39 ms·

I would love to know what early Sapiens thought about the Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is very strong, but acts a bit foolishly some

by lqet 5y ago

I would love to know what early Sapiens thought about the Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is very strong, but acts a bit foolishly sometimes? As we have been the only remaining member of the Homo species for thousands of years now, living side by side with creatures that are only quite like us is an experience that has been lost in the collective human memory. I think it is pretty likely that Sapiens back then just thought of a Neanderthal tribe in a similar way they thought about another Sapiens tribe. I read somewhere that the body proportions of Neanderthals are within the range of body proportions of modern humans, and research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals. (As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0], they certainly looked a bit strange, but they were not repelling or appeared un-human.) On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago. If anything, thousands of years of agriculture and living in large settlements removed the evolutionary pressure to be a quick and inventive observer of your environment. It is much more easy to somehow get by in an established farming community with thousands of members if you are a bit dense than it is if you are part of a small tribe of hunters. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Reconstruction_of_Neanderthal_woman.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Reconstr...

sillysaurusx 5y ago
If that were true, I'm not sure we'd use the term "extinct" to refer to Neanderthals. (Some) humans are willing to mate with just about anything. There would be human-dog hybrids if it wasn't genetically impossible, as unsettling as that thought is. Seems more likely that we treated Neanderthals as humans do with other outsiders: we exterminated them and took their resources. Word has it that you can find their descendants on Wall Street though.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > If that were true, I'm not sure we'd use the term "extinct" to refer to Neanderthals. Why not? Lots of our ancestors are extinct.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    You're right. I'm simply mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis I like that Homo habilis translates to "handy man" since they were the first to use stone tools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Evolution_of_genus_Homo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Evolution_of_g... is also an interesting read.
- mc32 5y ago
  Isn't it possible that humans simply outbred them? You don't have to "get rid" of a population if you can interbreed and outbreed a given stock, no? It's not like one day they exist and the next they don't; rather, they slowly get absorbed into the larger, faster breeding pop. Or even disease they had no natural immunity for. I presume there would be some conflict as even among human pops conflict is a given --but not necessary one to the end.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    It's possible. It's just one of those explanations that we'd really love to believe, since the alternative is so unthinkable. It's been a hobby of mine to be skeptical of it. Even Kurzgesagt mentioned in passing that we're not sure if it was due to "a series of minor genocides." - https://youtu.be/dGiQaabX3_o?t=79 https://youtu.be/dGiQaabX3_o?t=79 - https://youtu.be/CWu29PRCUvQ?t=165 https://youtu.be/CWu29PRCUvQ?t=165 If anyone knows of breadcrumbs to follow, please chime in. Genetic testing implies it should be possible to figure out how much interbreeding took place. We seem to be able to trace extinction events with some degree of accuracy, so it would be surprising if a genocide-type extinction event was easy to confuse with interbreeding.
    - ivanhoe 5y ago
      Neanderthals and humans co-existed for some 5,000 years. Think of that in terms of our modern history, and how many ethnical groups was there in that time span - and almost all of them perished completely, either destroyed or assimilated by others (usually a combination of both). Thinking of it, neanderthals actually lasted for quite long time, probably thanks to the overall scarcity of hominid populations and vast territory available to them.
      - robbedpeter 5y ago
