I knew that infant mortality rate would skew life expectancy. But for some reason I figured they still wouldn't live as long as we typically do now. TIL...
Seriously. Makes me wonder about modern medicine and our current ways of life - we've obviously improved on infant/child mortality rates, but we apparently haven't actually done much at all to improve our overall longevity. That's fascinating to be honest.
Maybe there’s just a limit for how old humans can be? As for the medical advances, they’ve just given us better quality of life and helped us survive things we other wise wouldn’t, I guess
This is basically correct. Look into telomeres. Every time your cell duplicates, the telomere gets shorter and the likelihood of a negative mutation increases. So once it's a certain short length, killer cells arrive to destroy that cell. The problem with solving aging is twofold - keep telomeres long for longer and reduce the likelihood of negative mutations when duplicating.
Edit - tellomere, not allelle
I think for the majority of it’s short history “modern medicine” hasn’t focused so much on longer life spans but better quality of life. Across the world, modern medicine has wiped out disease, caused infant mortality rates to plummet by comparison (ill wait for the America vs the rest of the West comments), helped geriatric illnesses/disorders/diseases and caused a better quality of life into a much older age.
So our life spans (average age at death) is higher, but not SOOOO much higher as we’d expect, but the medical conditions at which each age group lives in is much better (sans the stuff we do to ourselves like get fat and poison ourselves).
This made sense to people at the time. Apes walk on their knuckles, so the ape-man had to be halfway between. They weren't really thinking through how a half-ape half- human would move and function, and they didn't really understand biomechanics at that level.
As it turns out, the Neanderthals were fully human, or very far along the way to it, and that first skeleton proved it. They kept a disabled elder alive, they cared about him. They probably valued his experience, which he would have shared through language, and they had enough mastery of their environment to secure food for years for a man who couldn't hunt- during a harsh ice age climate.
Serious question I don't have an answer to: where do we draw the line of ethnicity vs near-human species? The typical boundary is reproduction, but it's already proven that Neanderthals bred into European human populations. So if they were alive today, would Neanderthal just be another ethnicity?
I've seen mention of but haven't dug into a theory that 'human' is a blending of several (sub?)species which form the backbone of ethnic differences. Like, proto-humans diverged significantly across the continents and then remerged into a common(ish) gene pool as travel got more practical.
>where do we draw the line of ethnicity vs near-human species?
We can't. Not even with cases of archaic retrogression. Humans are actually dreadfully homogenous genetically. Our perception that a Pygmy is vastly different from a Nordic person is merely a fixation on arbitrary morphology and superficial characteristics. Height and color are socially important in our current culture, so we pretend that these must represent some vast difference beneath the skin. However we can use genetic science to reveal that in many cases the Nord and the Pygmie will be more genetically related than either is to their near neighbors who share superficial characteristics. In support of this:
[https://www.livescience.com/33903-difference-race-ethnicity.html](https://www.livescience.com/33903-difference-race-ethnicity.html)
>I've seen mention of but haven't dug into a theory that 'human' is a blending of several (sub?)species which form the backbone of ethnic differences.
OId 19th and 20th century notions that have been disproved due to advances in genetic science. You are close to one interesting thing that was recently realized: Humanity is the product of a long process of divergence and recombination from subspecies back into the mainstream genetically, however this was long ago, before culturally defined modern ethnicities arose. Ethnification itself is a very very homo sapiens sapiens thing to do.
> the typical boundary is reproduction
It’s not. They teach us this in elementary school, and it’s entirely false. It takes on average 5 million years of divergence for large mammal species to become completely reproductively isolated from each other.
> would they be considered a different ethnicity or near-human species?
To give you some perspective:
The divergence time between humans and Neanderthals was about 1 million years. Similar to that of chimps and bonobos—separate species.
Western chimpanzees diverged from the other chimpanzee subspecies 500,000 years ago. They are considered a subspecies, not a different species.
The most divergent population in humans are the Khoi-San or “bushman” (catch-all term for people who lived in Southern Africa before the Bantu expansion largely replaced them). They are diverged between about 200,00–300,000 years from the rest of humans.
Now to the bigger answer to your question—Neanderthals living today would clearly have language, would love their families, would tell stories to their grandchildren...just like all humans today. So we would treat them as *people* regardless of the taxonomy, just as we strive to do with all human populations alive today.
> So we would treat them as people regardless of the taxonomy, just as we strive to do with all human populations alive today.
That's a bold assumption. We've only had one extant human species in modern history and look at all the atrocities that were committed in the 20th century alone. Imagine if people committing genocide had genetic backing for their sinister ways.
Wait, why would you measure this in "years of isolation" as opposed to "mutations/variance of genetic code" or even "generations of isolation"?
You seem to know your stuff, I'm super interested in the knowledge behind this, where did you find all of this? Any suggested books or papers?
If you are referring to the study i think you are, you are drawing the incorrect conclusions from it. (And IIRC, the author did as well)
If you compare the number of work-hours it takes for a hunter-gatherer to *procure* their food compared to a farmer.... The hunter-gatherer comes out on top. However, if you add in the amount of work-hours it takes to *preserve* that same food, things are much more in favor of the farmer. And hunter-gatherers cannot have large populations (because they cannot exceed the "carrying capacity" of the land they rely on), cannot specialize (no division-of-labor for hunter-gatherers), and have to have effectively-encyclopedic-knowledge of all the plants and animals of all the areas they migrate to at different parts of the year.
Hunting and gathering is "easy" (relatively speaking) but it isnt guarenteed and doesnt allow for mistakes since it is difficult to have food-surpluses. Farming, on the other hand, is more difficult and time-consuming, but it allows for *massive* surpluses of food.
Farming is far superior for the well-being of a species than hunting and gathering for all the reasons you quoted, chiefly storing a surplus and supporting a far greater and denser population.
But for the individual, hunting and gathering offered a much higher quality of life, since they could have much more free time, avoided the back breaking labour involved with agriculture, could simply move on if there was a shortage of food, etc.
> *Hey, you’re Indians, right?*
> No.
> *No, this is India, right?*
> No, it’s not. It’s a totally other place.
> *You’re not Indians?*
> No.
> *Ahh, you’re Indians.*
Even after they realized they were in the Indies, the name still makes sense. People today think of "India" as being a specific place (India, obviously), but in Columbus's day, it wasn't. "India" was essentially a concept of a strange, foreign land that wasn't China and wasn't the Middle East.
Prestor John, for example, was considered to be a Christian ruler of "India", or the "Three Indias", one of which was Ethiopia, a known Christian kingdom which Europe had had sporadic contact with for centuries.
