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Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years
- mproud 6mo agoHow ironic that the science.org website wants to verify I am a human!
- Glyptodon 6mo agoI know even with humans pre-modern populations were drastically smaller, but it's still just astounding to me how small of a population size it seems like Neanderthals had.
- conductr 6mo agoI didn’t see it mentioned in the article, but I think it’s hard to fully appreciate how at risk they were to predators and that they were certainly not the top of the food chain yet. Humans and similar aren’t naturally adept for survival in the wilderness. We developed coping mechanisms but it took some time. Had to extinct a few big cats, bears, wolfs, etc along the way.
- hax0ron3 6mo agoWere they really not at the top of the food chain before modern humans came along? It's hard for me to imagine big cats and wolf packs being higher in the food chain than beings that had their own social groups, language, fire, and spears and that are known to have effectively hunted big game.
- hattmall 6mo agoI feel like it's more to say that, "getting eaten was a legitimate concern" they weren't really the single top of the food chain because there were other animals that would reasonably consider them prey. Cave lions were massive and definitely targeted neanderthals.
- conductr 6mo agoThey/we also are weak and helpless for large portion of early life. Can’t reproduce unless they survive a dozen or so years. And even then pregnancy and child birth are also huge risks to life. This probably really stunted our ability to grow large populations. Fossil evidence exists pointing towards large eagles scooping up 3-5 year olds. It’s been a long time since we had to think of our toddlers safety the same way we think of a lap dogs.
- dyauspitr 6mo agoWhy was this the case? I thought they were at least as intelligent as modern humans and had more muscle mass, used rudimentary tools and had control over fire. They lived in a climate without a lot of dangerous animals or a lot of disease and disease vectors at least compared to the jungles of Africa.
- remify 6mo agoThere's new evidences that even Sapiens "introduction" in Europe happend multiple times in the scale of thousand years with migratory waves comming from Africa/Middle East. There's a 12h Collège de France course from Jean-Jacques Hublin that display new understandings that is really captivating. It's in French though
- throw-the-towel 6mo agoYou're talking about "Sapiens remplace Néandertal"?
- remify 6mo agoYes
- asdff 6mo agoFWIW the populations weren't actually as small as a lot of these articles (including about human bottlenecks) allege in the popular press. This comes from a knowledge gap in the public compared to a biologists understanding here. The biologists are talking about effective population size (1) in most all these cases. This is an idealized sort of population size based on the idea of using the smallest possible population size that can fully capture the observed genetic diversity. It makes sense to use this measure, considering you are never fully sure how large a real population can be beyond its effective population size. So you just use the effective population size and implicitly acknowledge its assumptions. This is well past HS biology though so popular press just skips that nuance and equates it to true population size. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size
- lobf 6mo agoI spent a year of high school in the Basque Country, and it always stuck out to me that a common feature of the Basques, especially the beefy ones, was incredibly caveman-like. I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very small population.
- boxedemp 6mo agoBasque Country also has an interesting language which doesn't seem related to other European languages. Basque language (or Euskara). Seems as though it could have been an enclave of neanderthals who eventually integrated with humans.
- lobf 6mo agoThis is a much-discussed topic. All we know of the Basque language is that it is pre-Indo-European. The last time I looked in to this, the consensus was that it was most likely a version of otherwise-extinct ancient Celtic. Now that doesn’t mean that the Basques don’t have a potentially outsized Neanderthal genetic influence, but the odds of their language being so ancient as to pre-exist modern humans entirely is unlikely.
- vintermann 6mo agoIf it has any relation to Celtic languages, then it's Indo-European by definition. We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.
- lobf 6mo ago
- hax0ron3 6mo agoIt's wild to think how long very human-like beings and modern humans existed before the technological revolution really took off. Hundreds of thousands of years of existing on the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of hides, and fire. Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow. Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.
- tyre 6mo ago> Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations. It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
- delta_p_delta_x 6mo ago> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history. What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.
- AJMaxwell 6mo agoThe lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared. IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
- alsetmusic 6mo agoSo a lack of animal husbandry is the same as lower technology and a lack of farming.
- Nevermark 6mo ago> Harmful mutations can accumulate through inbreeding. Yet somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained. So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once they reach a threshold, as implied by the article. It’s a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going “extinct”. And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the process, but it works. On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become pervasive. The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic diversity as a shield against new diseases.
- gobdovan 6mo agoI wouldn't single out the concern new diseases if the population is small. Most diseases co-evolve intra-population. The lethal ones are the ones that suffer a mutation and are suddenly able to be passed to a different 'species'. So, if they already survived on a 'knife's edge', immune variety is of comparatively low concern (but still existential) on the list of things that can end your species (climate change, competition, demographics - 2-3 infertile females in a group of 20, say bye bye to tribe).
- Nevermark 6mo agoIsolated populations are all going to be creating isolated variants of any disease doing well enough to stick around. And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that. Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments. But you are certainly right that the cross-overs are incomparably worse. And diversity becomes species extinction protection at that level.
- gobdovan 6mo ago> The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that. For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0]) > Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments. Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out. Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza. Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an inter-connected population, requiring a critical community size in the hundreds of thousands. [0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/2011/20231228/104262/How-density-dependence-genetic-erosion-and-the https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/2011/202...
- atleastoptimal 6mo ago350,000 years of just chilling, picking berries, you die in identical technological and cultural environment as when you were born. Now we got to be around when God is made in a data center
- nozzlegear 6mo agoWhat some otherwise intelligent people will convince themselves is God, anyway.