        We also lived in caves for several tens of millenia across multiple stretches of time, without written language. There may have been some sort of ephemeral symbolic transfer (knots, beads, wood carvings,) but it looks like those cultures used primarily oral traditions. We know many non literate cultures develop memory palace techniques, so rigorous oral traditions can be incredibly durable and stable, with lots of information passed down accurately. All that to say, human tribes could have had detailed and specific knowledge of interactions with Neanderthals over millenia, and developed peaceful tradition that maximizes cooperation, or at least borders that kept conflict minimized. Neanderthals could likely do the same memory tricks. 5000 years is a blip - if humans find a sufficiently habitable environment, we apparently can settle for a pretty low quality of life. It only works until it doesn't, though. Neanderthals or humans could have initiated an incident, in which traditions were distrusted or discarded or lost on either side, resulting in hostility, or they lost their elders to disease and the knowledge to survive. Just like megafauna extinction, "bad humans were bad" probably doesn't come close to what actually happened. Neanderthals were likely as or more intelligent than humans, implying susceptibility to all the same conflicts, biased thinking, and bad incentives that affect human cultures. It could be environmental or biological or a pure fluke that Neanderthals didn't outlive humans, but whatever the reason they're gone, it's going to be just as convoluted and nuanced as the rise and fall of millenia old human cultures.
- ivanhoe 5y ago
  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.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    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.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      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.)
- nradov 5y ago
  There is a fringe hypothesis that humans are hybrid product of chimpanzees and pigs. (I don't necessarily believe this, just found it entertaining.) https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
tshaddox 5y ago
> I think it is pretty likely that Sapiens back then just thought of a Neanderthal tribe in a similar way they thought about another Sapiens tribe. I would think so as well, although the Neanderthal tribes were much smaller than Sapiens tribes, weren’t they?
ivan_gammel 5y ago
> 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).
- Juliate 5y ago
  > 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.
  - flessner 5y ago
    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)
    - Juliate 5y ago
      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.
titzer 5y ago
> research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals. Yes, this very clearly established with genetic studies now. Caucasians have around 1.5% to 2% Neanderthal DNA.
cletus 5y ago
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?
- spideymans 5y ago
  > 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.
  - cletus 5y ago
    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.
wefarrell 5y ago
Modern adult humans would absolutely score higher on all tests of human intelligence that we use today. We're not smarter, intelligence is context specific and it's not possible to objectively compare two brains that developed to survive in vastly different worlds.
hunterb123 5y ago
> I read somewhere that the body proportions of Neanderthals are within the range of body proportions of modern humans, and research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals. Of course there was interbreeding. Their smaller population was bred into the larger Sapiens population. This is why most of us (Caucasians) have some percentage of Neanderthal in us.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
thehappypm 5y ago
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.”
- hunterb123 5y ago
  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.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    It’s a core argument in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      Ok, he's most likely wrong. Interbreeding is pretty much proven. Do you know why he thought they didn't have strong language skills and how he linked that to deception and such or was he guessing? Because we have genetic tests nowadays, and it looks like they all bred in from the high percentages people have.
      - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        Wouldn't current percentages depend more on how adaptive those particular genes are than what the starting percentage was? How many generations between then and now?
Spooky23 5y ago
I think the assumption that past rivals are dumb, as we tend to roll over the details. I think overall there’s an assumption that modern humans = better. Looking at contemporary history, there are dramatic differences in power dynamic between different human cohorts. There’s nothing that separates the biological abilities of any two populations on earth, but the one with the machine guns and artillery will always beat the guy with a bow and spear. Look at the fate of the indigenous people of the americas. Europe didn’t send its best people, but disease, better weapons and toxic politics carried the age.
- soperj 5y ago
  >Europe didn’t send its best people, but disease, better weapons and toxic politics carried the age. It was mostly disease. The muskets at the time were tragic. A properly trained infantry soldier could fire at most 4 rounds per minute.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The muskets (arquebuses) used by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century were even slower than that. They were lucky to fire 2 rounds per minute. But they also had crossbows, steel weapons, armor, and horses — as well as tactical doctrine which completely outclassed any of the primitive New World civilizations. But disease did wipe out the majority of their adversaries, so they had a relatively easy time dealing with the survivors.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Also horses. I wouldn’t envy a soldier with a stone/mica blade facing a mounted, armored cavalryman with a steel sword.
