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"Neanderthals"

27 Comments -

1 – 27 of 27
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So, is there going to be a Jay Leno worthy announcement regarding "living" neanderthals?

1/10/09, 7:14 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So the Neanderthals had large noses, pushed-forward faces, were probably furry and clannish, and their area of habitation included the Middle East? Oh, my.

A fascinating piece. None of its explanations for the paradox of them having large brains but primitive material culture sounded very plausible to me, but I'm not an expert, so I could be wrong about that.

The more-or-less official story now is that the Neanderthals went extinct because they couldn't compete with (and/or were killed off by) newcomers from Africa about 30,000 years ago. Modern Caucasoids (of which I'm one) are supposed to have descended from those newcomers. Some people dispute this theory, saying that modern Caucasoids descend from an ancient mixture of Neanderthals and out-of-Africa invaders.

The forces of political correctness are firmly on the side of the first theory because it implies that the genetic distance between modern races is smaller than does the second one. Not being an expert I have no idea who's right. I'm not ruling out that the PC folks could be unintentionally right - even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

I'll definitely buy that book when it comes out.

1/10/09, 8:04 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

If these Neanderthals were like cannibalistic lions on two legs, and they were constantly killing each other and fighting the largest and most dangerous mammals ever with short stabbing spears, there must have been a fine line between life and death.

An introduced disease to just make half the members of a Neanderthal clan sick with the flu could mean starvation to the weakened clan, if not the death of whole clans outright from disease. With such small isolated populations, new diseases would be apocolyptic. Increased competition from humans could reduce the meat supply just enough to mean starvation to clans needing a constant influx of fresh meat, perhaps 8-10,000 calories a day of it per Neandertal member.

I can't wait to read this book.

1/10/09, 8:44 PM

Anonymous Justin Halter said...

If evolution is less efficient in smaller populations, how did the original population pair ever expand their lineage in the first place?

1/10/09, 9:12 PM

Blogger mnuez said...

I'm only about halfway through this so far but I want to make sure that I thank you for this. It's absolutely amazing. There's nothing quite like reading material on the subject of evolutionary survival of the fittest to properly align one's thoughts with the world as it likely is.

We humans are still...humans. We're but a species of animal out there are we exhibit the social, moral and emotional tendencies that evolution has granted us. It's while (and hopefully after) reading material such as this though that we're granted easy access to seeing ourselves (and humanity in general) from the outside. Be we winners or losers in the world within which we live (and as creatures that imagine ourselves to be more than mortal we are all eventually losers) this sort of material (written by sufficiently authoritative and self-doubting folk such that we needn't constantly be concerned with it being but a collection of just-so stories) offers us a god's eye view of ourselves and a realignment of our moral, social and emotional perceptions. It's beautiful. Steve, thank you.

mnuez

1/10/09, 9:43 PM

Anonymous rightsaidfred said...

If the average member of the species incurs too much risk, more than that sustainable maximum, the species goes extinct.

Will someone please tell Henry Paulson.

1/11/09, 3:29 AM

Anonymous Mandy said...

It looks to us as if toolmaking in those populations was, to some extent, innate: genetically determined. Just as song birds are born with a rough genetic template that constrains what songs are learned, early humans may have been born with genetically determined behavioral tendencies that resulted in certain kinds of tools. Genetic transmission of that information has the characteristics required to explain this pattern of simple, near-static technology, since only a limited amount of information can be acquired through natural selection, while the information that is acquired is transmitted with very high accuracy.

1/11/09, 10:04 AM

Anonymous Dave R said...

The more-or-less official story now is that the Neanderthals went extinct because they couldn't compete with (and/or were killed off by) newcomers from Africa about 30,000 years ago. Modern Caucasoids (of which I'm one) are supposed to have descended from those newcomers. Some people dispute this theory, saying that modern Caucasoids descend from an ancient mixture of Neanderthals and out-of-Africa invaders.

Supposedly, genetic testing to date shows no gene flow from neanderthals to modern living humans, which supports the official story.

I believe John Hawks claims known human and primate behavior makes some amount of gene flow almost certain, or at least the default supposition. Possibly we just haven't found or recognized it yet. Or possibly there was some gene flow but the neanderthal genes all got swept out in selection without reaching fixation. A complication of genetic testing is that environmental contamination of samples with human DNA from excavation and handling seems nearly universal, so screening for contamination may be throwing out some positive matches.

An introduced disease to just make half the members of a Neanderthal clan sick with the flu could mean starvation to the weakened clan, if not the death of whole clans outright from disease. With such small isolated populations, new diseases would be apocolyptic.

The incoming anatomically modern humans were neither agriculturists nor city-dwellers, which removes a large driver of disease innovation. The Europeans in America model is possible, but there's no particular evidence to think it likely.

1/11/09, 4:33 PM

Anonymous Lies said...

Don't look for this book in American education factories. The story of the Neanderthals is so un-PC. Getting wiped out by a flood of African immigrants might cause shoolchildren to start asking questions.