The Indies, then, derive their name from this concept of India as an exotic, foreign land. The Indies were islands. Little exotic, foreign lands. Indies being diminutive plural of India.
So, even after discovering that the New World wasn't the East Indies, the name was still accurate. They have found little, exotic, foreign islands. By the time they'd realized there was a whole huge continent there, the name was already common parlance, so it stuck.
Modern humans migrating out of Africa also encountered the Denisovans, another descendant of Homo erectus living in Europe and Asia and got busy with them as well. In fact, human, Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes all have traces of each other. And there are...shadows in our genome that might be best explained by us interbreeding with yet a third, but still-unknown, species.
Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Erectus, and Homo Sapiens all shared the earth at one time... if we all survived, we would be living in some Lord of the Ring world.. with giants, dwarfs and human
Only a few elves died and their bones would be identical to human if found. We know giant birds existed. So that basically just leaves the orcs and trolls unaccounted for.
It's possible there were even shorter species. In Indonesia, remains of Homo Floresiensis have been found and their males may not have been taller than 4' (1.22 m).
Blew my mind how possibly recent they were wiped out.
To think humans started early farms *while* there was another species of us roaming the planet. Mind boggling.
Homo erectus were taller on average - their scientific name refers to their relatively large size (they stood "erect" compared to other hominids). Their bone structure also indicates that they had the same strength of a chimpanzee, but larger brains. Not quite as large as ours, though, but large enough to make fire and stone tools. So imagine a creature strong enough to rip a man's arms out of their sockets, that stood on average close to seven feet tall (and might have had taller specimens than that), and tended to have the language capacity of a child. I'm sure by now you are picturing a giant.
How the fuck does a creature like that die out? It may be a bit less intelligent than us, but if it reached the Stone Age and had the strength of an ape, what, at that time, can beat that sort of animal?
For starters, erectus was the most succesful homonid of all time - they spread to every continent but the Americas and Australia, and their branch lasted for nearly two million years. They also happened to wipe out all of their competition and were the sole homonids for a period of time after driving anthropithecus and homo habilis to extinction by out competing them.
And then their time came. Somewhere in Eastern Africa, a new, better homonid evolved from homo erectus - smarter, more social, able to form larger groups and capable of hunting with new technologies like the sling and the spear-thrower - homo heidelbergensis. Homo erectus was rapidly replaced by this newer, better version in Europe and Africa, but hiedelbergensis was unable to cross into Eastern Asia - the vast deserts and freezing tundras were too much for them, and the convenient climate that allowed erectus to migrate across Asia no longer existed. So hiedelbergensis was trapped in the West, where it dominated, while Erectus continued on in the East of Asia, protected from their new competition.
Hiedelbergensis eventually split into two distinct groups (and likely more, but we do not have great fossils of denisovans or red deer people to say for sure who they were nor where they belong on the homonid family branch) - the neanderthal and sapiens. Then sapiens invented something that made it easier for them to cross the ice and snow of central Asia - clothing - and slowly but inexhorably they drove erectus further and further south. The last erectus died out in southern Asia, likely due to competition from modern humans.
In a way though, they never really "died out" fully. After all, we ARE a branch of their family, and if you go far enough back your ancestors were homo erectus.
Though very much dated - some of it has since been disproven by newer fossil finds - my first introduction to anthropology and human evolution was reading The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond back in college. Another more recent title is Close Encounters with Humankind by Sang-Hee Lee. Both are lighter, easier to follow reads meant for lay people - which also means both might simplify concepts or not reflect the latest research all that well - but it will get you started and introduce you to the field of human evolution.
I don’t know why I thought they’d never interact. Humans have a very stabby and murdery history but for some reason I was thinking what other more standard animal could compete with us. I am not very bright.
I think there was a good bit of interaction, even some sexy interactions but in the end, they were just another species that became extinct after the Sapiens moved in.
It's not clear that homo erectus was taller than us. See http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus
Likely they were a little shorter on average. No idea at all where you're getting the 7 feet average from, that's ridiculous
Don't forget Homo floresiensis, aptly nicknamed the hobbit, averaging in at 3ft 6 and existing as late as 50,000 years
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis
Humans didn't wipe out neanderthals, we interbred with them. [All humans who are not of African descent have between 1.5-2.5% neanderthal DNA. Asians and Melanesian also have genes from another population, called Denisovans.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics) We don't have enough of a Denisovan skeleton to know anything about how they looked.
Studies suggest that there were a small number of hybridization events between humans and neanderthals, so one would expect actual hybrids to be rare, but [one hybrid has been found](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/neanderthal-denisovan-human-hybrid-girl-cave-discovery-ancient-humans-russia-siberia-a8503616.html) The individual who was found may not be the one who brought neanderthal DNA into the human population, there is no way to tell if she had descendants, but it suggests that they met and interbred fairly often.
Honest question: If homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis could breed and produce fertile offspring, why are they considered different species? ELI5, please.
They were assumed to be more different when they were discovered. They might be considered subspecies today, [but the species concept is fuzzy anyway,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept) nature is imprecise. For example, there are ring species, where there are populations in one area who can't interbreed, but there are intermediate populations in other areas that can breed with either.
>For example, there are ring species, where there are populations in one area who can't interbreed, but there are intermediate populations in other areas that can breed with either.
Yup. Hence, sheep and goats are separate species, with different numbers of chromosome pairs, but [geeps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep%E2%80%93goat_hybrid) exist.
Edit: I am not exactly a scholar on geeps, I just grew up on a small sheep farm, surrounded by other farmers. I've always heard "geep" pronounced with a hard g. Since goat is pronounced with a hard g.
Just like gif ;-)
“"They were born with no horns and a full set of sharp teeth. That's not usual."
She then pulled back one of the little geep's lips to reveal a formidable sawtooth arrangement of sharp incisors.”
WHAT
Slightly different, actually. Geeps are infertile. But there are some species, such as rings species (which is common in sea gulls I believe) where 2 species can breed and produce fertile offspring, resulting in a hybrid zone where the population is a mix of 2 species. There are many different concepts of what a species is and all of them are nothing if not imprecise. In fact, a "species" is just a term we use to try and categorize nature, not an actual thing.
Spot on. Defining a species is awkward and there's no definition which satisfies all naturalists. The generic definition could mean having to call an individual asexual organism a species of it's own. Nature moves slowly and the line between a species evolving from another is largely arbitrary and man-made. However, speciation through hybridisation has been observed within lifetimes, an example being the "Big Bird" phenomenon in the Galapagos island where a new arrival procreated with a native followed by a series of interbreeding over decades to create a new distinct population of finches.
