7 ms·

Growing up 250m from where the Neandertals were found, I got to watch in real time as the common (or communicated) thinking on it evolved, from the image of the

Growing up 250m from where the Neandertals were found, I got to watch in real time as the common (or communicated) thinking on it evolved, from the image of the primitive brute to the model that, wearing a suit, wouldn't seem out of place sitting across the table from you at Starbucks. Assuming the later view to be closer to the truth, and also including the genetic evidence that quite a bit of mating happened between these branches, I believe the relationship would have been more familiar than the rare sightings of physically intimidating strangers that seem to form the core of the Sasquatch myth.

btilly 4y ago
Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing, and also lived an extremely active lifestyle (they were bigger, stronger, and had lots of broken bones that healed), the Sasquatch doesn't seem like that bad a fit. As for quite a bit of mating, current estimates say a maximum of dozens of times over a period of 12,000 years. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ for verification. This is, "once every few hundred years someone got pregnant." This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  It seems interesting that even that much of their (our?) DNA has been conserved. Do they have a guess at how much of it has been lost due to lack of benefit?
  - gscott 4y ago
    It seems ancient unused dna just sticks around https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-grows-alli/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-gr...
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  > Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing Don't read too much into that. Native Americans (homo sapiens from the whole American continent) didn't master wheels for transport. Aztecs did have toys that used wheels, the concept wasn't foreign, but somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport. Yes, we can argue that they didn't have draught animals, but there are plenty of human powered uses for wheels, and some regions did have horses, llamas or buffaloes. Maybe Neanderthals just weren't interested.
  - progre 4y ago
    Horses and humans i the Americas at the same time is a post-Columbus thing. Buffaloes can't be domesticated. Llamas are mountain animals and wheeled wagons in mountains are extra hard to do well. Even in the old world, wheels where primarily a steppe thing. Edit: I was wrong about the horses, there is a overlap.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      No. Before 12800 years ago, North America was home to both horses and camels, along with ~30 other now extinct genera including mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, dire wolves, giant sloths, and a bear much larger than the grizzly. All of those were obliterated at that geological instant, along with the Clovis culture, apparently by a meteorite or comet strike. It also melted many cubic miles of glacial ice in an instant, scouring out the Scablands of eastern Washington state in a flood hundreds of feet deep, carving out the whole Columbia Gorge in only days. It ignited continent-spanning fires that destroyed everything anyone might have built. Nothing would have prevented the people who lived before then from domesticating horses and using them to pull wagons. None has been found, but remarkable little remains of the people who were in North America for at least 10 millennia before then.
      - poulpy123 4y ago
        Horses were domesticated between 3500 and 2000 BCE. The probability they could have been domesticated 10 000 years before in America is quite low
- IAmEveryone 4y ago
  You may be right, but that 2004 paper is on the wrong side of, for example, the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome by Pääbo, five years later: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1188021 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1188021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_... has some newer stuff and the trend seems to be progressively more archaic DNA being identified.
- smegger001 4y ago
  not necessarily uncommon just the fertility of such mating and their decedents might have been lower than replacement rate. if a such mating pair were only able to produce 2 or less fertile children on average then their line would eventually die out. Its also possible that it was like mules where the offspring are starile 99.9% of the time but every once in a while one is able to reproduce successfully for some reason.
- sitkack 4y ago
  > This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations. Interspecies sex happen a whole lot more often than that. Having viable offspring might have been the rare part. Dr. Eugene McCarthy has a theory that humans are a hybrid between pigs and chimpanzees https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
  - poulpy123 4y ago
    I do hope it's a April Fool joke...
    - yesenadam 4y ago
      I (not an expert) checked him out for 10 minutes just now.. He wrote a book about bird hybrids, and seems to see hybrids everywhere. Check out his pages on all kinds of hybrids, which reads like a crank website. e.g. the very wacky page on cabbits (cat + rabbit) https://www.macroevolution.net/mammalian-hybrids.html https://www.macroevolution.net/mammalian-hybrids.html https://www.macroevolution.net/cat-rabbit-hybrids.html https://www.macroevolution.net/cat-rabbit-hybrids.html But his pig+chimp theory is serious, and it seems it makes some sense in explaining numerous pig-like anatomical features of humans, but there can be no genetic evidence, so only he believes it, it seems.
      - btilly 4y ago
