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What the debate about Neanderthals reveals about us
- user982 3y ago> Perhaps that is a surer way to restore them to dignity than any other: to see them not as falling prey to our ancestors but as our ancestors. I did notice that the popular transition to recast Neanderthals from primitive troglodytes to advanced peers seemed to coincide closely with the revelation that all Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA.
- gumby 3y agoAFAIK they aren't our ancestors but cousins.
- daveslash 3y agoInsert: Zoidberg says: "Why not both"? meme
- ljf 3y agoI'm about as high a percentage of neanderthal dna as is possible (2 to 4 percent) (according to 23andme) - so they certainly were my ancestors.
- flextheruler 3y agoNot a geneticists but mathematically speaking isn’t that actually lower than what you’d expect for cousins. Parent = 50 Grandparent = 25 Cousin = 12.5
- hef19898 3y agoSpecies =|= individuals
- saalweachter 3y agoMathematically, 2-4% is equivalent to one of your great-great-great-grandparents being a full-blooded Neanderthal.
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- everdrive 3y agoThis a bit short sighted (both the view that Neanderthals are primitive troglodytes and also that that are sophisticated) as all (or nearly all? I'm not 100% sure here) human populations show evidence of admixture with other hominids. Whether or not that's a _good_ thing largely has to do with being able to understand the genes we received. We're not quite there yet, but research keeps advancing.
- NotSuspicious 3y agoFunny response and probably true to some extent although all human groups seem to have archaic hominid admixture whether it's neanderthal, denisovan or "ghost" dna (Why did they choose that name?). I think ultimately, controversy by controversy, the academic community will gradually admit that 'humanity' has a much longer "pre"history than we like to admit. Likely on the order of 1-2 million years. If I had to bet, within the next century some archeological evidence will be unearthed that shows some level of Civilization (tm) among humans that lived over 100 kya.
- dboreham 3y agoThis has to be (roughly) true because the energy to power the size of brain found in hominids post 2Mya can only come from cooked food (or living in the very small number of places where there's enough fruit available year round to provide equivalent diet).
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- civilitty 3y agoHuh? The academic community has been clear on that for decades now. The problem is the oversimplification taught in schools, which is often decades behind the cutting edge science. See the timeline on the archaic humans wiki page [1]. The first migration out of Africa and the first use of fire were all millions of years ago. The first stone tools made by Australopithecus predate archaic humans altogether. It really just depends on where you draw the "human" and "civilization" lines. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans
- marssaxman 3y agoIndeed, something along those lines was announced just the day before yesterday: "Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. " https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoRegardless, is this change a step in the truth-seeking direction? Or is it motivated reasoning? I'm inclined to believe the former.
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- LAC-Tech 3y agoA brief wikipedia search suggests a lot of humanity has Neanderthal DNA, not just Europeans. Neanderthals shared more alleles with Eurasian populations (e.g. French, Han Chinese, and Papua New Guinean) than with sub-Saharan African populations (e.g. Yoruba and San).[8] According to the authors Green et al. (2010), the observed excess of genetic similarity is best explained by recent gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans after the migration out of Africa.[8] They estimated the proportion of Neanderthal-derived ancestry to be 1–4% of the Eurasian genome.
- bjourne 3y agoThat is because Homo Sapiens "returned" to Africa after the invention of animal husbandry and agriculture. They out-competed and drove away many traditional hunter-gatherer tribes.
- mo_42 3y agoI think the debate reveals how flawed and entitled our thinking is. A bit over-simplistic, we find a couple of bones in a cave and so a few pieces of evidence. From this, we patch up a full picture of the Neanderthals (flawed) and we do it in a way to convince ourselves how great we are (entitled). With "our thinking" I'm talking about the not-so-scientific public. I guess the scientists get this right. They know about their unknowns. But these subtleties are lost on their way to the general public.
- ulizzle 3y agoA lot of people just believe whatever the supposed science is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone question science outside of HN.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoYou must have missed all the debate about the Covid vaccines.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago5G? Homeopathy? chemtrails?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoWhat is a woman?
- renewiltord 3y agoSomething I liked from Sapiens is this idea of how all these other hominids existed and we whacked them. In some sense, we had aliens among us and we killed them and vilified them. It would have been so cool to have seen alternative related species, but I suppose this was a winner-take-all market. It may be that describing our victims as villains (itself such a word) is an adaptive trait. In that vein, "anyone who downvotes this is a moron"!
- stewbrew 3y ago[flagged]
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- carlosjobim 3y agoBut at least racial hatred lives on – not least in your comment.
- edgyquant 3y agoReplace the word white with Jewish and maybe you’ll realize how fucked up your belief system is
- stewbrew 3y agoI assume you are from the US with little knowledge of history. Neander (ever wondered where the Neanderthals got their name from) was German. Early anthropologists were German or French. So yes, early anthropologists were all (really) white Europeans. BTW I'm actually surprised you wouldn't think of Jews as "white". But I'm not familiar with US American raceology. Are you from the white supremacy fraction? But all of this misses the point of my statement.
- edgyquant 3y ago[flagged]
- mharig 3y agoOn one hand, a small difference in the reproduction rate of two similar species competing for the same resources leads to extinction of the slower reproducing one in not so many generations. Even without hostilities. On the other hand, Spainiards and Portuguese killed around 90-95% of the indigenous population when they conquered South America. Contemporary Homo sapiens seems to be a rather aggressive monkey horde. Choose your odds. I think it was a mixture of both.