They certainly didn't treat other humans anything different. In those days "us" meant the tribe or family group. Everyone else was "them", sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, depending on the situation, resource scarcity and the power of both sides. And those were the violent times, so when there was no enough food for everyone, competition (whether it's human, neanderthal or animal) had to be either scared away or destroyed. That's how all creatures in nature function, it's a matter of survival, there's nothing unethical about that.
It's important not to underestimate the intellectual life of ancient cultures. They were humans, with language, and probably had music, stories, traditions, religion, conflict, politics, and more. Methods of oral traditions have been identified that are essentially equivalent to modern memory athlete techniques, hundreds of thousands of factoids could be transferred with very little "bitrot" over generations. There are traditions in Australian aboriginal cultures that go back 40,000 years, and very sophisticated memory techniques that perpetuated their culture.
The relations between tribes near each other would have been as nuanced and varied and sophisticated and weird as any collectives of humans in relation to each other in modern life. "Those asshats downriver are rude, but they trade fair"
Modern life has given us profound advantages over previous generations, but we are basically the exact same kind of creature as plains walking humans from 300k years ago.
The notion of primitive simple hunter gatherer tribes doesn't account for the innate complexity of individuals. Their experience going through life would be the same as ours, we just have better (on most measures) tools and knowledge.
We are a lot less violent on average, though. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to war a lot. We don't see it as high-intensity conflict because of the low casualty numbers and lack of pitched battles. But when you look at it as percentage of the overall population, it turns out to be worse than our worst conflicts.
(To be clear, not all hunter-gatherer societies are like that. Some are more peaceful than others, and there are extremes like the Moriori. But the average is what it is.)
> I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago.
Evolution of our species continues and some changes in our anatomy are being observed even in the last 100 years of our history. The evolutionary pressure never stopped, it just changed its form. We are no longer competing with nature, we are competing with ourselves, adjusting our diet, exposure to seasonal weather, sun and fresh air, physical activities and mental challenges. I would say yes, we may have become more intelligent, even if we lost our connection to nature. We just use our intelligence for different things: our society, our language are much more sophisticated, our abstract thinking and creativity have advanced, some of us may have got more control over our bodies (I’m pretty sure modern athletes are more developed than our ancestors).
> our society, our language are much more sophisticated, our abstract thinking and creativity have advanced,
Can we be so sure? Our tools have evolved and become more sophisticated thanks for our industry for sure, but that says nothing of intelligence per se.
How much more or less sophisticated and creative were humans only 150/200 years ago? Yet, technologically... things have moved quite a bit. Technology that has built upon a lot of precedents.
I think a lot of this discussion can evolve around definitions.
If we look at history back until the industrial revolution, I would guess that less people had to work on food production and thus could go into creative fields.
Intelligence is better measurable through IQ tests and we can see IQ score rising in societies today. (Flynn Effect)
Intelligence is also highly context-specific. Context today is not the same for the average human 200 years ago, even more different 2000 or 20k years ago.
I'm not sure high IQ people from today would make it far in more ancient times, and not because smarter or dumber, but only because they are unadapted.
> Intelligence is also highly context-specific
It's not though. It's the opposite, and that's what makes it interesting, and why it's being measured. The g factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
General intelligence is related to the ability to learn new things in general, no matter the context.
And today's humans, would, if they got to start as babies 20k years ago, learn all there was to know, about that world. And they'd start feeling bored. Maybe they'd try to build and invent things, just to escape the otherwise for-the-brain empty days.
(You somehow got it the other way around :-) I wonder how you formed your opinions / beliefs about intelligence? If it's ok if I ask)
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If, in your comment, replace IQ with "wisdom" and "knowledge", then it makes sense. A grown up human of toady -- yes, definitely unadapted, knowledge wise.
> And they'd start feeling bored.
Likely not. Agafia Lykova is not bored, she‘s still not using any of the modern technology and she’s still living like her ancestors lived 500-100 years ago. And she was young when her family was discovered.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova
But there's around 10 billion people on the planet, you can always find some unusual person to make a point.