idiotsecant 5y ago
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.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  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.
  - alcover 5y ago
    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.
    - wcoenen 5y ago
      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
      - kuhewa 5y ago
        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.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Human brain size had been increasing until 35000 years ago and then started to decrease. Modern human is less intelligent than human of old times.
patcon 5y ago
STRONG agreement! I think if we'd found a way to co-exist with Neanderthals, we'd be faring much better with toeing around the edge of the great filter of Fermi's paradox[1]. The contemporary ability ("contemporary" as far as life history goes) to craft stories about human vs animal/nature has stimulated catastrophic growth and "othering" of nature in really significant way. Every religion and belief system would be affected by having a "bridge" intelligence closer to our own. (Not saying we'd have a history free of shameful treatment though.) Related: a past comment on article "Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104373 While recklessly creating new intelligent life is ethically nauseating to me, I also fear the status quo of NOT needing to consider these dilemmas. In my mind it's a clash between my visceral horror (of creating an intelligent being that is not human) vs a very real fear of global human extinction (of continuing on our destructive track without hard, global-scale conversations about our relationship/responsibility/entanglement with animals and other forms of life) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Great_Filter
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0], they certainly looked a bit strange, but they were not repelling or appeared un-human. The theory is out there that Neanderthals were furry; I believe that's because there isn't evidence of them wearing clothing.
jccooper 5y ago
I've always enjoyed the theory that the Wild Man figure is a cultural memory of the last days of the Neanderthal. It's a bit far-fetched, since they've been gone for a very long time, but recent realization of specific cultural memories on the order of 10,000 years (and of more schematic ideas like the Pleiades for even longer) suggests it may be possible.
agumonkey 5y ago
about intelligence, being in post agricultural has benefits, but it removes the constant stimulation and challenge of wild life indeed. The former allows for slightly more explicit and abstract thinking, the latter for intuitionistic skills (ability to find quick solution that work for critical situations). I'm interested in this topic because spending time in the woods made my brain operate very differently. Also crafting with no evolved tooling is very hard.
usrusr 5y ago
"I would love to know what early Sapiens thought about the Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is very strong, but acts a bit foolishly sometimes?" If population density was as low as we like to imagine (was it? Or is it just sites where traces survived into the present being so rare?), perhaps a neanderthaliensis tribe was just as alien to them as any foreign sapiens tribe would be?
enriquto 5y ago
> As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [...] Apparently, this is not what happened. It seems that there are no neanderthal traces on human mitochondrial dna. This means that all neandertal legacy comes from neanderthal males mating with human females. It's not a question of how attractive you found a neanderthal girl. Maybe as a human male you wouldn't be strong enough to seduce her!
dahfizz 5y ago
I've always thought that the existence of the uncanny valley is interesting. For some reason, it was advantageous for us as a species to be creeped out and skeptical of things that looked very nearly human, but not human. I'm sure that informed how early humans felt about neanderthals.
jltsiren 5y ago
Maybe you should use another word instead of intelligence. You don't need much intelligence to survive and thrive as a pack hunter. Wolves, lions, and other animals manage to do that, and they are not as intelligent as humans. Intelligence is something you need in a complex society rather than in the nature.
riffraff 5y ago
> On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago. because "intelligence" is a vague thing and it connects with education. For example, the average person with a school education today can do math better than Leonardo da Vinci, which enables some stuff to be invented today more easily than before.

