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Article-specifics aside, why do we always put ourselves on a pedestal? Many modern humans are, at least in part, descended from Neanderthals. Other hominids h
by jumploops 3y ago
Article-specifics aside, why do we always put ourselves on a pedestal?
Many modern humans are, at least in part, descended from Neanderthals.
Other hominids have displayed seemingly complex behavior[0].
Maybe it’s just me, but human technological superiority seems to be some combination of “enough” on the intelligence scale and “luck” (in the sense of time and place).
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/small-brained-hominid-species-challenges-human-exceptionalism-says-paleoanthropologist-1.7075618 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/small-brained-hominid-specie...
- SamBam 3y agoI've always felt it is a great sorrow that the world couldn't fit more than one intelligent hominid species on it for more than a short period before all but one were wiped out (killed, outbred, whatever). Imagine living on a planet with multiple human-level intelligent species, who somehow had managed to get to now without eradicating each other.
- boringuser2 3y agoThese saccharine moral statements aren't really productive IMO. Nature doesn't care about any of this stuff. You might as well lament the wind that blows over a house. It's also a bit of a cognitive hijack because morality is a mechanism that existed in a very specific context because it outcompeted other genes. Applying these blueprints to this amended context is kind of an unintentional self-cuckoo.
- bitwize 3y agoBe like Middle-earth...
- philwelch 3y agoWe didn’t eradicate each other. Many of us are descended from Neanderthals and Denisovans.
- Tor3 3y agoA little bit of DNA from brief interactions in the past isn't what is usually considered "descended from". It's fine to say "there's a tiny bit of Neanderthal and Denisovan in my ancestry" though.
- zizn 3y ago[dead]
- seszett 3y agoStudies seem to indicate that the Neanderthal population was always low though (in the low tens of thousand individuals max) unlike Homo sapiens. So at the extreme all Neanderthal individuals at one point could have been far outnumbered and ended up mating only with Homo sapiens in mixed tribes, and today we would have still ended up with only a few percent Neanderthal DNA, while all Neanderthal DNA would have ended up merged with Homo sapiens DNA. It's unlikely to be the case, but what I mean is that even though we only carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, it doesn't mean that such a large part of Neanderthal DNA was actually lost.
- pcrh 3y agoYou should add to this the observation that there is a lack of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in modern humans. This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to produce offspring. The implication is that mating between these two groups may have been twice as frequent as is suggested just by considering the amount of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans.
- im3w1l 3y ago> This suggests that hybrids from Homo sapiens and Neanderthal female parents were non-viable; perhaps only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could mate to produce offspring. That's one possibility, but it could be that they were perfectly viable but the matrilineal lineages just ended at some point. Maybe they were x% less fit or maybe the ended to due pure chance. Like maybe the daughter daughter daughter only had sons and that was the end of that mitochondial dna. It's my understanding that mt-dna and y-dna are subject to much more random genetic drift, and thats one reason that their genetic material is gradually replaced by more reliable autosomal dna.
- noduerme 3y agoIt's not really an infamy against our species. Generally speaking, any two species in the same area need to occupy different ecological niches, or else one will outcompete the other for whenever resources in their niche are scarce. And more so with apex predators, which will predate other predators. Maybe human level intelligence coupled with ability could have occurred in a non-predatory, prey species, but I doubt it.
- imbnwa 3y agoDon’t Lions share the savannas with Cheetahs, Hyenas, etc?
- bubblyworld 3y agoYeah, there are lots of examples of species in the same niche evolving ways to avoid competition rather than wiping each other out - see "resource partitioning" in ecology.
- noduerme 3y agoPrimates have plenty of this. It only becomes an issue when the ones on the ground can dominate the trees, or vice versa. Whole thesis of "Planet of the Apes", really.
- dotnet00 3y agoThey all have slightly different kinds of niches though. Sophonce involves so much generality and adaptability that it's hard to see how coexistence would be possible. Even if initially there might be coexistence due to each other's niches being sufficiently difficult to penetrate, technological civilizations quickly stop having such limitations, so coexistence would've ended depending on which ended up being technologically superior. I can't really see any way that any species that evolve human level intelligence don't either wipe out all their competitors or interbreed and at least partly merge with them the way we have (since unless human level intelligence happens to evolve twice around the same time across distinct branches of the tree of life, all comparatively intelligent species are likely to be very closely related).
