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Neanderthals cold-adapted? Ribcage reconstruction may hold the answer
- ashoeafoot 2y agoI wonder what adaptions humans could develop to survive overheating in a wet bulb szenario. Some thermal shutdown of metabolism or almost all muscles could make those temperatures surviveable?
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThe only thing to do is hvac management. We don’t have enough time to accumulate sufficient favorable mutations across the population given the speed we are affecting the earths climate.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoDo thinner people fare better than obese people?
- suzzer99 2y agoBased on my experience gaining and losing weight and the amount I sweat when I'm heavier, I'd guess yes.
- gherkinnn 2y agoSquare cube law would say so. The more surface area per volume to dissipate heat the better. The inverse can be seen in arctic animals that are basically baubles to conserve heat.
- akdor1154 2y agoNot a genetic adaptation like OP is considering, but if you're a big westerner and spend a lot of time in a tropical country you're likely to lose weight. Edit: tried to find some peer reviewed evidence to back up my anecdote but came away empty handed. Still i stand by my claim. :)
- Qem 2y agoLow hanging fruit probably would be smaller body sizes, and early onset baldness in both sexes.
- 00N8 2y agoI expect housing & behavioral adaptations would carry the most weight. E.g. you'd want to dig a basement in a moderate weather season, so you'll have somewhere survivable in the hot season. And of course have redundant backup power for A/C if you can afford it. Some of the adaptations camels use could theoretically be useful, like dropping temperature at night & letting it rise throughout the day, tolerating higher temps overall, etc. But I doubt there's time for humans to naturally evolve those abilities very far in the next several thousand years.
- hiergiltdiestfu 2y agoMany orders of magnitude too few time to adapt naturally to the coming climate crash.
- timschmidt 2y agoThis is wrong thinking about evolution. The potentially beneficial mutations are already out there in the population. They gain dominance in the population after a large die-off of folks who don't have them and the remaining survivors reproduce.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoYeah but the selection for who survives is going to be based not on a specific gene, but on membership in the group with the will and power to kill for the remaining arable land.
- gorbachev 2y agoThe selection is going to be based on wealth, not on genes.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoThat's pretty much it yes.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoWealth as an abstraction can fall apart too
- asdff 2y agoNot all potential traits are going to be present in the population. If this were true nothing would go extinct as there would be enough diversity in this theoretical population to see some individuals with the right combination of traits. It it somewhat more likely to happen when you have say a flask of bacteria where they grow logarithmically by the hour in terms of generational time and have much simpler single cell systems vs us poor multicellular well differentiated humans that are waiting until our thirties when reproductive systems start failing to have our 0.6 kids or whatever the rate is in western countries where diversity is already quite low due to a lack of significant african demography in most populations out of africa. Even in places with significant african background population numbers, social history means these alleles have not yet dispersed across the population homogeneously and are maintained in their demographic subset.
- davidw 2y agoMigrating north (or south, in the southern hemisphere). Which is going to increasingly collide with the man-made borders preventing people from doing so.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoThis is in the back of my mind as my spouse and I ponder emigration.
- bpodgursky 2y agoEvolution will select for humans intelligent enough to buy air conditioners.
- cgh 2y agoBergmann’s rule: animals in colder climates have larger bodies than members of the same species (or subspecies) in warmer climates. Allen’s rule: limb lengths vary according to climate. Limbs are longer in warmer climates. Both rules observed in human populations over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_and_heat_adaptations_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_and_heat_adaptations_in_h...
- Qem 2y agoI wonder if adaptation to cold in Neanderthals included torpor during the winter. That could at least provide an alternative explanation for their eradication/dilution by Sapiens, despite the evidence they had greater physical strength and larger brains than the later. The newly arrived Sapiens learned to raid Neanderthal shelters in the winter, while they slept and were mostly defenseless.
- antegamisou 2y ago> larger brains than the latter What matters though is how efficient were the H. Sapiens brains.
- mistrial9 2y agoI read somewhere, long ago, that larger brain is not necessarily better "intelligence" .. maybe a survey of primate brains.. pointers welcome
- twojacobtwo 2y agoFrom the little I've read and watched regarding animal intelligence, it's typically mentioned that the brain-to-body size ratio is more important/correlated to estimated intelligence than brain size alone. It seems to help explain things like the outsized intelligence of certain smaller animals (e.g. corvids), but it also seems to only be a partial explanation.
- Jensson 2y agoMakes more sense to dedicate larger share of body-mass to brains the smarter the brain is. So I don't think it is that the big brain makes them smart, its that smart brains can make up for being a bigger burden so they grow larger.
- suzzer99 2y agoThat's a fascinating idea.
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- leobg 2y agoTangent: Can anyone recommend a piece of fiction about Neanderthal life, or about their encounters with Sapiens? I know there’s Asimov’s “Ugly Little Boy”.