        Yeah, it is wrong. First of all, the coincidences become a lot less coincidence when you look at convergent evolution. For example tooth shape is tied to what you eat. Since we and pigs are both omnivores, we wind up with similar teeth. Second, only related species can form hybrids. Lions and tigers split probably a bit under 4 million years ago. Donkeys and horses split a bit before that. We don't know when humans and chimps split, but you can find estimates everywhere from 7-12 million years. The split between primates and pigs appears to be about 80 million years ago. And the result is that lions and tigers can interbreed and the child can be fertile. Donkeys and horses can interbreed and the child is usually NOT fertile. We have no evidence that humans and chimps can have children, and it has probably been tried. As for more distant than that, farmers have been having regular sex with farm animals since farms existed, with no babies. So I'm going firmly with "crank".
- Someone 4y ago
  it seems there were very few Neanderthals or humans around in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Population: “Like modern humans, Neanderthals probably descended from a very small population with an effective population—the number of individuals who can bear or father children—of 3,000 to 12,000 approximately. However, Neanderthals maintained this very low population, proliferating weakly harmful genes due to the reduced effectivity of natural selection”) Given that Neanderthals were found from Spain to Libanon and even deep into Asia, chances are most humans never saw Neanderthals or vice versa. Also, I don’t see how that article counts interspecies sex, pregnancies or even live births. It counts number of births who grew up to reproduce. I can easily see early humans stigmatizing or even killing kids of mixed descent or, even easier, children from such encounters being less fertile or even infertile.
duxup 4y ago
> from the image of the primitive brute I kinda prefer the short stint in the 60s and 70s where they were imagined / portrayed to be a sort of nature oriented flower children. Fun how culture influences things.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Maybe Homo Floresiensis devolved from Homo Sapiens the same way the Sleestak devolved from the Altrusians. https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak >At one time, in the distant past, the Sleestak were known as Altrusians. They were a very peaceful and intelligent race and eventually grew into an advanced civilization, mastering many (if not all) of the secrets of the Land of the Lost, creating cities and temples among other landmarks. Unfortunately, the Altrusians lost control over their emotions and destroyed their civilization becoming known as the Sleestak. >In their decline, the Sleestak became are a degenerate warring race that lost much of their knowledge and culture. Now based on a distrust of strangers and struggle for survival, they have come out of the Era of Intelligence and into the Era of Solitude. The Era of Intelligence was the period in time when the Sleestak first arrived at The Land of the Lost. They built several temples now called Pylons which serve to regulate the life conditions, seasons and meteorological traits of the area. There was a period when there was only darkness before the Sleestak built the Time Pylon, which controls the light and dark cycles of The Land of The Lost. >As the Sleestak moved into The Lost City they entered a more barbarian state as they reverted back to their more primeval conditions. They eventually became ruled by a Sleestak called Sol, who reorganized the Sleestak and taught them how to hunt and kill.
rishav_sharan 4y ago
Would the African bush pygmy people be considered as a separate human branch? What makes the Hobbit people different from the current pygmy people? I think my question boils down to - if these separate branches of humans existed today, wouldn't we just consider them as Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  Pygmy populations are ordinary humans with conserved genetic mutations, due to inbreeding, that limit the expression of things like growth hormones. They are anatomically modern humans, just much smaller. The ease with which these mutations can occur is evidenced by the existence of unrelated Pygmy populations in different parts of the world. There is no evidence of speciation or material genetic divergence in these cases. While we can't say anything for sure, the genetic divergence between modern humans and these other hominid species is significantly larger.
  - oh_sigh 4y ago
    I agree with 100% of what you said, but if we didn't have access to the genes and were merely going by fragments of a few fossils - what then? Can one quantify the magnitude of difference between H. nalendi and H. erectus fossils, and compare it to the magnitude of difference between hypothetical Polynesian and Pygmy fossils?
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      You'd still notice a difference between two lineages diverging for a few hundreds or thousands of years and a two lineages diverging for hundreds of thousands of years or more. It's not just size or deformity, but other features that will diverge.
  - epivosism 4y ago
    I think the sense of the question was that as the most distant modern human branch, they're useful to compare relatively to potential new discoveries.
beowulfey 4y ago
If you read a lot of ancient mythologies there is a pattern that the "gods" are regularly mentioned and read as a separate species or society that interacted with us. Personally, I have a guess that it was interactions between Neandertals and early Sapiens that led to these myths. Two separate societies, viewed as independent. I won't make any guesses as to which is which, but I think the possibility makes sense.
DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
they ate ordinary amounts of meat, some sources say >70% of their diet was carnivore. Also they were sprinters rather than marathon runners and could outrun us and also had much more muscular build. Some theories suggest that they likely also consumed rotten meat if they had no choice. There carnivorous lifestyle would mean different gut biome to us allowing their bodies to get away with eating rotten meat more often.