In this case, though, she might agree with me, I'd say -- in that she spends part of her time reading and constructing things, from the article you linked: "reading and construction".
Modern tech? I think there's lots of cool not-modern tech, ancient tech.
Edit: She's an amazingly cool person! Thanks for linking the article, I might have a closer look at her & her life (now done. I wonder how many books she has to read, and after how long she's forgotten them so she can re-read)
Edit2: Sorry if my first version of this post sounded a bit grumpy. Now edited
200 years is not long time ago, the changes may be subtle. I’m not aware of any research in this field, but mass education improves our cognitive abilities and I won’t be surprised to see if natural selection favors those who respond to education better. Our species developed new ways to pass „genetic“ information to next generations beyond DNA. We may be almost the same as ancient human right after birth, but we acquire and encode in our behavior and body much more extra information as we grow. Our biome adjusts to our food habits, our hormonal system adapts to our level of stress, our immune system gets upgrades via vaccines etc etc. And all of this is controlled by our intelligence.
>Can we be so sure?
We have enough studies on the impacts of nutrition in the womb and the impact of experience and neglect on brain development in children that we can be sure that intelligence is more advanced. More complex languages leads to more complex thoughts. Better nutrition leads to greater intelligence. Both for our normal communication but also for languages to describe abstract ideas like mathematics.
If this still doesn't sound definite, then I think we are getting into the issue of what is intelligence and how do you measure it in a person or a population. But then we would need to get into answering just how can we be sure humans are more intelligent than a wide selection of animals and even non-animals. Same for creativity and sophistication.
We are not smarter than our ancestors. Human brain size is down 20% from peak, and is continuing to shrink.
If size of brains were any measure of IQ, elephants and whales would be the smartest animals on this planet.
Brains consume a lot of resources, so evolution had to optimize their efficiency. They need energy, they need cooling, they need removal of waste, they must deliver signals faster - all those things are pushing for miniaturization.
> We are not smarter than our ancestors. Human brain size is down 20% from peak, and is continuing to shrink.
Processors in 2000 were ~42nm in size, now they’re ~5nm in size. Not only did they get faster as they grew smaller, they became more efficient as well.
https://www.technotification.com/2021/06/what-is-nm-in-processors-4nm-7nm-and-10nm-in-cpus.html https://www.technotification.com/2021/06/what-is-nm-in-proce...
Most of the newer research on this topic suggests that it's neural connection complexity, and specifically frontal lobe volume, rather than overall brain size that determines intelligence or brain power.
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do...
>Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity. This view is supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses between different species suggests that what makes up synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
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Two things spring to mind:
The first is that how we think is deeply intertwined with language. There's tons of evidence of this, not the least of which is Helen Keller's description of her world before she learned language. We'll probably never know what language existed 50,000+ years ago, how sophisticated or simple it was and how it affected how our ancestors thought.
The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world, which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked. So would we even be able to relate to Homo Sapiens (or Neanderthals for that matter).
Some things we'd be able to related to (eg the earliest burial rites we've found evidence were from ~75,000 years ago) but I imagine a lot we simply couldn't.
Some Neanderthal DNA exists in the modern gene pool. That itself raises many questions. Was this violent? How was it viewed? Were these people viewed the same? How dominant were large family/tribal groups?
> The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world, which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked
Can you elaborate some more on these differences? I’d love to learn more.
Look into Roman and Greek history. Slavery, the treatment of slaves, the attitudes towards minors (slaves and otherwise) for sexual purposes and so on. It's actually pretty abhorrent.
Another example: the origin of the word "decimate". "Decimation" was a Roman military punishment to military units in provinces that rebel against Rome. I don't believe it was widespread but it was common enough to spawn the modern word. "Deci-" here is Latin meaning "10". The punishment was this: soldiers (typically) were put in groups of 10. Each group was responsible for picking which of those 10 would die and be responsible for killing that person. The general way Rome quashed rebellion in general was brutal.
