4 ms·

they weren't necessarily killed off, rather blended into the human population through conquest and wife-stealing and the resulting interbreeding.

• mistrial9 3y ago
  indeed, wife-stealing appears to be a very successful formation over long periods of time.. woe to the peaceful
  • ffgjgf1 3y ago
    If anything it was the opposite: > No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans.[30][31][32] > This suggests that successful Neanderthal admixture happened in pairings with Neanderthal males and modern human females Of course it also might mean that human males and Neanderthal females can’t produce viable offspring
    • mjfl 3y ago
      It doesn't follow that if human males stole Neanderthal wives sometime in the past, that you would necessarily see Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in present populations. Consider a serial 'wife-stealing' human culture. One generation of human males leaps upon a small population of Neanderthals, killing the men and stealing the women. The next generation, a new group of half-neanderthal males leaves the colony in search of wives, finds a human group, kills the men, and steals the women. The children of this generation will be 1/4 Neanderthal with no Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. Imagine that the first colony gets wiped out, as most ancient communities were. There you go.
      • ffgjgf1 3y ago
        > There you go. So either it didn’t happen at all or if it did it happened in on a much smaller scale than the opposite (Neanderthal male and human female)? Also this scenario is completely unsubstantiated conjecture so hardly worth discussing.
        • mjfl 3y ago
          It probably went both ways to some extent. But the Neanderthal population was much smaller, and probably martially weaker, as they were clearly playing a losing evolutionary strategy.