- RealStupidity 6mo agoTo our pets we're gods - in some ways it's just a matter of perspective
- nozzlegear 6mo agoI don't think my stubborn ass dog thinks of me as a god lol, but I understand your analogy
- justonceokay 6mo agoTo paraphrase an Arabic saying: “dogs believe man is god and follow his word, but cats are aware of the one true god and so stand unmoved”
- oceanplexian 6mo agoCorrection: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.
- justonceokay 6mo agoParasites are my main go-to when I meet someone complaining about the modern world. In the history of multicellular organisms on earth, only (some) humans—and only in the last ~100 years—have had the luxury of not being completely infested with parasites. Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.
- netcan 6mo ago>somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years, longer than modern humans have been on Earth. These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing. Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is kind of messy. There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle." In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't have fossils, but something has to be our ancestors. So if we are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien ancestors sapiens. Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died out. But... there were people everywhere. Humans existed over a vast range. From south Africa to Northern Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it's confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different species. Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic diversity we have today. In some sense, we are the inbred ones. Also... population estimates are pretty dicey. We don't really know. Could have been booms and busts. Could have been ideal habitats with higher populations. We still have a fairly poor grasp of human "natural history"
- jarjoura 6mo ago> Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. Heidelbergensis is the last common anscestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and us. We were all around for just as long, 400kya+, and before that, it was Homo Erectus. All of them, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens were walking around at the same time. There's plenty of fossil records we've uncovered that show that to be true. It was only in the last 100k years or so that we remained and the other variants "died out".
- MadDemon 6mo agoDid they really die out, or did the population just merge with modern humans? Most people on the planet have some Neanderthal DNA, so clearly there was some intermixing. If modern humans were a much larger population, it makes sense that the Neanderthals only contributed a small amount of DNA to the gene pool. I could imagine that they were just slowly absorbed into the much larger Sapiens population.
- razorbeamz 6mo agoPerhaps some cultures' stories about "wild men" are about Neanderthals. Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.
- arlcode 6mo agoWithout being an expert that still seems very unlikely to me. The epic was written around 2000 BCE which was well over >> 10k years after agriculture and more than 4 times that much after neanderthals died out. It's possible but much more likely that they refer to something more contemporary. There are always "wild men" around no matter who you ask.
- poncho_romero 6mo agoI believe Enkidu also became much more wild over time. In Against the Grain the author suggests earlier tellings of Gilgamesh presented Enkidu as unusual, but human. When the same story was being recorded a thousand years later, he was a monster. If the story was preserving some ancient memory about Neanderthals, such significant change seems unlikely.
- asdff 6mo agoCould also just be someone with mental illness ostracized from society at the time.
- SarahC_ 6mo agoShouldn't have bothered....
- brador 6mo agoFood, water, then the RNG is solved by large N. Was it a knifes edge at times? Sure. Was it abundant at times? Also true.
- zkmon 6mo agoThe phrase "survived on a knife edge" or the dramatization is a product of awareness of modern living. For them at those times, neither "survival" nor "struggle" has any meaning. There was likely no consciousness of such concepts. They just continued via instincts and evolutionary goals such as reproduction, food gathering, hunting etc, which were just the same activities their ancestors did, with no changes. Lack of change should actually mean pretty normal life, instead of rapid change-related struggle that we go through now.
- vasco 6mo agoWe are also surviving on a knife edge from the perspective of a super advanced civilization that doesn't deal with disease or has more energy than they know what to do with. Everything is relative
- PowerElectronix 6mo agoFunily enough, that could describe pretty well the first sapiens that learned how to make fire.
- jojobas 6mo agoHunter-gatherers were always on a knife edge, as they were in equilibrium with the food supply. Killing children in dry years, constant fighting over resources, massacres of entire tribes. Of course they didn't know they were on the knife edge, so what?
- zkmon 6mo agoRelative terms such as "living on edge" require normative references. It was just business-as-usual, normal life for them, in their own normative reference frame. Just like how cultures in some parts of the world today see things as normal, which would be abnormal to others. It's all your reference frame. There is no permanent or universal norms that can tell what is normal.
- Fokamul 6mo agoSeventy years ago, a scientist published a book about Neanderthals. According to his scientific opinion, they didn’t speak; they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to sleep early because they couldn’t see those gestures at night, lol. In my country, there is an area with archaeological sites of Neanderthal villages and their mammoth hunting grounds. In one area, there are thousands of mammoth bones. Imagine having only wooden spears and ordinary stones at your disposal. Maybe flint spears, maybe not. In this area, flint is too rare and is mainly used for cutting, because the nearest flint deposit is 400 km away.
- poulpy123 6mo ago> they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to sleep early because they couldn’t see those gestures at night, lol. LMAO did he never saw a dog or a cat in is live ? They don't speak but can still use sounds to communicate
- shevy-java 6mo agoWhat is more interesting is how they went extinct. I would assume there were local populations that lived for a long time. But then they were gone too. Some DNA is in modern humans, so there must have been some inter-breeding, but that in itself alone can not explain why the Neanderthals went extinct.
- prplxd_nihilist 6mo agoThe females in this article look exactly like modern age humans, the males have these long beard but apart from that there is no visible change in the looks. Far different from what we used to see depicting neanderthals. Is that AI generated?
- macintux 6mo agoLooks like those are stock illustrations for "cavemen". You can see more from the studio that created them: https://www.dreamstime.com/gorodenkov-more-popular-photos https://www.dreamstime.com/gorodenkov-more-popular-photos
- ghtbircshotbe 6mo agoI liked the recent Nova episode on neanderthals. They talked about how awful the last ice age was for the neanderthals despite being adapted to cold climates, and how modern humans survived it by staying away until it got warmer.
- tsoukase 6mo agoAs is usual for such a distant past, we can't answer basic questions: how many persons and where they were distributed, how their evolution and life was and mostly why intermediate species between modern human and the rest of primates don't survive today.