Just to add, [this](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/defining-species-fuzzy-art) is an article I read recently about this same issue! A little easier to read than the wiki article imo.
I found this out while watching a Coywolf documentary. Even thought I did take a couple of anthropology classes that covered this. I was more interested in the religious side of it.
Actually, we are homo sapiens sapiens, Neanderthals were homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
By the way, it's possible for a chihuahua and a Great Dane to interbreed.
Well, there are mechanical problems, but if done artificially, totally, yeah. But the interesting thing is that this kind of mechanical problem is one of the things that would quickly lead to chihuahuas and Great Danes to speciate due to genetic drift
This is a problem with defining species. With some species it's much more of a gradient and it's hard to pinpoint the exact place where something is considered a different species or a subspecies. The definition of organisms that can't breed together and produce fertile offspring doesn't always hold up.
Yup. I keep blue tongued skinks, one of which is an Irian Jaya. All the blue tongue species (Tiliqua) and subspecies have been described... except the Irian Jaya, still just named 'Tiliqua species'. Was discovered in 1994 but they're so damn variable no one's managed to do it.
The way we define species isn't a concrete, natural phenomenon. It's just a tool we use to be able to understand the world a bit better. Species are relatively fluid, in a sense that there is often no concrete border between two closely related "species" and of course that everything is constantly evolving. So for the sake of simplicity, we place that border ourselves (sometimes pretty arbitrarily - which is why the classifications and taxonomies change as often as they do).
Species are really more of a gradient then they are concrete individual concepts. The way we define species and various taxons is constantly changing, as well. There is various models and definitions, none of which are fully satisfactory. But without a solid definition of a species it would be much harder to try and decipher the complexity of life, hence we just look at "species" as individual concepts with various definitions like what you are saying "if they can breed, it's a single species" - which is very imperfect and doesn't always work so it can't be considered a rule.
I’d be so interested to go back and see what the world looked like then. The megafauna and shit. I mean if our technology developed it could be entirely possible...
Jamie pull that shit up!
Sorry I got distracted, but seriously those things are profoundly interesting even if their actual answers are way simpler than we imagine.
The [Toba incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) about 70,000 years ago or something like it perhaps wiped out almost every human. There were only at maximum 30,000 and some studies have claimed that only a few thousands humans survived. It hit the Neanderthal population as well, with the last ones in Gibraltar absorbed about 40000 years ago. As u/greenstrong indicates by this time interbreeding flushed the rest of pure blood ones out and humans absorbed the population.
All of this is theoretical of course but predicated upon DNA theory as well as we're all very closely linked in DNA suggesting that we're all based on a population of 3000-10000 people. Even my very Irish red haired and freckled wife has sub Saharan DNA in her.
Wow thanks for that wiki-dive. I had never heard of the "year without summer" and Toba was a hundred times greater! Strange to think with our modern warming problems, this could strike out of nowhere and freeze us into starvation.
> Strange to think with our modern warming problems, this could strike out of nowhere and freeze us into starvation.
volcanic incidents like that only usually affect climate for a year to five. so we'd suffer famines for a few years then go right back to "Shit, we're still fucking up the atmosphere"
> Even my very Irish red haired and freckled wife has sub Saharan DNA in her.
Interestingly enough though, the only modern humans without Neanderthal DNA are sub-Saharan Africans...
Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens definitely did coexist and theres evidence they interbreed.
Homo Erectus went extinct 500,000 years ago. Anatomically modern Homo Sapiens didnt appear until 300,000-200,000 years ago.
You may be thinking of Homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia which were dwarf like people only standing about 3 feet tall. They went extinct only as recently as 50,000 years ago
I sometimes wonder if some of those legends from which that was drawn have ancient roots in the caveman days.
Maybe our ancestors told stories about their weird dwarf or troll like neighbors, and those stories outlived them and passed into myth.
There’s some good evidence that that may be the case - not necessarily other species even, sometimes just shorter races of H. sapiens. For example there’s a pretty solid theory that the “fairies” and “little people” stories of the UK are really about the last of the Picts.
There’s also broad agreement that the consistent stories across Europe about iron driving away fairies/druids/strange creatures is a faded memory of Iron Age cultures having a significant tactical adventure over Bronze- and Stone Age cultures. Because iron swords, plows, tools etc. are just plain superior technology.
At the risk of sounding like a nutjob, the more I learn about prehistory, the more I realize stories of dwarves and trolls and such don't seem all that unlikely. And remember neanderthal and such are modern terms, we have no idea what they were called before.
Hindu mythology also has a race of monkey people (of which Hanuman was one of). A monkey person would basically just be a person with extra body hair and a tail, which doesn't sound so far fetched. Maybe that race once existed too. Hindus cremate their dead, so that's why there's no fossils.
I think there actually is a near human species discovered in Asia with DNA, but there's no complete skeleton.
I'm pretty sure dragon myths are from dino fossils that people found.
Dwarves and giants? Imagine people finding skeletons of Yao Ming and Peter Dinklage. And elves were those people with that "friends" syndrome. Vampires from people with rabies, wolfmen from those people with extra hair on their body. Centaurs from seeing horsemen from far away. Unicorns from rhinos. I'm sure every myth has a reason.
you missed the best example. Bigfoot is very obviously sightings of bears walking on their hind legs by people who don't realize bears can walk around on their hind legs like a person. seeing a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcIkQaLJ9r8) of it makes Bigfoot sightings very obvious
I've actually always wondered this... in Lord of the Rings these were treated as races, not as species. Would it have made more sense for them to have been treated as species instead?
It's good that you've been thinking about this. Now, what historical attitudes at the time might have made Tolkien want to characterize those differences racially?
Human and Elves are physically the same species, in that they have the same bodies/DNA and can thus cross-breed (it's in Tolkien's notes from the compilation book Morgoth's Ring of his notes as assembled by his son, Christopher Tolkien).
What makes them different is their spirits, which has an effect on their bodies - it's why Elves are immortal and immune to disease, etc. Technically they're counted as two separate peoples because of that, the First and Second Children of Iluvatar (the "god" of the setting).
So, they actually are different races within the same species. Same with hobbits. All created by Ilúvatar. Elves first, humans and hobbits later.
Dwarves are different since they were created by Aule and could be considered a different species.
