4 ms·
Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
by peacebeard 5mo ago
Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
- egeozcan 5mo agoDoesn't outcompete include murder? We are a very tribal species, and the history is full of genocides and mass murders, so from a very uneducated viewpoint, this sounds reasonable. If not that, is it that we depleted the resources they depended on?
- peacebeard 5mo agoGreat question. When people say outcompete it can certainly include violence but we’re talking about populations spread over continents over thousands of years. Factors like technology, fertility, adaptability, etc. are more what people mean when they said outcompete.
- kjkjadksj 5mo ago[flagged]
- peacebeard 5mo agoThis is accurate for post history but evidence doesn't support this for prehistoric hunter gatherer tribes.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoSure it does. We see cultural displacement in the archaeological record all over the world. Bones marred by marks of damage by weapons. Otzi the iceman was possibly hunted down and smote on the mountainside like the Balrog Gandalf did in.
- peacebeard 5mo agoI’m not saying violence didnt happen, of course it did! I’m saying the evidence is not that neanderthals were simply eradicated like animals that were hunted to extinction and that multiple factors led to their gradual decline over time.
- bonesss 5mo agoOutcompeting includes murder, rape, war, and cannibalism. But we have population overlap for millennia, so that’s kinda factored into numbers. All primates are resource competing, so outcompeting is also drinking up their milkshakes. But, again, that’s the baseline. Non-conclusively, from my lay understanding, the tail end of falls into general bi-lateral competitive practices and breeding rates leading to ‘us’ not ‘them’. All columns all the time, not one crisp incident or behavioural change. [And there’s no indication that ‘they’ geno-rapo-ate us any less than we them… if being slightly better at mass murder was the difference, then yay for our side?]
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoNot necessarily, it could also mean that homo sapiens was just more successful - better fed, bigger population, etc. It's not likely that early sapiens was so organized that they intentionally genocided neanderthals, it's more like they were subsumed etc. A slow process across thousands of years.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoYou really think we would have let a competing species exist?
- peacebeard 5mo agoLions, bears, wolves, etc all survived us
- bschwarz 5mo agoBears and wolves were indeed "removed" from parts of Europe by humans.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5mo agoThere is a long list of Megafauna that did not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions
- peacebeard 5mo agoAh yeah looks I wasn't on the mark here. The "outcompete" framing is more accurate for neanderthals but for many pleistocene extinctions "hunted to extinction" did happen in some cases so it was not a good comparison. Thanks!
- prmoustache 5mo agoBarely and only because some of use decided to protect them.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoDepends on whether they were considered competing, and whether "we" were as organized, single-minded and competitive as this statement seems to imply - "we" probably weren't, not until larger kingdoms and empires started forming ~4000 years ago.
- kjkjadksj 5mo ago[flagged]