The amazing thing we actually have first hand accounts on Rome's military conquests in the forms of the writings of Julius Caesar (eg with the conquest of Gaul, which was essentially genocide). Now first hand accounts aren't necessarily accurate (eg Herodotus tended to embellish) but there are other accounts that lend a lot of credence to Caesar's accounts.
I mean Ridley Scott's The Last Duel features the last instance in France of its eponymous jurisprudence technique which came from Germanic tribal law before they were even literate (Germanic tribal warlords becoming the aristocracy everywhere but Ireland in post-Roman Western Europe), and this is about 500 or 600 years ago, never mind how much further back into the Bronze or previous time periods that dueling as juridical adjudication came from and what the world looked like to make such an idea palpable.
Wasn't an American President killed in a pistol duel not 130 years ago or so?
My grandfather grew up on a farm and never went to high school (which was a perfectly fine life decision in that milieu) and fought in WWII at 16 by lying about his age cause there were no birth certificates to prove otherwise
I think we very much underestimate how different human reality is as far back as 4000 years ago, nevermind 50k
> Wasn't an American President killed in a pistol duel not 130 years ago or so?
You're probably thinking of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who died of his wounds from a duel with Vice-President Aaron Burr. It was 1804.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr–Hamilton_duel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr–Hamilton_duel
I believe Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel before he became President: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/andrew-jackson-kills-charles-dickinson-in-duel https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/andrew-jackson-k...
There’s a theory that Neanderthals didn’t have very strong language skills. So just like you can communicate with the dog reasonably well, maybe we could have sort of communicated with Neanderthals. But nothing resembling the rich conversation that Homo sapiens is capable of. Bearing that theory in mind, the humans would have just been much more able to out-compete, deceive, and defeat Neanderthals little by little over time.
“Winter is coming. Should we migrate down to the coast? Last winter, there were lots of crabs, but my dad said many winters ago there was a terrible flood that killed many of his friends. We could stay here and try to gather as much wood as we can to keep warm and try to hunt the deer. The dumb people are wandering up the mountain. It’s always cold up there. They won’t survive.”
Doesn't seem like a very sound theory, it's just more "Neanderthals were more stupid" with a backwards reasoning why they lasted so long.
It's more likely they were successful but slowly bred into the larger Homo Sapien population over time, judging from everyone's genetics today. Caucasians have way too high of a percentage of Neanderthal for them to have been killed off. Most of their population bred in.
The cave paintings they left behind suggest otherwise.
As far as I know the commonly accepted meme of neanderthals as dopey slow caveman versions of us is not as well accepted as it once was. I've read that the current idea is that neanderthals were stronger, faster, and possibly even smarter than sapiens but that they were less efficient, suited more for quick sprinting and hard fighting in environments with plentiful food sources and less suited to long distance travel, endurance hunting, and calorie-starved environments.
In effect, we won the evolutionary race by being a honda civic instead of a Porsche 911.
As someone with an abnormal amount of Neanderthal DNA (relatively speaking for modern populations), I do seem to run a higher metabolic rate. I'd never thought to associate the two though.
How much do you have ? If very high I wonder how it can happen, since I'd guess ancient admixtures should dilute a lot over time.
It's about 0% for sub-Sahara Africans, and in the 1% to 4% range for the rest. [1]
This may not mean exactly what you think it means though. Your non-Neanderthal genes are also almost identical to the Neanderthal ones, otherwise interbreeding would have been impossible. It's just that genes come with slight variances that can be used to trace ancestry.
E.g. you may also have heard that humans and chimpansee DNA is 98.8% identical, so there is obviously a different type of similarity metric being used there
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1245938 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1245938
Some of the very similar Neanderthal variants of genes are manifest as important phenotypic differences though. Traits ranging from hair straightness, sneezing after dark chocolate, to severe COVID risk. Some alleles are now suddenly quite deleterious due to modern lifestyles, like the CHRN3 gene variant, but wasn't before widespread smoking.