- cdogl 3y agoMany humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovans DNA. We are hybrids. I find that inspiring, not sad. There’s enough discord and conflict within one hominid species to go around for me!
- verisimi 3y agoYes, but maybe there was only ever one species, and the idea of other species is itself a misunderstanding. One can find a bit of bone and claim it is 'Neanderthal' but how can you or I really know this? We cannot. Can one really look at a piece of bone and then gauge how intelligent a creature was from that? No again. And then, think of the need in science for this type of evidence. Think of the desire for some people to find fame and fortune with their 'discoveries'. Think also of the impossibility in verifying these sorts of potentially false claims - these claims cannot be falsified; there is no test to confirm or deny. Putting it together, one can also see all sorts of reasons for these sorts of claims to be created and allowed to stand, regardless of the quality of evidence. To me, with 'Neanderthals', we are in the realm of conjecture. These are ideas. They might be ideas that are faithful to the evidence, well-intentioned attempts at a best explanations... Or they might be a fabrication that arose out of a desire to complete a backstory. However, if we want to speak truthfully, we need to bear in mind that we can never know if these ideas accurately depict history. It doesn't matter if there are whole subjects in academia on the topic, and books etc that assume these ideas to be true - we cannot treat these ideas as facts.
- Tor3 3y agoWe actually have real DNA from not only Neanderthals but also Denisovans. There's no conjecture here - they were different.
- Anotheroneagain 3y agoIt is a conjecture, the difference just isn't big enough: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/ The most striking example is from the Taï forest, where the 19 haplotypes show greater diversity than the entire human clade, even though they occur in a single breeding group.
- Tor3 3y agoI don't see any support in that paper for the idea that Neanderthal DNA doesn't show that it's a different species. On the contrary. What the paper describes is the very well known theory that (modern) humans went through a near-fatal population bottleneck in the not too distant past, which means that the human genetic diversity is so low that two people from different sides of the earth have less genetic variation between them than two chimpanzees from different sides of the river in a single forest have between them.
- pachico 3y agoConsidering how we have treated diversity across history, I'm not sure it would have been a pleasant coexistence.
- bowsamic 3y agoIt would be way too easy to make pro-genocide arguments on the basis of objective differences in that case
- concordDance 3y agoWe can bring the neanderthals back! Would be pretty interesting to see how they integrate with the modern world.
- kvgr 3y agoWe cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape. And also made up stories about who told what, when about how we should live.Imagine the slave trades and all the suffering with other hominids. Neanderthals and denisovans somewhere in forced labor colonies and bred for work.. I think they were kind of lucky.
- someuser2345 3y ago> We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape. Sure we can; obviously racism exists, but generally speaking you can travel to most other countries without any issues.
- BehindBlueEyes 3y agoMore or less easily depending on which country you initially leave from
- yetihehe 3y agoSome of us can't even be civil with themselves (self-mutilation, depression, overworking etc).
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> We cant even be civil with people of different skin color and eye/nose shape. Modern Chinese culture tends to exalt European eye and nose shapes. Especially eye shapes. The meme is also current that the most beautiful possible baby is half Chinese and half white. What people mind about those who look different is not that they look different. It's that they act different.
- marginallen 3y ago[dead]
- patcon 3y agoHard agree! We likely world have discovered sooner that we're on the same plane as animals. I can only imagine the effect it works have had on western religion and it's narratives of domination.
- mannyv 3y agoBecause homo sapiens survived and the others did not. Homo Sapiens beat natural selection and became more generalized instead of more specialized...for whatever reason. In fact, there is no reason, really, unless you believe the Mesopotamians (ie: we were created as work slaves).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Anotheroneagain 3y agoNeanderthals and sapiens are the same species. People built the first cities, and the soils around got depleted, as they sent their waste down the river, instead of returning it into soil. These deficiencies turned people into deformed and mentaly ill "sapiens". The "Sapiens" didn't win, the depletion eventually became universal (or it was made so). Animals are also affected, all the megafauna died back then, now everything is dead, as the ability to remove the "toxin" exceeded the ability of life to adapt.
- throwaway8877 3y agoThe nature is diverse indeed.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agoafaik it's still debatable whether they are seperate species. maybe just a semantic thing. i think they are just one of the earlier waves of migration out-of-africa altough 99% the same as us outside of some physical adaptations.
- blurbleblurble 3y agoIt's pretty annoying and honestly seems to be made of the same urge as racism.