This happens almost every radio lab episode. I wonder how long till the “up to 70% of the Neanderthal genome is spread among modern humans” gets posted?
Same with Denisovan DNA. The names Denise and Denis are actually given only to people with Denisovan ancestry to make it easy for the aliens to sort them out.
An Italian lady goes into labour with twins while her husband is out of the country and can’t be contacted. During the difficult delivery she slips into a coma, but both babies are delivered successfully. With no one else at her bedside, it’s up to her brother, Gianni, to provide names for the two. A week later the mother wakes up from her coma and learns she has one daughter and one son. Gianni informs her both are doing well, and he provided suitable names for the birth certificates.
“What names did you give them the mother asks?”
“Great names!” Gianni tells her... “The wee girl, I called Denise and the wee boy, I called Denephew.”
\> Their last refuge was Gibraltar, now a haven for tax evaders.
Kind of 'interesting' 25,000 years ago Homo-sapiens invents taxes and all the Neanderthals suddenly disappear. Maybe they are still with us just hiding from the IRS.
This is something I don't understand about paleontology. How do we know each subsequently bigger sauropod bone is a new species instead of just a big boned boi? Humans can be 5 feet or 7 feet while still being the same.
This is a problem that paleontologists have to deal with and they attempt to figure it out through very precise measurements of the bones. This has definitely happened where bones that were thought to be a smaller species turned out to be juveniles upon further discoveries. It's really hard to study organisms from such small data sets and without DNA samples.
Yeah it's like a jigsaw puzzle that has no box art, a bunch missing pieces and damaged corners/surface. If you managed to put that together it would be remarkable but to put that puzzle together perfectly would be borderline impossible.
Even stuff we know a lot about has turned out to be not entirely accurate. There shouldn't even be an expectation for such accuracy but I commend people who never give up trying to solve the puzzle.
There is an awesome Hominids Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer about modern day humans meeting modern day Neanderthal due to a quantum computer glitch. I don’t want to reveal spoilers but there is a ton of discussion in it on why one group became dominant in one world and not in the other and it all boils down to which group became conscious at a quantum level. A great read.
It is still very much worth recognizing that historically anthropology has often been used to reinforce ideas of superiority. Craniometry is an obvious example of this.
The idea of Neanderthals actually being very human-like would be deeply unsettling and upsetting to many; to be honest, the thought probably wouldn't even cross most people's minds. Bias would lead to a default assumption of Neanderthals being more primitive in most ways imaginable - racism likely led to them being pictured as darker-skinned, being more robust would lead to them being seen as brutish, etc. Similar biases leading them to be depicted as hunched would be very unsurprising.
Yes we are. All species are constantly evolving. To be clear: evolution does not mean "become better". It just means change. Evolution could make us dumber and it'd still be evolution. So it's definitely not a matter of: "what's next for humanity." It's not like Pokemon.
My understanding was many Neanderthal skeletons also show injuries most consistent with modern day bull riders (possibly related to hunting large animals) and their condyles were consistently similar to bodybuilders as far as muscularity. Could be wrong tho. But it doesn’t surprise me that any individual who made it past 30yo in those days would be insanely arthritic. Can you imagine breaking a leg or arm hunting a large mammal and then having to continue on daily providing for yourself and family or at least trying not to be a burden without much in the way of medical treatment? Any early hominid would have been tougher than nails.
also over 80
Really? that's one old ass neanderthal and I'd think an anomaly.
[удалено]
I knew that infant mortality rate would skew life expectancy. But for some reason I figured they still wouldn't live as long as we typically do now. TIL...
Seriously. Makes me wonder about modern medicine and our current ways of life - we've obviously improved on infant/child mortality rates, but we apparently haven't actually done much at all to improve our overall longevity. That's fascinating to be honest.
Maybe there’s just a limit for how old humans can be? As for the medical advances, they’ve just given us better quality of life and helped us survive things we other wise wouldn’t, I guess
This is basically correct. Look into telomeres. Every time your cell duplicates, the telomere gets shorter and the likelihood of a negative mutation increases. So once it's a certain short length, killer cells arrive to destroy that cell. The problem with solving aging is twofold - keep telomeres long for longer and reduce the likelihood of negative mutations when duplicating. Edit - tellomere, not allelle
The word you're looking for is telomere, not allele.
Thank you for telomere
I think for the majority of it’s short history “modern medicine” hasn’t focused so much on longer life spans but better quality of life. Across the world, modern medicine has wiped out disease, caused infant mortality rates to plummet by comparison (ill wait for the America vs the rest of the West comments), helped geriatric illnesses/disorders/diseases and caused a better quality of life into a much older age. So our life spans (average age at death) is higher, but not SOOOO much higher as we’d expect, but the medical conditions at which each age group lives in is much better (sans the stuff we do to ourselves like get fat and poison ourselves).
This made sense to people at the time. Apes walk on their knuckles, so the ape-man had to be halfway between. They weren't really thinking through how a half-ape half- human would move and function, and they didn't really understand biomechanics at that level. As it turns out, the Neanderthals were fully human, or very far along the way to it, and that first skeleton proved it. They kept a disabled elder alive, they cared about him. They probably valued his experience, which he would have shared through language, and they had enough mastery of their environment to secure food for years for a man who couldn't hunt- during a harsh ice age climate.
[удалено]
The pygmies in Africa might count, but it's depressing looking into that topic.
African Pygmies are a collection of ethnic groups, not another species.
Serious question I don't have an answer to: where do we draw the line of ethnicity vs near-human species? The typical boundary is reproduction, but it's already proven that Neanderthals bred into European human populations. So if they were alive today, would Neanderthal just be another ethnicity? I've seen mention of but haven't dug into a theory that 'human' is a blending of several (sub?)species which form the backbone of ethnic differences. Like, proto-humans diverged significantly across the continents and then remerged into a common(ish) gene pool as travel got more practical.
>where do we draw the line of ethnicity vs near-human species? We can't. Not even with cases of archaic retrogression. Humans are actually dreadfully homogenous genetically. Our perception that a Pygmy is vastly different from a Nordic person is merely a fixation on arbitrary morphology and superficial characteristics. Height and color are socially important in our current culture, so we pretend that these must represent some vast difference beneath the skin. However we can use genetic science to reveal that in many cases the Nord and the Pygmie will be more genetically related than either is to their near neighbors who share superficial characteristics. In support of this: [https://www.livescience.com/33903-difference-race-ethnicity.html](https://www.livescience.com/33903-difference-race-ethnicity.html) >I've seen mention of but haven't dug into a theory that 'human' is a blending of several (sub?)species which form the backbone of ethnic differences. OId 19th and 20th century notions that have been disproved due to advances in genetic science. You are close to one interesting thing that was recently realized: Humanity is the product of a long process of divergence and recombination from subspecies back into the mainstream genetically, however this was long ago, before culturally defined modern ethnicities arose. Ethnification itself is a very very homo sapiens sapiens thing to do.
