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I wonder if we knew the Neanderthals were a different species. It seems weird that we would have chosen to breed with them if they were obviously not the same s
by decremental 5y ago
I wonder if we knew the Neanderthals were a different species. It seems weird that we would have chosen to breed with them if they were obviously not the same species as us.
- whalesalad 5y agolaws all over the land that say it is illegal to have sex with animals demonstrate the fact that we, as humans, will breed with literally anything
- momirlan 5y agoThat's bestiality, not breeding as it doesn't produce offspring. It's like saying "i breed with my hand"
- jjk166 5y agoWell we have no way of knowing if the couplings that produced human-neanderthal hybrids were done with the intention of producing offspring. If you stick your dick in what you think is a bull but is actually the queen of Crete in a bull costume, your bestiality may very well result in a child.
- londons_explore 5y agoRumours always swirl about the disgusting things people from $X_NEARBY_CITY do to animals even today...
- ASalazarMX 5y agoIf Neanderthals were attractive and the offspring was viable, that's all they needed to know. I think people have an instinct for enriching their genome, that's why we're attracted to features our own group lacks, like different skin/hair color, facial structure, etc.
- dotcommand 5y ago> I think people have an instinct for enriching their genome, that's why we're attracted to features our own group lacks, like different skin/hair color, facial structure, etc. This is simply false. We know for a fact that humans have an in-group bias. Studies have shown that even infants and toddlers are biased toward their own in-group. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-infants-racial-bias-members.html https://phys.org/news/2017-04-infants-racial-bias-members.ht... https://time.com/67092/baby-racists-survival-strategy/ https://time.com/67092/baby-racists-survival-strategy/ If what you claim is true, we would never have had miscegnation laws. Most people in the world wouldn't encourage marrying their own kind. Just think about it. If people naturally favored the out-group ( people who look different ), racial/ethnic groups and diversity wouldn't exist. Blue eyes and blonde hair wouldn't exist because they are recessive traits. We wouldn't have any diversity because ethnic/racial groups require in-group bias to exist. The fact that we have black people, white people, indian people, chinese people, etc shows that in-group bias is the norm. People naturally find their own kind and traits to be attractive. We know it's innate since it exists in babies. To find out-group features to be desirable requires external pressure - media, education, etc. Edit: Since so many here are downvoting science because of their political agenda... "We Choose Friends Who Are Genetically Similar to Us" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/we-choose-friends-who-are-genetically-similar-us-180952050/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/we-choose-friends-... "I like your genes: People more likely to choose a spouse with similar DNA" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140519160716.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140519160716.h...
- jhgb 5y agoDifferent people can have different views. You can easily have some people wanting to mate with outgroup members and other people not wanting the former people to mate with outgroup members and trying to prevent it. This is not a contradiction.
- Dylan16807 5y agoYou're reaching. Early bias exists, but that doesn't remove culture from the equation. Culture is much more powerful. Also, the difficulty of travel until quite recently would still lead to a lot of variety in different locations. Also, that's not how recessive genes work. > To find out-group features to be desirable requires external pressure - media, education, etc. This is a massive mistake, of looking at an overall average and trying to apply it to individual situations. It's like expecting every man to be taller than every woman.
- Causality1 5y ago"Species" is a rather arbitrary concept. Sometimes we divide species by whether they can produce fertile offspring, but many times we divide them by much fuzzier criteria such as where they live, how they behave, or what they look like. If there was an offshoot of humanity that found themselves facing a plague and only those with trisomy 21 survived it, we might well have regarded that population as a different species.
- cortesoft 5y agoA ‘species’ is a human categorization, it is not some objective thing. They likely didn’t have a concept like we do about species.
- missedthecue 5y agoRight, but any human could tell that a chimpanzee is not the same thing as themselves. Could they tell that with neanderthals?
- robbrown451 5y ago"Same thing" obviously has blurry boundaries. Neanderthals might have seemed to be a different race or the like.
- bmitc 5y agoHaving just seen a comparison of human and Neanderthal skeletons in person, it seems rather far fetched that they couldn’t tell each other were different.
- fallingknife 5y agoForensic scientists can also tell what race you are from your skeleton. It's not necessarily a determining factor.
