6 ms·

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 ha

by btilly 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        That happened in Eurasia. Events in the Americas were decoupled from Eurasia. The fact is, we don't have any evidence for or against any domestication, or wheels, in North America. Any evidence that might have existed was burned up along with everything else, in the YD conflagration. So, any estimation of probability is 100% guessing, with a decorative and misleading frosting of "science". What we do have firm evidence for is domestication of tree species in South America before 10,000 years ago. So, domestication did happen there before similar events in Eurasia.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Even a wheelbarrow is a big deal. But making a practical wheel out of wood would take some significant woodworking and joinery skills. They may have tried, and just gave up after the wheel would fracture after a few moments use. I.e. the concept of the wheel and making a successful implementation of it are very different things.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport If you weren't aware, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, a kind of larger version of Venice, so the most effective way to move goods around would by boat rather than any land-based transportation. The area outside of Lake Texcoco would have been quite mountainous, with lowland regions largely being dense jungles, both regions that are obviously poorly suited for wheeled transportation in general. This is the kind of terrain where the modern US Army, with all of its technological access, will still rely on pack mules to move goods. Do you really think wheeled transport would have been a viable invention in such circumstances?
  - thesuitonym 5y ago
    That's exactly the point that the GP is making. It's not that they were incapable of creating the technology, they just didn't see it as useful. Similarly, the Neanderthals may have been capable of sewing, they just didn't do it.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    Even in Venice they use wheelbarrows and sack trucks.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      where the wheelbarrow is concerned the question then arises, is the wheelbarrow a primary wheeled invention of a secondary one, that is to say do people invent stuff like carts because they are really necessary for moving things around in their area and then afterwards think hey what if we had a smaller cart for moving things in smaller areas? I think it's a secondary invention, and then if you are in an area where the primary invention just doesn't make much sense neither one gets invented.
    - doodlebugging 5y ago
      But were those wheelbarrows invented in Venice to handle problems that they encountered moving things around their local environment or did they get theirs from some traveler who agreed to tell them where they could get their own?
- xhevahir 5y ago
  I seem to remember reading that in some areas of southern China the wheel didn't see widespread use until the twentieth century.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > toys that used wheels Toy wheels don’t scale. A solid piece of wood is too fragile, it easily splits into rings. A good wooden wheel is harder than it looks. You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit. Secondly, you need good well fitted axels, which also requires precision tools.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > require good quality saws and a tight fit The Aztecs and other South and Central American societies were capable of fine stonework so I think they at least had the potential to do fine woodwork. Even a poor quality wheel and axle makes a useful wheelbarrow.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit. You don't need saws at all. Initial shaping with an adze, and subsequent flattening/fitting of the two pieces with friction and an abrasive like sand would give you closely fitted wood surfaces, though not necessarily all that flat. Note that a somewhat similar technique was used to fit irregular stone blocks together with high precision by the Inca. You could also create a flat wood surface by abrasion against a flat stone surface, but that is more labor intensive to produce.
IAmEveryone 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  I do hope it's a April Fool joke...
  - yesenadam 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

by btilly 5y ago

galangalalgol 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      That happened in Eurasia. Events in the Americas were decoupled from Eurasia. The fact is, we don't have any evidence for or against any domestication, or wheels, in North America. Any evidence that might have existed was burned up along with everything else, in the YD conflagration. So, any estimation of probability is 100% guessing, with a decorative and misleading frosting of "science". What we do have firm evidence for is domestication of tree species in South America before 10,000 years ago. So, domestication did happen there before similar events in Eurasia.
WalterBright 5y ago
Even a wheelbarrow is a big deal. But making a practical wheel out of wood would take some significant woodworking and joinery skills. They may have tried, and just gave up after the wheel would fracture after a few moments use. I.e. the concept of the wheel and making a successful implementation of it are very different things.
jcranmer 5y ago
> somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport If you weren't aware, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, a kind of larger version of Venice, so the most effective way to move goods around would by boat rather than any land-based transportation. The area outside of Lake Texcoco would have been quite mountainous, with lowland regions largely being dense jungles, both regions that are obviously poorly suited for wheeled transportation in general. This is the kind of terrain where the modern US Army, with all of its technological access, will still rely on pack mules to move goods. Do you really think wheeled transport would have been a viable invention in such circumstances?
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  That's exactly the point that the GP is making. It's not that they were incapable of creating the technology, they just didn't see it as useful. Similarly, the Neanderthals may have been capable of sewing, they just didn't do it.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  Even in Venice they use wheelbarrows and sack trucks.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    where the wheelbarrow is concerned the question then arises, is the wheelbarrow a primary wheeled invention of a secondary one, that is to say do people invent stuff like carts because they are really necessary for moving things around in their area and then afterwards think hey what if we had a smaller cart for moving things in smaller areas? I think it's a secondary invention, and then if you are in an area where the primary invention just doesn't make much sense neither one gets invented.
  - doodlebugging 5y ago
    But were those wheelbarrows invented in Venice to handle problems that they encountered moving things around their local environment or did they get theirs from some traveler who agreed to tell them where they could get their own?
xhevahir 5y ago
I seem to remember reading that in some areas of southern China the wheel didn't see widespread use until the twentieth century.
mr_toad 5y ago
> toys that used wheels Toy wheels don’t scale. A solid piece of wood is too fragile, it easily splits into rings. A good wooden wheel is harder than it looks. You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit. Secondly, you need good well fitted axels, which also requires precision tools.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > require good quality saws and a tight fit The Aztecs and other South and Central American societies were capable of fine stonework so I think they at least had the potential to do fine woodwork. Even a poor quality wheel and axle makes a useful wheelbarrow.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit. You don't need saws at all. Initial shaping with an adze, and subsequent flattening/fitting of the two pieces with friction and an abrasive like sand would give you closely fitted wood surfaces, though not necessarily all that flat. Note that a somewhat similar technique was used to fit irregular stone blocks together with high precision by the Inca. You could also create a flat wood surface by abrasion against a flat stone surface, but that is more labor intensive to produce.

IAmEveryone 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
I do hope it's a April Fool joke...
- yesenadam 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.