What the debate about Neanderthals reveals about us

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/19/justice-for-neanderthals-what-the-debate-about-our-long-dead-cousins-reveals-about-us

by Vigier • 3 years ago

37 41 3 years ago

theguardian.com

user982• 3 years ago

Perhaps that is a surer way to restore them to dignity than any other: to see them not as falling prey to our ancestors but as our ancestors.

I did notice that the popular transition to recast Neanderthals from primitive troglodytes to advanced peers seemed to coincide closely with the revelation that all Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA.

gumby• 3 years ago

AFAIK they aren't our ancestors but cousins.

daveslash• 3 years ago

Insert: Zoidberg says: "Why not both"? meme

ljf• 3 years ago

I'm about as high a percentage of neanderthal dna as is possible (2 to 4 percent) (according to 23andme) - so they certainly were my ancestors.

everdrive• 3 years ago

This a bit short sighted (both the view that Neanderthals are primitive troglodytes and also that that are sophisticated) as all (or nearly all? I'm not 100% sure here) human populations show evidence of admixture with other hominids. Whether or not that's a _good_ thing largely has to do with being able to understand the genes we received. We're not quite there yet, but research keeps advancing.

NotSuspicious• 3 years ago

Funny response and probably true to some extent although all human groups seem to have archaic hominid admixture whether it's neanderthal, denisovan or "ghost" dna (Why did they choose that name?). I think ultimately, controversy by controversy, the academic community will gradually admit that 'humanity' has a much longer "pre"history than we like to admit. Likely on the order of 1-2 million years. If I had to bet, within the next century some archeological evidence will be unearthed that shows some level of Civilization (tm) among humans that lived over 100 kya.

dboreham• 3 years ago

This has to be (roughly) true because the energy to power the size of brain found in hominids post 2Mya can only come from cooked food (or living in the very small number of places where there's enough fruit available year round to provide equivalent diet).

civilitty• 3 years ago

Huh? The academic community has been clear on that for decades now. The problem is the oversimplification taught in schools, which is often decades behind the cutting edge science.

See the timeline on the archaic humans wiki page [1]. The first migration out of Africa and the first use of fire were all millions of years ago. The first stone tools made by Australopithecus predate archaic humans altogether. It really just depends on where you draw the "human" and "civilization" lines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans

marssaxman• 3 years ago

Indeed, something along those lines was announced just the day before yesterday:

"Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. "

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9

mitthrowaway2• 3 years ago

Regardless, is this change a step in the truth-seeking direction? Or is it motivated reasoning? I'm inclined to believe the former.

yterdy• 3 years ago

The acknowledgement that GP's obersvation is significant might lead to further reevaluation of "set" attitudes, based on the recognition that self-serving bias was involved in their formulation.

_a_a_a_2• 3 years ago

Why are you inclined to believe the former?

LAC-Tech• 3 years ago

A brief wikipedia search suggests a lot of humanity has Neanderthal DNA, not just Europeans.

Neanderthals shared more alleles with Eurasian populations (e.g. French, Han Chinese, and Papua New Guinean) than with sub-Saharan African populations (e.g. Yoruba and San).[8] According to the authors Green et al. (2010), the observed excess of genetic similarity is best explained by recent gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans after the migration out of Africa.[8] They estimated the proportion of Neanderthal-derived ancestry to be 1–4% of the Eurasian genome.

bjourne• 3 years ago

That is because Homo Sapiens "returned" to Africa after the invention of animal husbandry and agriculture. They out-competed and drove away many traditional hunter-gatherer tribes.

mo_42• 3 years ago

I think the debate reveals how flawed and entitled our thinking is.

A bit over-simplistic, we find a couple of bones in a cave and so a few pieces of evidence. From this, we patch up a full picture of the Neanderthals (flawed) and we do it in a way to convince ourselves how great we are (entitled).

With "our thinking" I'm talking about the not-so-scientific public. I guess the scientists get this right. They know about their unknowns. But these subtleties are lost on their way to the general public.

ulizzle• 3 years ago

A lot of people just believe whatever the supposed science is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone question science outside of HN.

amanaplanacanal• 3 years ago

You must have missed all the debate about the Covid vaccines.

_a_a_a_2• 3 years ago

5G? Homeopathy? chemtrails?

NoZebra120vClip2• 3 years ago

What is a woman?

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Something I liked from Sapiens is this idea of how all these other hominids existed and we whacked them. In some sense, we had aliens among us and we killed them and vilified them. It would have been so cool to have seen alternative related species, but I suppose this was a winner-take-all market.

It may be that describing our victims as villains (itself such a word) is an adaptive trait.

In that vein, "anyone who downvotes this is a moron"!

jsndidneske• 3 years ago

Well... if it is any solace to you, as time moved forward the way we valued life, saw mortality and death in ouraelves and others, what we value, has changed.

People were violent and death was a much more normal thing.

When we look at it in modern time with all our accumulated knowledge we seek to not cause it. Even tyranical and psycotic individuals hold nihlistic or anarchic philosphies.

Truely to understand the worlds pardigm change over history is multifaceted in regard to demographics, and skills aquired, and scarcites and suppluses come into effect too.

adr1an• 3 years ago

Technically those 'aliens' were humans too. Different species, same genera. We had interbreeding with them, though it's a small proportion of neanderthal and some other species dna that were discovered.

nextaccountic2• 3 years ago

I like to believe that we viewed them as close as another ethnicity, rather than a different species altogheter

ericmcer• 3 years ago

Was it an intentional genocide? Or was it repetitions of human/neanderthal clashes that resulted in us wiping out male neanderthals and breeding with the females until their genetic contribution got reduced to current levels (~2% on the high end). I guess technically we are still slowly killing them off every time someone with a high % procreates with someone who has none.

Jensson• 3 years ago

Evidence points towards the opposite, Neanderthal males bred with us but Neanderthal females didn't.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC368159/

We don't know why, but that would suggest we didn't conquer them, maybe our males didn't find their females attractive enough to have sex with. Neanderthals are more masculine looking than us, so their males would be attractive, but their females maybe looked too much like males to us.

mharig2• 3 years ago

On one hand, a small difference in the reproduction rate of two similar species competing for the same resources leads to extinction of the slower reproducing one in not so many generations. Even without hostilities.

On the other hand, Spainiards and Portuguese killed around 90-95% of the indigenous population when they conquered South America. Contemporary Homo sapiens seems to be a rather aggressive monkey horde.

Choose your odds. I think it was a mixture of both.

What the debate about Neanderthals reveals about us

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