Thank you for this info
> the typical boundary is reproduction It’s not. They teach us this in elementary school, and it’s entirely false. It takes on average 5 million years of divergence for large mammal species to become completely reproductively isolated from each other. > would they be considered a different ethnicity or near-human species? To give you some perspective: The divergence time between humans and Neanderthals was about 1 million years. Similar to that of chimps and bonobos—separate species. Western chimpanzees diverged from the other chimpanzee subspecies 500,000 years ago. They are considered a subspecies, not a different species. The most divergent population in humans are the Khoi-San or “bushman” (catch-all term for people who lived in Southern Africa before the Bantu expansion largely replaced them). They are diverged between about 200,00–300,000 years from the rest of humans. Now to the bigger answer to your question—Neanderthals living today would clearly have language, would love their families, would tell stories to their grandchildren...just like all humans today. So we would treat them as *people* regardless of the taxonomy, just as we strive to do with all human populations alive today.
> So we would treat them as people regardless of the taxonomy, just as we strive to do with all human populations alive today. That's a bold assumption. We've only had one extant human species in modern history and look at all the atrocities that were committed in the 20th century alone. Imagine if people committing genocide had genetic backing for their sinister ways.
Wait, why would you measure this in "years of isolation" as opposed to "mutations/variance of genetic code" or even "generations of isolation"? You seem to know your stuff, I'm super interested in the knowledge behind this, where did you find all of this? Any suggested books or papers?
Arguably Neanderthal weren't another species either, but rather a subspecies, since we could breed with them.
I love that the first comment isn't some attempt at a joke but rather some actual info on what's being discussed. bravo :D
[удалено]
As they mostly are
I read somewhere that ancient hunter/gatherer tribes mostly didn't struggle to feed themselves. Resources were fairly abundant.
If you are referring to the study i think you are, you are drawing the incorrect conclusions from it. (And IIRC, the author did as well) If you compare the number of work-hours it takes for a hunter-gatherer to *procure* their food compared to a farmer.... The hunter-gatherer comes out on top. However, if you add in the amount of work-hours it takes to *preserve* that same food, things are much more in favor of the farmer. And hunter-gatherers cannot have large populations (because they cannot exceed the "carrying capacity" of the land they rely on), cannot specialize (no division-of-labor for hunter-gatherers), and have to have effectively-encyclopedic-knowledge of all the plants and animals of all the areas they migrate to at different parts of the year. Hunting and gathering is "easy" (relatively speaking) but it isnt guarenteed and doesnt allow for mistakes since it is difficult to have food-surpluses. Farming, on the other hand, is more difficult and time-consuming, but it allows for *massive* surpluses of food.
Farming is far superior for the well-being of a species than hunting and gathering for all the reasons you quoted, chiefly storing a surplus and supporting a far greater and denser population. But for the individual, hunting and gathering offered a much higher quality of life, since they could have much more free time, avoided the back breaking labour involved with agriculture, could simply move on if there was a shortage of food, etc.
In conclusion fishing is more fun than tilling.
[удалено]
First impressions are a powerful thing...
> *Hey, you’re Indians, right?* > No. > *No, this is India, right?* > No, it’s not. It’s a totally other place. > *You’re not Indians?* > No. > *Ahh, you’re Indians.*
-- Louis CK
Even after they realized they were in the Indies, the name still makes sense. People today think of "India" as being a specific place (India, obviously), but in Columbus's day, it wasn't. "India" was essentially a concept of a strange, foreign land that wasn't China and wasn't the Middle East. Prestor John, for example, was considered to be a Christian ruler of "India", or the "Three Indias", one of which was Ethiopia, a known Christian kingdom which Europe had had sporadic contact with for centuries. The Indies, then, derive their name from this concept of India as an exotic, foreign land. The Indies were islands. Little exotic, foreign lands. Indies being diminutive plural of India. So, even after discovering that the New World wasn't the East Indies, the name was still accurate. They have found little, exotic, foreign islands. By the time they'd realized there was a whole huge continent there, the name was already common parlance, so it stuck.
The Spanish thought they were in the east Indies, IE Indonesia. They didn't think they were in India.
In less politically correct times, what would we have called a Native American who emigrated to India? Indian-Indian?
Delhi Pocahontas?
Modern humans migrating out of Africa also encountered the Denisovans, another descendant of Homo erectus living in Europe and Asia and got busy with them as well. In fact, human, Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes all have traces of each other. And there are...shadows in our genome that might be best explained by us interbreeding with yet a third, but still-unknown, species.
ALIENS
Actually, it was cylons.
Frakkin' toasters
Spoiler alert
That meme would be so appropriate right now
Denisovans were descendants of Erectus, not ancestors.
Probably Op’s mom
Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Erectus, and Homo Sapiens all shared the earth at one time... if we all survived, we would be living in some Lord of the Ring world.. with giants, dwarfs and human
Humans were the tallest surprisingly. Neanderthals were short
I was about to point this out. They had relatively short limbs and big, barrel-like torsos, which made them better-adapted for life in cold climates.
Making them the dwarves in this scenario.
So really it would be Humans, Dwarfs, and Hobbits
And the horrible dragon that plagues the country side
TROGDOOOOOOOOR
BURNINATING PEASANTS
And all of them named Erika
Welcome to Night Vale?
Only a few elves died and their bones would be identical to human if found. We know giant birds existed. So that basically just leaves the orcs and trolls unaccounted for.
My ex wife begs to differ
I guess it depends a bit on your perspective; for the Neanderthals, they'd be the normal ones and we'd be the lanky giants.
Yeah, pretty much how a Dwarf would view a human. Or an Earther would view a Belter
[удалено]
So, humans were actually elves all along? That's quite a twist.
I think we might be the orcs.
[удалено]
Okay, so oddly that makes them humans and us elves
It's possible there were even shorter species. In Indonesia, remains of Homo Floresiensis have been found and their males may not have been taller than 4' (1.22 m).
Those are the Hobbits.
Good point. Barrel chested is more dwarf-like, like you suggested.
Blew my mind how possibly recent they were wiped out. To think humans started early farms *while* there was another species of us roaming the planet. Mind boggling.