by lqet 5y ago

sillysaurusx 5y ago

If that were true, I'm not sure we'd use the term "extinct" to refer to Neanderthals. (Some) humans are willing to mate with just about anything. There would be human-dog hybrids if it wasn't genetically impossible, as unsettling as that thought is. Seems more likely that we treated Neanderthals as humans do with other outsiders: we exterminated them and took their resources. Word has it that you can find their descendants on Wall Street though.

tshaddox 5y ago
> If that were true, I'm not sure we'd use the term "extinct" to refer to Neanderthals. Why not? Lots of our ancestors are extinct.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  You're right. I'm simply mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis I like that Homo habilis translates to "handy man" since they were the first to use stone tools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Evolution_of_genus_Homo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Evolution_of_g... is also an interesting read.
mc32 5y ago
Isn't it possible that humans simply outbred them? You don't have to "get rid" of a population if you can interbreed and outbreed a given stock, no? It's not like one day they exist and the next they don't; rather, they slowly get absorbed into the larger, faster breeding pop. Or even disease they had no natural immunity for. I presume there would be some conflict as even among human pops conflict is a given --but not necessary one to the end.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  It's possible. It's just one of those explanations that we'd really love to believe, since the alternative is so unthinkable. It's been a hobby of mine to be skeptical of it. Even Kurzgesagt mentioned in passing that we're not sure if it was due to "a series of minor genocides." - https://youtu.be/dGiQaabX3_o?t=79 https://youtu.be/dGiQaabX3_o?t=79 - https://youtu.be/CWu29PRCUvQ?t=165 https://youtu.be/CWu29PRCUvQ?t=165 If anyone knows of breadcrumbs to follow, please chime in. Genetic testing implies it should be possible to figure out how much interbreeding took place. We seem to be able to trace extinction events with some degree of accuracy, so it would be surprising if a genocide-type extinction event was easy to confuse with interbreeding.
  - ivanhoe 5y ago
    Neanderthals and humans co-existed for some 5,000 years. Think of that in terms of our modern history, and how many ethnical groups was there in that time span - and almost all of them perished completely, either destroyed or assimilated by others (usually a combination of both). Thinking of it, neanderthals actually lasted for quite long time, probably thanks to the overall scarcity of hominid populations and vast territory available to them.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      We also lived in caves for several tens of millenia across multiple stretches of time, without written language. There may have been some sort of ephemeral symbolic transfer (knots, beads, wood carvings,) but it looks like those cultures used primarily oral traditions. We know many non literate cultures develop memory palace techniques, so rigorous oral traditions can be incredibly durable and stable, with lots of information passed down accurately. All that to say, human tribes could have had detailed and specific knowledge of interactions with Neanderthals over millenia, and developed peaceful tradition that maximizes cooperation, or at least borders that kept conflict minimized. Neanderthals could likely do the same memory tricks. 5000 years is a blip - if humans find a sufficiently habitable environment, we apparently can settle for a pretty low quality of life. It only works until it doesn't, though. Neanderthals or humans could have initiated an incident, in which traditions were distrusted or discarded or lost on either side, resulting in hostility, or they lost their elders to disease and the knowledge to survive. Just like megafauna extinction, "bad humans were bad" probably doesn't come close to what actually happened. Neanderthals were likely as or more intelligent than humans, implying susceptibility to all the same conflicts, biased thinking, and bad incentives that affect human cultures. It could be environmental or biological or a pure fluke that Neanderthals didn't outlive humans, but whatever the reason they're gone, it's going to be just as convoluted and nuanced as the rise and fall of millenia old human cultures.
ivanhoe 5y ago
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.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  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.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    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.)
nradov 5y ago
There is a fringe hypothesis that humans are hybrid product of chimpanzees and pigs. (I don't necessarily believe this, just found it entertaining.) https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html

tshaddox 5y ago

> I think it is pretty likely that Sapiens back then just thought of a Neanderthal tribe in a similar way they thought about another Sapiens tribe. I would think so as well, although the Neanderthal tribes were much smaller than Sapiens tribes, weren’t they?

ivan_gammel 5y ago

> 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).

Juliate 5y ago
> 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.
- flessner 5y ago
  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)
  - Juliate 5y ago
    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.

titzer 5y ago

> research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals. Yes, this very clearly established with genetic studies now. Caucasians have around 1.5% to 2% Neanderthal DNA.

cletus 5y ago

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?

spideymans 5y ago
> 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.
- cletus 5y ago
  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.

wefarrell 5y ago

Modern adult humans would absolutely score higher on all tests of human intelligence that we use today. We're not smarter, intelligence is context specific and it's not possible to objectively compare two brains that developed to survive in vastly different worlds.

hunterb123 5y ago

> I read somewhere that the body proportions of Neanderthals are within the range of body proportions of modern humans, and research suggests that there was interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals. Of course there was interbreeding. Their smaller population was bred into the larger Sapiens population. This is why most of us (Caucasians) have some percentage of Neanderthal in us.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

thehappypm 5y ago

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.”

hunterb123 5y ago
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.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  It’s a core argument in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Ok, he's most likely wrong. Interbreeding is pretty much proven. Do you know why he thought they didn't have strong language skills and how he linked that to deception and such or was he guessing? Because we have genetic tests nowadays, and it looks like they all bred in from the high percentages people have.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Wouldn't current percentages depend more on how adaptive those particular genes are than what the starting percentage was? How many generations between then and now?