By the way, you may have read somewhere (The Mismeasure of Man) that brain volume has no relationship to intelligence, but that’s just a lie.

Mismeasure author Stephen Jay Gould is the one of the greatest liars of history. His fraudulent intellectualism eroded the very foundation of America and planted the seeds of our destruction as a cohesive nation.

We will never recover from the destruction (through mass low IQ immigration and mass alien immigration) of our once-unbeatable demography and culture. To turn a white nation into a brown nation is to put it asleep, to force it to sit on the sidelines of history as a backwater a la Latin America. Spain and Portugal were transmogrified by Moorish blood. They were genetically cut off from the rest of Europe much like present day Turkey.

The Mismeasure of Man was just one attack of thousands. Death by a thousand cuts is what has taken place. Books like the Mismeasure of Man provided the "intellectual" basis for suicidal mass immigration and suicidal tolerance of alien peoples.

The technique is called Culture Cracking: thousands of widely disseminated poisonous "intellectual" attacks can shatter an entire civilization.

1/11/09, 4:38 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have heard repeated speculation that modern Europeans are the hybrid result of African humans and Neanderthals, although there is not a shred of proof.

Why, or rather how, could a modern human safely mate with a large cannibalistic Neanderthal? A creature that basically looks like this:
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sweetums

1/11/09, 5:50 PM

Anonymous A Whiter Person said...

Lets see, if our ancestors killed off the Neanderthals then I should be able to use that to prove my own moral superiority. I feel more guilty about killing Neanderthals than you do, so I'm morally superior. Yeah, that should work.

1/11/09, 6:20 PM

Anonymous An Even Whiter Person said...

If only we could find a few living Neanderthals, this could be the start of a whole new rights movement. We could even demand that all modern Caucasoids leave Europe, in order to return the continent to its indigenous inhabitants. This could be big.

1/11/09, 6:24 PM

Anonymous early man said...

Some people dispute this theory, saying that modern Caucasoids descend from an ancient mixture of Neanderthals and out-of-Africa invaders.

Cochran and Harpending's description of Neanderthal's makes this sound extremely unlikely. To our ancestors, Neanderthals would have been vicious scary hairy monsters, not something you want to breed with. A human would be as likely to breed with a bear as a Neanderthal. And if Neanderthals ate their own kind, you can be damn sure they probably viewed early humans as quite tasty. I've always wondered if Scandinavian legends of trolls might not be based on folk memories of Neanderthals - the latest research seems to make that idea oddly plausible.

1/11/09, 6:46 PM

Anonymous Mosca said...

Oh yeah, like humans are separated from neanderthals by cannibalism.

Those neanderthals were primitive beasts! We (the god-like humans) tried to get the neanderthals to recycle, eat vegetarian, embrace sustainable lifestyles and practice non-discrimination.

But they refused, so they went extinct.

1/12/09, 12:25 AM

Anonymous UTAnon said...

Those neanderthals were primitive beasts! We (the god-like humans) tried to get the neanderthals to recycle, eat vegetarian, embrace sustainable lifestyles and practice non-discrimination. But they refused, so they went extinct.

All humor aside, there was the study a few years back that hypothesized that one advantage H. sapiens had over H. neanderthalensis is that our ancestors developed labor specialization between the sexes.

Yep, that's right - barefoot and pregnant is what kept us alive. Now whoever would've guessed that after looking at the fertility gap between traditional populations like Mormons, Muslims, Mexicans, and Hasidic Jews and the ones which celebrate feminisim?

1/12/09, 4:53 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A human would be as likely to breed with a bear as a Neanderthal.

Loved the troll comment, but your breeding comment assumes the mating was voluntary, and was between female Neanderthals and male humans. Of course the human female and her clan could've (would've) discarded the offspring if it looked anything like the father...

If only we could find a few living Neanderthals, this could be the start of a whole new rights movement. We could even demand that all modern Caucasoids leave Europe, in order to return the continent to its indigenous inhabitants. This could be big.

I'm 1/256th Neanderthal on my mother's side. I'd like my share of France back, preferably in the Bordeaux region.

The forces of political correctness are firmly on the side of the first theory because it implies that the genetic distance between modern races is smaller than does the second one.

Keep in mind that the developing science of deep ancestry postulates that the earliest and deepest split in the Homo sapiens line is between the ancestors of black Africans and the ancestors of everyone else. That's fairly un-PC. It also breaks off Australian aborigines quite soon after the African exodus.

There's plenty of PC in it, though. One only has to read Spencer Wells to see how PC it gets, with his references to how closely we all are supposedly related. In The Seven Daughters of Eve, Bryan Sykes speaks of our early ancestors almost as if they were pacifists. In his book the early humans of Europe never come to blows with each other, even though well over one-third of all remains are discovered to have died from violence.

Nicholas Wade, on the other hand, is quite blunt when he comes out and acknowledges that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not Quakers, and he actually calls scientists to task for their obfuscation.