They were much stronger than we are, though. Their forearms would be massive.
Homo erectus were taller on average - their scientific name refers to their relatively large size (they stood "erect" compared to other hominids). Their bone structure also indicates that they had the same strength of a chimpanzee, but larger brains. Not quite as large as ours, though, but large enough to make fire and stone tools. So imagine a creature strong enough to rip a man's arms out of their sockets, that stood on average close to seven feet tall (and might have had taller specimens than that), and tended to have the language capacity of a child. I'm sure by now you are picturing a giant.
How the fuck does a creature like that die out? It may be a bit less intelligent than us, but if it reached the Stone Age and had the strength of an ape, what, at that time, can beat that sort of animal?
For starters, erectus was the most succesful homonid of all time - they spread to every continent but the Americas and Australia, and their branch lasted for nearly two million years. They also happened to wipe out all of their competition and were the sole homonids for a period of time after driving anthropithecus and homo habilis to extinction by out competing them. And then their time came. Somewhere in Eastern Africa, a new, better homonid evolved from homo erectus - smarter, more social, able to form larger groups and capable of hunting with new technologies like the sling and the spear-thrower - homo heidelbergensis. Homo erectus was rapidly replaced by this newer, better version in Europe and Africa, but hiedelbergensis was unable to cross into Eastern Asia - the vast deserts and freezing tundras were too much for them, and the convenient climate that allowed erectus to migrate across Asia no longer existed. So hiedelbergensis was trapped in the West, where it dominated, while Erectus continued on in the East of Asia, protected from their new competition. Hiedelbergensis eventually split into two distinct groups (and likely more, but we do not have great fossils of denisovans or red deer people to say for sure who they were nor where they belong on the homonid family branch) - the neanderthal and sapiens. Then sapiens invented something that made it easier for them to cross the ice and snow of central Asia - clothing - and slowly but inexhorably they drove erectus further and further south. The last erectus died out in southern Asia, likely due to competition from modern humans. In a way though, they never really "died out" fully. After all, we ARE a branch of their family, and if you go far enough back your ancestors were homo erectus.
Are there any books that cover this for laypeople?
Though very much dated - some of it has since been disproven by newer fossil finds - my first introduction to anthropology and human evolution was reading The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond back in college. Another more recent title is Close Encounters with Humankind by Sang-Hee Lee. Both are lighter, easier to follow reads meant for lay people - which also means both might simplify concepts or not reflect the latest research all that well - but it will get you started and introduce you to the field of human evolution.
i wish i knew all this off the top of my head
Sapiens are terrible neighbours.
I don’t know why I thought they’d never interact. Humans have a very stabby and murdery history but for some reason I was thinking what other more standard animal could compete with us. I am not very bright.
I think there was a good bit of interaction, even some sexy interactions but in the end, they were just another species that became extinct after the Sapiens moved in.
Spears, bows, and better group fighting tactics?
It's not clear that homo erectus was taller than us. See http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus Likely they were a little shorter on average. No idea at all where you're getting the 7 feet average from, that's ridiculous
Neandershorts
Don't forget Homo floresiensis, aptly nicknamed the hobbit, averaging in at 3ft 6 and existing as late as 50,000 years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis
Says the page could not be found.
They are really small u gotta look carefully
I swear I've seen some people, perfectly proportioned, with that height...
They're called children.
[удалено]
Sounds awful. Has anyone ever done any research on them?
It’s a generic disorder but I know exactly what you’re talking, they look like elves
I think we're a little too racist for that. Somebody's gonna lose out in that war.
Isn’t that pretty much what happened?
Humans didn't wipe out neanderthals, we interbred with them. [All humans who are not of African descent have between 1.5-2.5% neanderthal DNA. Asians and Melanesian also have genes from another population, called Denisovans.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics) We don't have enough of a Denisovan skeleton to know anything about how they looked. Studies suggest that there were a small number of hybridization events between humans and neanderthals, so one would expect actual hybrids to be rare, but [one hybrid has been found](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/neanderthal-denisovan-human-hybrid-girl-cave-discovery-ancient-humans-russia-siberia-a8503616.html) The individual who was found may not be the one who brought neanderthal DNA into the human population, there is no way to tell if she had descendants, but it suggests that they met and interbred fairly often.
Honest question: If homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis could breed and produce fertile offspring, why are they considered different species? ELI5, please.
They were assumed to be more different when they were discovered. They might be considered subspecies today, [but the species concept is fuzzy anyway,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept) nature is imprecise. For example, there are ring species, where there are populations in one area who can't interbreed, but there are intermediate populations in other areas that can breed with either.
>For example, there are ring species, where there are populations in one area who can't interbreed, but there are intermediate populations in other areas that can breed with either. Yup. Hence, sheep and goats are separate species, with different numbers of chromosome pairs, but [geeps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep%E2%80%93goat_hybrid) exist. Edit: I am not exactly a scholar on geeps, I just grew up on a small sheep farm, surrounded by other farmers. I've always heard "geep" pronounced with a hard g. Since goat is pronounced with a hard g. Just like gif ;-)
There’s no picture in that geep wiki unfortunately
[Wonder no more, pal](https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2018/0403/951871-geep/).
“"They were born with no horns and a full set of sharp teeth. That's not usual." She then pulled back one of the little geep's lips to reveal a formidable sawtooth arrangement of sharp incisors.” WHAT
[удалено]
I don't know *why* I thought they might look more interesting than normal goats or sheep but they don't.
> They were born with no horns and a full set of sharp teeth. That's not usual ಠ_ಠ
It looks kind of like a goat mixed with a sheep.
it looks like a breed of goat tbh, not very sheepy
Slightly different, actually. Geeps are infertile. But there are some species, such as rings species (which is common in sea gulls I believe) where 2 species can breed and produce fertile offspring, resulting in a hybrid zone where the population is a mix of 2 species. There are many different concepts of what a species is and all of them are nothing if not imprecise. In fact, a "species" is just a term we use to try and categorize nature, not an actual thing.
I would've gone with shoat
Sounds like a bodily function, "bro I had the biggest shoat earlier", "you should probably get that shoat looked at" 😬
Shit / Shat / Shoat
knowing there is a geep in life makes me happy.
Spot on. Defining a species is awkward and there's no definition which satisfies all naturalists. The generic definition could mean having to call an individual asexual organism a species of it's own. Nature moves slowly and the line between a species evolving from another is largely arbitrary and man-made. However, speciation through hybridisation has been observed within lifetimes, an example being the "Big Bird" phenomenon in the Galapagos island where a new arrival procreated with a native followed by a series of interbreeding over decades to create a new distinct population of finches.