btilly 4y ago

Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing, and also lived an extremely active lifestyle (they were bigger, stronger, and had lots of broken bones that healed), the Sasquatch doesn't seem like that bad a fit. As for quite a bit of mating, current estimates say a maximum of dozens of times over a period of 12,000 years. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ for verification. This is, "once every few hundred years someone got pregnant." This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.

galangalalgol 4y ago
It seems interesting that even that much of their (our?) DNA has been conserved. Do they have a guess at how much of it has been lost due to lack of benefit?
- gscott 4y ago
  It seems ancient unused dna just sticks around https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-grows-alli/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-gr...
ASalazarMX 4y ago
> Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing Don't read too much into that. Native Americans (homo sapiens from the whole American continent) didn't master wheels for transport. Aztecs did have toys that used wheels, the concept wasn't foreign, but somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport. Yes, we can argue that they didn't have draught animals, but there are plenty of human powered uses for wheels, and some regions did have horses, llamas or buffaloes. Maybe Neanderthals just weren't interested.
- progre 4y ago
  Horses and humans i the Americas at the same time is a post-Columbus thing. Buffaloes can't be domesticated. Llamas are mountain animals and wheeled wagons in mountains are extra hard to do well. Even in the old world, wheels where primarily a steppe thing. Edit: I was wrong about the horses, there is a overlap.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    No. Before 12800 years ago, North America was home to both horses and camels, along with ~30 other now extinct genera including mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, dire wolves, giant sloths, and a bear much larger than the grizzly. All of those were obliterated at that geological instant, along with the Clovis culture, apparently by a meteorite or comet strike. It also melted many cubic miles of glacial ice in an instant, scouring out the Scablands of eastern Washington state in a flood hundreds of feet deep, carving out the whole Columbia Gorge in only days. It ignited continent-spanning fires that destroyed everything anyone might have built. Nothing would have prevented the people who lived before then from domesticating horses and using them to pull wagons. None has been found, but remarkable little remains of the people who were in North America for at least 10 millennia before then.
    - poulpy123 4y ago
      Horses were domesticated between 3500 and 2000 BCE. The probability they could have been domesticated 10 000 years before in America is quite low
IAmEveryone 4y ago
You may be right, but that 2004 paper is on the wrong side of, for example, the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome by Pääbo, five years later: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1188021 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1188021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_... has some newer stuff and the trend seems to be progressively more archaic DNA being identified.
smegger001 4y ago
not necessarily uncommon just the fertility of such mating and their decedents might have been lower than replacement rate. if a such mating pair were only able to produce 2 or less fertile children on average then their line would eventually die out. Its also possible that it was like mules where the offspring are starile 99.9% of the time but every once in a while one is able to reproduce successfully for some reason.
sitkack 4y ago
> This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations. Interspecies sex happen a whole lot more often than that. Having viable offspring might have been the rare part. Dr. Eugene McCarthy has a theory that humans are a hybrid between pigs and chimpanzees https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
- poulpy123 4y ago
  I do hope it's a April Fool joke...
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    I (not an expert) checked him out for 10 minutes just now.. He wrote a book about bird hybrids, and seems to see hybrids everywhere. Check out his pages on all kinds of hybrids, which reads like a crank website. e.g. the very wacky page on cabbits (cat + rabbit) https://www.macroevolution.net/mammalian-hybrids.html https://www.macroevolution.net/mammalian-hybrids.html https://www.macroevolution.net/cat-rabbit-hybrids.html https://www.macroevolution.net/cat-rabbit-hybrids.html But his pig+chimp theory is serious, and it seems it makes some sense in explaining numerous pig-like anatomical features of humans, but there can be no genetic evidence, so only he believes it, it seems.
    - btilly 4y ago
      Yeah, it is wrong. First of all, the coincidences become a lot less coincidence when you look at convergent evolution. For example tooth shape is tied to what you eat. Since we and pigs are both omnivores, we wind up with similar teeth. Second, only related species can form hybrids. Lions and tigers split probably a bit under 4 million years ago. Donkeys and horses split a bit before that. We don't know when humans and chimps split, but you can find estimates everywhere from 7-12 million years. The split between primates and pigs appears to be about 80 million years ago. And the result is that lions and tigers can interbreed and the child can be fertile. Donkeys and horses can interbreed and the child is usually NOT fertile. We have no evidence that humans and chimps can have children, and it has probably been tried. As for more distant than that, farmers have been having regular sex with farm animals since farms existed, with no babies. So I'm going firmly with "crank".
Someone 4y ago
it seems there were very few Neanderthals or humans around in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Population: “Like modern humans, Neanderthals probably descended from a very small population with an effective population—the number of individuals who can bear or father children—of 3,000 to 12,000 approximately. However, Neanderthals maintained this very low population, proliferating weakly harmful genes due to the reduced effectivity of natural selection”) Given that Neanderthals were found from Spain to Libanon and even deep into Asia, chances are most humans never saw Neanderthals or vice versa. Also, I don’t see how that article counts interspecies sex, pregnancies or even live births. It counts number of births who grew up to reproduce. I can easily see early humans stigmatizing or even killing kids of mixed descent or, even easier, children from such encounters being less fertile or even infertile.