The other highly relevant and un-PC aspect to deep ancestry is this: modern black Africans are known to be the most genetically diverse group in the world, the result of the fact that non-Africans are descended only from a very small splinter group of the African population 50,000 years ago. But how has all this genetic "diversity" served Africa politically, economically, or intellectually? Turkey, too, is far more genetically diverse than Germany, Britain, or Japan yet Turkey lags.

If what we actually see with our eyes isn't enough to kill the "Celebrate Diversity" myth, deep ancestry drives the knife even deeper.

1/12/09, 5:26 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A few of the myths killed/truths exposed by deep ancestry:

1) The myth that hunter-gatherers, either modern groups or our early ancestors, are/were pacifistic noble savages.

2) The myth that vast amounts of genetic diversity is necessarily good for a society. Turkey and black Africa, both genetically very diverse, are far less peaceful and prosperous than the more homogeneous nations of Europe and Asia.

3) The deep, ancient split between black Africans and everyone else.

4) The myth of climate stasis. One can't read a book on deep ancestry without being reminded that our climate is not static, and has been changing since long before humans had any power to affect it.

1/12/09, 5:44 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This seems as good a post as any for a long-time question of mine: why are so damn many people of Anglo-European descent nearsighted?

It's got to be really recent, because I imagine being a squinty-eyed nerd when the neighboring tribe decided to lay an ambush or trying to get a good site picture on that red deer would be pretty brutal. For that matter, how could your line make it out of the Middle Ages without good vision?

Anybody?

--Senor Doug

P.S. # 3 Profit: Steve-o, start a real-time forum and charge $50/yr for posting.

1/12/09, 6:14 AM

Anonymous simon said...

Re Neanderthals' big brains, the most interesting theory I've seen is that these were needed to process the scent information from their big noses.

Whereas modern humans had outsourced that job to dogs - lacking a good sense of smell gave us plenty of spare brainpower for other tasks.

1/12/09, 7:08 AM

Blogger John Carney said...

"One paradoxical possibility is that Neanderthals lacked complex language and so had to be smart as individuals in order to learn their culture and technology, while that same lack severely limited their societal achievements."

Is this a Neanderthal origins of autism theory?

1/12/09, 7:18 AM

Blogger Truth said...

"Don't look for this book in American education factories. The story of the Neanderthals is so un-PC. Getting wiped out by a flood of African immigrants might cause shoolchildren to start asking questions."

Einstein, the 'African immigrant' was your forefather.

"It also breaks off Australian aborigines quite soon after the African exodus."

No, actually most scientists consider Aboriginies genetically closer to whites than blacks.

"2) The myth that vast amounts of genetic diversity is necessarily good for a society. Turkey and black Africa, both genetically very diverse, are far less peaceful and prosperous than the more homogeneous nations of Europe and Asia."

Well, New York City is more genetically diverse than Wausau isn't it? It all depends on how you look at it.

1/12/09, 7:49 AM

Anonymous Jess_Wundring said...

Somehow these early humans were capable of transmitting a simple material culture for hundreds of thousands of years with little change.

If you're collectively living on a razor's edge, who's going to let some youngster play with the tried and true method for getting something done? To experiment, failure has to be considered an acceptable option. "Hail Mary" saves via desperate experimentation occur but are not likely and definitely not reliable.

1/12/09, 8:44 AM

Anonymous early man said...

why are so damn many people of Anglo-European descent nearsighted

Literacy. The same reason so many East Asians are nearsighted. We let kids read too damn early in this culture.

1/12/09, 5:18 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

early man,

Myopia is not "eye strain." It is a hereditary condition that manifests in an elongated eyeball. This means the lens will focus light at a point in front of your optic receptors instead of in the sweet spot for vision in the back of the eyeball.

Now, I'm not a hunter-gatherer, but I have to believe myopia would send you right off the Lamarckean rails in short order. But in modern society, I'd bet half of all Anglo-Europeans are myopic. Where did this come from and when? I wouldn't think myopic people would have made it out of the Middle Ages even.

Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?

--Senor Doug

1/13/09, 6:21 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

early man is right.

http://www.google.com/search?q=eyesight+Stirling+Colgate
http://www.google.com/search?q=Stirling+Colgate+glasses
http://www.i-see.org/otis_brown/chapter_11.html
http://members.aol.com/myopiaprev/ttabs1.htm
http://www.myopia.org/
http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2254

Reading is probably the major culprit. Diet may play a role as well. Follow your own reasoning: Genetic change can't possibly account for the recent explosion of myopia. As for heritability of eyesight: Recall that personality and IQ (and thus e.g. reading vs. outdoor activity preference) are heritable (perhaps so is the response of the eye to a given stimulus).

1/13/09, 1:58 PM

Blogger sre94 said...

I checked out this book and was not too impressed by it

RegCure

11/16/10, 4:55 AM

Anonymous P90x Fitness Plan said...

"One paradoxical possibility is that Neanderthals lacked complex language and so had to be smart as individuals in order to learn their culture and technology, while that same lack severely limited their societal achievements."

1/24/11, 3:15 AM

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