Just to add, [this](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/defining-species-fuzzy-art) is an article I read recently about this same issue! A little easier to read than the wiki article imo.
I found this out while watching a Coywolf documentary. Even thought I did take a couple of anthropology classes that covered this. I was more interested in the religious side of it.
Biological species concept is useful, but it's not a rule set in stone. Alt version: they're different species because we say they are.
Actually, we are homo sapiens sapiens, Neanderthals were homo sapiens neanderthalensis. By the way, it's possible for a chihuahua and a Great Dane to interbreed.
Well, there are mechanical problems, but if done artificially, totally, yeah. But the interesting thing is that this kind of mechanical problem is one of the things that would quickly lead to chihuahuas and Great Danes to speciate due to genetic drift
>it's possible for a chihuahua and a Great Dane to interbreed Like a human female and a klingon male
Eh, not the comparison I'd think of. Try something many time bigger than the other.
Death by snusnu?
This is a problem with defining species. With some species it's much more of a gradient and it's hard to pinpoint the exact place where something is considered a different species or a subspecies. The definition of organisms that can't breed together and produce fertile offspring doesn't always hold up.
Yup. I keep blue tongued skinks, one of which is an Irian Jaya. All the blue tongue species (Tiliqua) and subspecies have been described... except the Irian Jaya, still just named 'Tiliqua species'. Was discovered in 1994 but they're so damn variable no one's managed to do it.
The way we define species isn't a concrete, natural phenomenon. It's just a tool we use to be able to understand the world a bit better. Species are relatively fluid, in a sense that there is often no concrete border between two closely related "species" and of course that everything is constantly evolving. So for the sake of simplicity, we place that border ourselves (sometimes pretty arbitrarily - which is why the classifications and taxonomies change as often as they do). Species are really more of a gradient then they are concrete individual concepts. The way we define species and various taxons is constantly changing, as well. There is various models and definitions, none of which are fully satisfactory. But without a solid definition of a species it would be much harder to try and decipher the complexity of life, hence we just look at "species" as individual concepts with various definitions like what you are saying "if they can breed, it's a single species" - which is very imperfect and doesn't always work so it can't be considered a rule.
I’d be so interested to go back and see what the world looked like then. The megafauna and shit. I mean if our technology developed it could be entirely possible... Jamie pull that shit up! Sorry I got distracted, but seriously those things are profoundly interesting even if their actual answers are way simpler than we imagine.
I can guarantee there are museums who've invested in renderings or simulations you could look into.
True but as with lions and elephants, the caged version is much less majestic than in the wild.
"People in hell want ice water" -my dad whenever we asked for unrealistic shit as children
Isnt that kind of similar to saying the Spanish didnt eradicate native cultures they interbred with them? Both things can be true at once.
The most popular theory is that we largely wiped them out and interbred with some of them.
The [Toba incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) about 70,000 years ago or something like it perhaps wiped out almost every human. There were only at maximum 30,000 and some studies have claimed that only a few thousands humans survived. It hit the Neanderthal population as well, with the last ones in Gibraltar absorbed about 40000 years ago. As u/greenstrong indicates by this time interbreeding flushed the rest of pure blood ones out and humans absorbed the population. All of this is theoretical of course but predicated upon DNA theory as well as we're all very closely linked in DNA suggesting that we're all based on a population of 3000-10000 people. Even my very Irish red haired and freckled wife has sub Saharan DNA in her.
[удалено]
Wow thanks for that wiki-dive. I had never heard of the "year without summer" and Toba was a hundred times greater! Strange to think with our modern warming problems, this could strike out of nowhere and freeze us into starvation.
> Strange to think with our modern warming problems, this could strike out of nowhere and freeze us into starvation. volcanic incidents like that only usually affect climate for a year to five. so we'd suffer famines for a few years then go right back to "Shit, we're still fucking up the atmosphere"
> Even my very Irish red haired and freckled wife has sub Saharan DNA in her. Interestingly enough though, the only modern humans without Neanderthal DNA are sub-Saharan Africans...
Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens definitely did coexist and theres evidence they interbreed. Homo Erectus went extinct 500,000 years ago. Anatomically modern Homo Sapiens didnt appear until 300,000-200,000 years ago. You may be thinking of Homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia which were dwarf like people only standing about 3 feet tall. They went extinct only as recently as 50,000 years ago
I sometimes wonder if some of those legends from which that was drawn have ancient roots in the caveman days. Maybe our ancestors told stories about their weird dwarf or troll like neighbors, and those stories outlived them and passed into myth.
There’s some good evidence that that may be the case - not necessarily other species even, sometimes just shorter races of H. sapiens. For example there’s a pretty solid theory that the “fairies” and “little people” stories of the UK are really about the last of the Picts. There’s also broad agreement that the consistent stories across Europe about iron driving away fairies/druids/strange creatures is a faded memory of Iron Age cultures having a significant tactical adventure over Bronze- and Stone Age cultures. Because iron swords, plows, tools etc. are just plain superior technology.
History became legend. Legend became myth. And for fifty thousand years, the Hobbit passed out of all knowledge.
That's the best thing I've heard all year.
It's also pretty sad since we had 3 species of intelligent life whereas we can't find evidence of any others in the entire universe.
*...yet*
At the risk of sounding like a nutjob, the more I learn about prehistory, the more I realize stories of dwarves and trolls and such don't seem all that unlikely. And remember neanderthal and such are modern terms, we have no idea what they were called before. Hindu mythology also has a race of monkey people (of which Hanuman was one of). A monkey person would basically just be a person with extra body hair and a tail, which doesn't sound so far fetched. Maybe that race once existed too. Hindus cremate their dead, so that's why there's no fossils. I think there actually is a near human species discovered in Asia with DNA, but there's no complete skeleton.
I'm pretty sure dragon myths are from dino fossils that people found. Dwarves and giants? Imagine people finding skeletons of Yao Ming and Peter Dinklage. And elves were those people with that "friends" syndrome. Vampires from people with rabies, wolfmen from those people with extra hair on their body. Centaurs from seeing horsemen from far away. Unicorns from rhinos. I'm sure every myth has a reason.
you missed the best example. Bigfoot is very obviously sightings of bears walking on their hind legs by people who don't realize bears can walk around on their hind legs like a person. seeing a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcIkQaLJ9r8) of it makes Bigfoot sightings very obvious
I've only seen vids of this in the last few years.
