found in the same location, on a ledge behind a hearth in a Mousterian occupation level. They were originally identified as being Neanderthal. A fragment of occipital bone was found in a separate locality in a later season. Recent dating of adjacent sediments gives a probable age of <48 ka. The purpose of this article is to provide an updated description of the morphology of this material and consider its likely taxonomic assignment from comparison with Neanderthal and Homo sapiens samples. One of the original teeth has been lost, and we identify one as nonhominin. At least two adult individuals are represented. Cervix shape and the absence of common Neanderthal traits in several teeth suggest affinities with H. sapiens in both individuals, while crown and root dimensions and root morphology of all the teeth are entirely consistent with a Neanderthal attribution, pointing toward a possible shared Neanderthal and H. sapiens ancestry (the likely date of this material corresponds with the time in which both Neanderthals and H. sapiens were present in Europe). The occipital fragment is stratigraphically more recent and does not exhibit any diagnostic Neanderthal features.
- mncharity 6y agoPaywalled. Currently no preprint on google scholar[1], nor result on sci-hub. Not on project[2] or Stringer pages. Skinner(Kent) repository copy is access restricted. [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15251536819818479627 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15251536819818479... [2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/origins-evolution-and-futures/pathways-ancient-britain/emerging-neanderthals.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/origins-evolution...
- peter_retief 6y agoWe are looking at very long time periods, the cave La Cotte de St. Brelade had continuous Neanderthal occupation for 250 000 years, the span of recorded history is roughly 5000 years. So called modern humans and neanderthals shared living space for roughly 2000 years, they were genetically close enough to have viable offspring. Like a donkey and a horse produce a mule that is infertile. With human neanderthal offspring it is likely the male offspring was infertile but the female was fertile Most remarkable for me is how long the neanderthal was a stable group and even now they contribute quite a large amount to the human phenotype.
- AstralStorm 6y agoI wouldn't call anything on the likelihood of fertility without genomic analysis. These branches of humanity were similar enough that the offspring could be viable, in fact, sometimes you can find people with more neanderthal residual genomic admixture nowadays too.
- peter_retief 6y agoThe neanderthal male chromosome is missing from modern humans. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35992612 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35992612
- happyconcepts 6y ago"Absorbed" is a nothing burger. It tells us nothing. Enslaved by humans is just as conceivable an outcome for the Neanderthals as being wiped out. And it would explain the 2% homology.
- not_knuth 6y agoIf anybody is looking for a deeper dive into the subject matter, I can recommend any kind of talks given by John Hawks [0], since they usually lie at the intersection of containing decent information and being pleasant to listen to. In a talk he gave in Gibraltar [1] he explains the many difficulties with making claims about Neanderthals. I suppose the tl;dr is that we are really just very barely scratching the surface of understanding where Neanderthals fit into the hominid ancestry tree, but I don't feel entirely justified to sum up the talk like that, because it contains a lot of nuance. Watch it, if you have the time :). [0] https://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/staff/hawks-john/ https://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/staff/hawks-john/ [1] (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3258dAOxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3258dAOxo
- loudmax 6y agoThere's a pretty good documentary on Curiosity Steam called Out of the Cradle that goes over the story of early humans. The path from the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans to modern humans is not a straight line. There were a lot of forms of hominids running around until modern humans pretty much took over the planet, and these hominids were frequently cross breeding with each other. Neanderthals were certainly part of this story. If you're at all interested, I'd recommend Curiosity Stream since it's cheap enough to be worth the subscription even if you only watch a few of the videos. Also, the excellent Tides of History podcast is doing a series on early humans. The host Patrick Wyman started this cycle in July 2020 and a lot of the material he talks about is based on the latest archaeological evidence and understanding. Very much worth listening to, and it's available on the usual podcasting platforms.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoWasn't there an article discussed here recently, where the buried bones of a child one-eight Neanderthal had its dna sequenced? Which not only means they tolerated and buried carefully one such inter-bred person, but their parent was likely (at least tolerated) as well, as well as their great-grandparent.
- jl2718 6y ago> The reasons for Neanderthal extinction remain unclear, but going theories include violent conflict with modern humans, disease, climate change (and an inability to adapt), and, as mentioned, interbreeding. A 1% difference in breeding rates over those 400,000 years reduces the admixture to less than 1 in a googol. These K-selective extinction theories are totally ridiculous. We should be asking how their genes survived at all against r-selective extinction. Also, the species weren’t uniform or static. There were huge K-selective differentiations with migration and climate change over that time. “Modern” human is a major misnomer, as we are very different today. 50,000 years ago, birth rates started increasing, and brain size started decreasing, with the last 20,000 years reducing it ~20% to what it was 500,000 years prior, depending on how you measure it.