duxup 4y ago

> from the image of the primitive brute I kinda prefer the short stint in the 60s and 70s where they were imagined / portrayed to be a sort of nature oriented flower children. Fun how culture influences things.

DonHopkins 4y ago
Maybe Homo Floresiensis devolved from Homo Sapiens the same way the Sleestak devolved from the Altrusians. https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak >At one time, in the distant past, the Sleestak were known as Altrusians. They were a very peaceful and intelligent race and eventually grew into an advanced civilization, mastering many (if not all) of the secrets of the Land of the Lost, creating cities and temples among other landmarks. Unfortunately, the Altrusians lost control over their emotions and destroyed their civilization becoming known as the Sleestak. >In their decline, the Sleestak became are a degenerate warring race that lost much of their knowledge and culture. Now based on a distrust of strangers and struggle for survival, they have come out of the Era of Intelligence and into the Era of Solitude. The Era of Intelligence was the period in time when the Sleestak first arrived at The Land of the Lost. They built several temples now called Pylons which serve to regulate the life conditions, seasons and meteorological traits of the area. There was a period when there was only darkness before the Sleestak built the Time Pylon, which controls the light and dark cycles of The Land of The Lost. >As the Sleestak moved into The Lost City they entered a more barbarian state as they reverted back to their more primeval conditions. They eventually became ruled by a Sleestak called Sol, who reorganized the Sleestak and taught them how to hunt and kill.

rishav_sharan 4y ago

Would the African bush pygmy people be considered as a separate human branch? What makes the Hobbit people different from the current pygmy people? I think my question boils down to - if these separate branches of humans existed today, wouldn't we just consider them as Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

jandrewrogers 4y ago
Pygmy populations are ordinary humans with conserved genetic mutations, due to inbreeding, that limit the expression of things like growth hormones. They are anatomically modern humans, just much smaller. The ease with which these mutations can occur is evidenced by the existence of unrelated Pygmy populations in different parts of the world. There is no evidence of speciation or material genetic divergence in these cases. While we can't say anything for sure, the genetic divergence between modern humans and these other hominid species is significantly larger.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  I agree with 100% of what you said, but if we didn't have access to the genes and were merely going by fragments of a few fossils - what then? Can one quantify the magnitude of difference between H. nalendi and H. erectus fossils, and compare it to the magnitude of difference between hypothetical Polynesian and Pygmy fossils?
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    You'd still notice a difference between two lineages diverging for a few hundreds or thousands of years and a two lineages diverging for hundreds of thousands of years or more. It's not just size or deformity, but other features that will diverge.
- epivosism 4y ago
  I think the sense of the question was that as the most distant modern human branch, they're useful to compare relatively to potential new discoveries.

beowulfey 4y ago

If you read a lot of ancient mythologies there is a pattern that the "gods" are regularly mentioned and read as a separate species or society that interacted with us. Personally, I have a guess that it was interactions between Neandertals and early Sapiens that led to these myths. Two separate societies, viewed as independent. I won't make any guesses as to which is which, but I think the possibility makes sense.

DyslexicAtheist 4y ago

they ate ordinary amounts of meat, some sources say >70% of their diet was carnivore. Also they were sprinters rather than marathon runners and could outrun us and also had much more muscular build. Some theories suggest that they likely also consumed rotten meat if they had no choice. There carnivorous lifestyle would mean different gut biome to us allowing their bodies to get away with eating rotten meat more often.