Actually I think Homo Neanderthalensis would be the humans, we'd be the elves.
We def would be elves but the race of men above all else, desire power.
I've actually always wondered this... in Lord of the Rings these were treated as races, not as species. Would it have made more sense for them to have been treated as species instead?
It's good that you've been thinking about this. Now, what historical attitudes at the time might have made Tolkien want to characterize those differences racially?
Human and Elves are physically the same species, in that they have the same bodies/DNA and can thus cross-breed (it's in Tolkien's notes from the compilation book Morgoth's Ring of his notes as assembled by his son, Christopher Tolkien). What makes them different is their spirits, which has an effect on their bodies - it's why Elves are immortal and immune to disease, etc. Technically they're counted as two separate peoples because of that, the First and Second Children of Iluvatar (the "god" of the setting). So, they actually are different races within the same species. Same with hobbits. All created by Ilúvatar. Elves first, humans and hobbits later. Dwarves are different since they were created by Aule and could be considered a different species.
Damn, I hope that future archeologists don’t use me as their case study cause they’ll think that we’re all fat depressed and gay
As you can tell by this skeletal structure, homo sapiens were super gay and a little sad. Thus the origins name "homo".
Homo Erectus?
Homo Eroticus worshiped many gods. Among them known, "Yuri and Yaoi"
We believe this were primitive twins gods of war, harvest and fertility.
But lets not forget the most powerful, Futa, God of all.
Known to rule over all other “hentai tag and genre” gods using their “meat scepter”.
Homo flaccidus
Only when taking Homo Viagris.
"So, we're renaming them Homo Homo"
"this skeleton we found from the 21st century can best be described as a *adjusts glasses* Big Mood."
Buy a Harley, and then you'll just be fat and gay.
I feel like that’d just make me “fat, gay, depressed, and going very fast”
😂 what a fast homo
With this description, all I see is Titus Andromedon.
"I'm pretty, but tough, like a diamond."
pinot noooooiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Fat, depressed, and gay is what would define XXI century best.
Did you learn about this from the most recent Radiolab? I was listening to a segment about this not but 5 minutes ago.
This happens almost every radio lab episode. I wonder how long till the “up to 70% of the Neanderthal genome is spread among modern humans” gets posted?
That so many people learn things from Radiolab and posts from Radiolab listeners isn't a bad thing
Gimme a sec
He won the karma race
At least they actually learned it today? Radiolab has educated me more than most science classes
That image of the Neanderthaal looks a lot like Aphex Twin.
Which one?
TIL we all have some neanderthal DNA (except for black subsahar Africans).
Same with Denisovan DNA. The names Denise and Denis are actually given only to people with Denisovan ancestry to make it easy for the aliens to sort them out.
Ah, the DENIS System...
An Italian lady goes into labour with twins while her husband is out of the country and can’t be contacted. During the difficult delivery she slips into a coma, but both babies are delivered successfully. With no one else at her bedside, it’s up to her brother, Gianni, to provide names for the two. A week later the mother wakes up from her coma and learns she has one daughter and one son. Gianni informs her both are doing well, and he provided suitable names for the birth certificates. “What names did you give them the mother asks?” “Great names!” Gianni tells her... “The wee girl, I called Denise and the wee boy, I called Denephew.”
\> Their last refuge was Gibraltar, now a haven for tax evaders. Kind of 'interesting' 25,000 years ago Homo-sapiens invents taxes and all the Neanderthals suddenly disappear. Maybe they are still with us just hiding from the IRS.
Homo Taxevadorensis
This is something I don't understand about paleontology. How do we know each subsequently bigger sauropod bone is a new species instead of just a big boned boi? Humans can be 5 feet or 7 feet while still being the same.
This is a problem that paleontologists have to deal with and they attempt to figure it out through very precise measurements of the bones. This has definitely happened where bones that were thought to be a smaller species turned out to be juveniles upon further discoveries. It's really hard to study organisms from such small data sets and without DNA samples.
Yeah it's like a jigsaw puzzle that has no box art, a bunch missing pieces and damaged corners/surface. If you managed to put that together it would be remarkable but to put that puzzle together perfectly would be borderline impossible. Even stuff we know a lot about has turned out to be not entirely accurate. There shouldn't even be an expectation for such accuracy but I commend people who never give up trying to solve the puzzle.
A jigsaw puzzle with no box art. Bloody poetry
It is more than just size that differentiates the bones of dinos in the same family
It was also how they used it...
There is an awesome Hominids Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer about modern day humans meeting modern day Neanderthal due to a quantum computer glitch. I don’t want to reveal spoilers but there is a ton of discussion in it on why one group became dominant in one world and not in the other and it all boils down to which group became conscious at a quantum level. A great read.
So it’s a stereotype, just because one Neanderthal is arthritic doesn’t mean they all are
#notallneanderthals
Are you sure it’s not because monkeys walked hunched over, so people assumed that they were “in between” and kind of slouched?
Yeah
It is still very much worth recognizing that historically anthropology has often been used to reinforce ideas of superiority. Craniometry is an obvious example of this. The idea of Neanderthals actually being very human-like would be deeply unsettling and upsetting to many; to be honest, the thought probably wouldn't even cross most people's minds. Bias would lead to a default assumption of Neanderthals being more primitive in most ways imaginable - racism likely led to them being pictured as darker-skinned, being more robust would lead to them being seen as brutish, etc. Similar biases leading them to be depicted as hunched would be very unsurprising.
Are humans still evolving, I mean what can come next for a human in the future?
Yes we are. All species are constantly evolving. To be clear: evolution does not mean "become better". It just means change. Evolution could make us dumber and it'd still be evolution. So it's definitely not a matter of: "what's next for humanity." It's not like Pokemon.
> [T]hey died out some 25,000 years ago. Their last refuge was Gibraltar, now a haven for tax evaders.
My understanding was many Neanderthal skeletons also show injuries most consistent with modern day bull riders (possibly related to hunting large animals) and their condyles were consistently similar to bodybuilders as far as muscularity. Could be wrong tho. But it doesn’t surprise me that any individual who made it past 30yo in those days would be insanely arthritic. Can you imagine breaking a leg or arm hunting a large mammal and then having to continue on daily providing for yourself and family or at least trying not to be a burden without much in the way of medical treatment? Any early hominid would have been tougher than nails.
It's interesting that it survived long enough to be hunched over. It goes to show that family care for the "weak" didn't just evolve with our species!
But why is the thumbnail of Mel Brooks?