- otherme123 5y agoSure they did. Not so long ago, a lot of people thought that black humans were a different specie, or at least a subspecie. If anything, humans tend to be more prone to look for differences than assume equality.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Not so long ago, a lot of people thought that black humans were a different specie, or at least a subspecie. They easily meet the bar for "subspecies" today. Emphasis on everyone being "the same species" is a purely political maneuver; it's made without reference to -- and in direct contradiction of -- the standards that apply to taxonomy in nonhumans.
- macksd 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QlHgA27qfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QlHgA27qfw
- paxys 5y agoWhy not? We willingly breed with people who have extremely different physical characteristics than us all the time. Would a human and neanderthal from the same region back in the day be as different as, say, people of different races from the opposite sides of the world today?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jjk166 5y agoGenetically and physically yes, you would be way closer to a H. Sapien from the other side of the world than you would be to a Neanderthal who lived a cave over. Perhaps culturally a geographically close Neanderthal would be easier to relate with than a more distant modern human, but that's pure speculation.
- robbrown451 5y agoDo you really think we had a concise definition of "species" that was generally recognized back then? Do you think they pondered whether Neanderthals were a different race, a subspecies, or actually a different species? And do you think that their societal mores regarding inter-species sex were identical to those of typical humans today? Also, our current definition of species takes into account whether there is significant interbreeding in the wild. So that makes your question rather circular.
- orthecreedence 5y agoI think it's a valid question. I often wonder what the cutoff is for how something determines whether another entity is of the same species (ie, something I have sex with vs something I eat). For instance, you could go off of looks, but then why would a german shepherd try to have sex with a pug? There seems to be some sort of ingrained biological threshold for what is a compatible mate and what isn't. Determining that threshold for various species is interesting to me.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> There seems to be some sort of ingrained biological threshold for what is a compatible mate and what isn't. Clearly, Neanderthals were very much within the acceptable mate boundary, the question was whether that occurred despite recognizing them as “other” or not.
- markdown 5y ago> There seems to be some sort of ingrained biological threshold for what is a compatible mate and what isn't. Perhaps in a general sense yes, but across millions of people across tens of thousands of years, there will always be outliers who'll mate with anything with two legs.
- robbrown451 5y agoOk but the question is assuming they have a concept of species, presumably with a bright line, and then are using that to determine whether or not to have sex. Which is circular (as well as absurd on so many levels). That said, I'm sure they had some concept of "differentness," which would lie on a spectrum, rather than the black and white way the above poster described it. Humans may, for instance, find people of different races to be less attractive in general. But exceptions can be made. I imagine if you are desperate enough, you widen the pool of acceptable candidates. I have no reason to think it was very different back then.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> I wonder if we knew the Neanderthals were a different species. Whether Neanderthals are a different species in genus Homo (H. neanderthalensis) or a different subspecies of H. sapiens (H. sapiens neanderthalensis) doesn't even seem to be completely a matter of consensus today (similar is true of Denisovans, for instance.) And, honestly, the more evidence of ongoing, successful, fertile interbreeding we find, the less strong the “separate species” argument is, though its ultimately unresolvable because there's not a clearcut objective definition of what constitutes a “species”. Taxonomy isn't (well, the decision as to which taxonomic level a division is, at least, isn’t; the phylogenetic organization is) science so much as a necessary tool to have names for things to use when doing science.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoWho's "we?" Africans are the most human human. Europeans are an admixure with Neanderthals. East Asians are admixures of Denisovans (twice). My bet is that Neanderthals got absorbed, out-competed, swindled, out-procreated, and out-politiced by h. s. sapiens. Maybe they became a marginalized group within h. s. sapiens tribes (like Roma in modern Europe) that were shunned, banished, or held in low status, and so tapered to zero.
- zosima 5y agoThe old definition of biological species was exactly that animals of the same species are able to breed and get fertile offspring. So I suppose they made a point, by definition, by doing so.
- ummonk 5y agoNeanderthals, denisovans, homo erectus, etc. were likely just members of the shared human species together with surviving homo sapiens. You could say they were separate subspecies, but it's not clear that such a designation is reasonable without likewise considering various groups of bushmen and pygmies (e.g. khoi, san, hadza, mbuti) separate subspecies from each other and from the rest of humans as well.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoLooking around, I’d say humans will have sex with anybody and anything, given the opportunity. Doesn’t seem weird to me at all.