How did you find this out? Also could I use my genome data from ancestry.com etc to do the same
Evolutionary The Tortoise and the Hare
I believe Neanderthals were also less pack oriented, so humans just had bigger powers in numbers.
It's also fascinating that Neanderthals soundly beat us in the first round of incursions, and 50k years later humans presumably wiped them out entirely + all other variations of homonids
If I were to bet my money I would bet it on social structure or a disease.
- Homo Sapiens had tribes 100-200 people when Neanderthals had 20-30. They were outnumbered. I'm not suggesting brutal wipe out, but competition for resources.
- we "won" because we were immune to a disease be brought from Africa.
A paleoanthropologist remarked that the most striking and reliable difference between finds at Neanderthal and contemporaneous sapiens sites was that Neanderthal artifacts were never from sources far away, which he interpreted to mean they had no trade network.
There are many ways to interpret that: xenophobic? susceptible to disease? militantly self-sufficient? not interested in decoration? (Most trade goods are decorative.) no language skills?
There is other evidence that Neanderthals had no reliable access to fire: that if their banked coals died, they could not start a new fire, or get a light from another band.
It is also quite possible that the Neanderthals were stronger, faster, smarter, and more moral/ethical, and that sapiens were simply crueler, more diabolical, more savage.
It is quite difficult to imagine a species that is more vicious to even its own members, let alone members of other species, than ours is.
the percentage of deaths caused by other members of the same species:
Hylobates lar - 8.93%
Gorilla beringei - 5.00%
Pan troglodytes - 4.49%
Hylobates agilis - 4.17%
Nomascus hainanus - 1.00%
Pongo abelii - 0.82%
Pan paniscus - 0.68%
Nomascus gabriellae - 0.59%
Nomascus leucogenys - 0.59%
Nomascus siki - 0.59%
Nomascus concolor - 0.36%
Gorilla gorilla - 0.14%
Modern humans - 0.14%
Medieval Age, Old World - 12.08% (± 7.15%)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf?referrer_access_token=l8ioYKjUYPdWetGttHPLutRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MV6-Ms_XF0JyPRKMYcJKvFhuYb7GC50qzB9LvsxOAiqpkiAHTci-g8JHeQIWOVYMgheuFk4B8Zzv6deVnKMYbfBluXDcqTM1UoneUZPpn-E1-V-s1T7IJ9lwB11kHwshKrkcooBV0UfzjyiTMYND69cQd_WVimlU6qiG6JDtLgkrjdmsdCfEWHUpzQuURMexwHeZtzctTwlmf13fTXnakhwdkjD2xWYnCJ8AjCDdU8OwthTU8O_vQtCe42ZHdWNmUSHZLng4RzKuOr0D5wmikI&tracking_referrer=www.theatlantic.com https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf?referrer_ac...
The paper indicates that at times and levels of.social organisation our lethal violence rate increases well above the phylogenically predicted 2% — see Fig. 3c the contemporary band and tribe median estimates of 5±1% which are probably considerably more accurate than inferring from prehistoric remains). Other work suggests during resource scarcity hunter gatherer lethal violence shoots way up as well. I'm actually not sure what my point was, other than I suppose early humans under the conditions of contact with Neanderthals probably were on par with the most violent of phylogenetically similar animals.
My point is, our intelligence requires some activation. It is context-specific in the sense, that pure brain cannot develop it alone, in isolation or in a low tech culture. Configuration of our brain takes time and education, so modern human in prehistoric context may not reach the same IQ as if this person would have studied in one of the best schools on this planet. Agafia is modern human being, but she never had a chance to learn all the things that others had access to. When she met the civilization, she was already an adult person and her ability and desire to learn more was limited. She ran away from civilization back to her hut in taiga, and never wanted to live another life. She does not read a lot and, if you watch the documentary about her, she‘s reading Bible or books for children, so it’s not the same being fond of reading as for someone with university degree. She is unusual, yet she is normal, and she is a good illustration of what would happen if modern human had to become a hunter-gatherer, losing almost all cultural baggage except faith.