Spooky23 5y ago

I think the assumption that past rivals are dumb, as we tend to roll over the details. I think overall there’s an assumption that modern humans = better. Looking at contemporary history, there are dramatic differences in power dynamic between different human cohorts. There’s nothing that separates the biological abilities of any two populations on earth, but the one with the machine guns and artillery will always beat the guy with a bow and spear. Look at the fate of the indigenous people of the americas. Europe didn’t send its best people, but disease, better weapons and toxic politics carried the age.

soperj 5y ago
>Europe didn’t send its best people, but disease, better weapons and toxic politics carried the age. It was mostly disease. The muskets at the time were tragic. A properly trained infantry soldier could fire at most 4 rounds per minute.
- nradov 5y ago
  The muskets (arquebuses) used by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century were even slower than that. They were lucky to fire 2 rounds per minute. But they also had crossbows, steel weapons, armor, and horses — as well as tactical doctrine which completely outclassed any of the primitive New World civilizations. But disease did wipe out the majority of their adversaries, so they had a relatively easy time dealing with the survivors.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Also horses. I wouldn’t envy a soldier with a stone/mica blade facing a mounted, armored cavalryman with a steel sword.

idiotsecant 5y ago

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.

ethbr0 5y ago
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.
- alcover 5y ago
  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.
  - wcoenen 5y ago
    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
    - kuhewa 5y ago
      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.

vbezhenar 5y ago

Human brain size had been increasing until 35000 years ago and then started to decrease. Modern human is less intelligent than human of old times.

patcon 5y ago

STRONG agreement! I think if we'd found a way to co-exist with Neanderthals, we'd be faring much better with toeing around the edge of the great filter of Fermi's paradox[1]. The contemporary ability ("contemporary" as far as life history goes) to craft stories about human vs animal/nature has stimulated catastrophic growth and "othering" of nature in really significant way. Every religion and belief system would be affected by having a "bridge" intelligence closer to our own. (Not saying we'd have a history free of shameful treatment though.) Related: a past comment on article "Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104373 While recklessly creating new intelligent life is ethically nauseating to me, I also fear the status quo of NOT needing to consider these dilemmas. In my mind it's a clash between my visceral horror (of creating an intelligent being that is not human) vs a very real fear of global human extinction (of continuing on our destructive track without hard, global-scale conversations about our relationship/responsibility/entanglement with animals and other forms of life) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Great_Filter

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0], they certainly looked a bit strange, but they were not repelling or appeared un-human. The theory is out there that Neanderthals were furry; I believe that's because there isn't evidence of them wearing clothing.

jccooper 5y ago

I've always enjoyed the theory that the Wild Man figure is a cultural memory of the last days of the Neanderthal. It's a bit far-fetched, since they've been gone for a very long time, but recent realization of specific cultural memories on the order of 10,000 years (and of more schematic ideas like the Pleiades for even longer) suggests it may be possible.

agumonkey 5y ago

about intelligence, being in post agricultural has benefits, but it removes the constant stimulation and challenge of wild life indeed. The former allows for slightly more explicit and abstract thinking, the latter for intuitionistic skills (ability to find quick solution that work for critical situations). I'm interested in this topic because spending time in the woods made my brain operate very differently. Also crafting with no evolved tooling is very hard.

usrusr 5y ago

"I would love to know what early Sapiens thought about the Neanderthals. Did they see them as that other tribe that is very strong, but acts a bit foolishly sometimes?" If population density was as low as we like to imagine (was it? Or is it just sites where traces survived into the present being so rare?), perhaps a neanderthaliensis tribe was just as alien to them as any foreign sapiens tribe would be?

enriquto 5y ago

> As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [...] Apparently, this is not what happened. It seems that there are no neanderthal traces on human mitochondrial dna. This means that all neandertal legacy comes from neanderthal males mating with human females. It's not a question of how attractive you found a neanderthal girl. Maybe as a human male you wouldn't be strong enough to seduce her!

dahfizz 5y ago

I've always thought that the existence of the uncanny valley is interesting. For some reason, it was advantageous for us as a species to be creeped out and skeptical of things that looked very nearly human, but not human. I'm sure that informed how early humans felt about neanderthals.

jltsiren 5y ago

Maybe you should use another word instead of intelligence. You don't need much intelligence to survive and thrive as a pack hunter. Wolves, lions, and other animals manage to do that, and they are not as intelligent as humans. Intelligence is something you need in a complex society rather than in the nature.

riffraff 5y ago

> On a side note regarding early sapiens: I never understood why most people assume that humans today are, on average, more intelligent than our ancestors 40,000 years ago. because "intelligence" is a vague thing and it connects with education. For example, the average person with a school education today can do math better than Leonardo da Vinci, which enables some stuff to be invented today more easily than before.