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New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal
ThinkComp writes "In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus that has held for decades, recent research suggests that the traditional conception of Neanderthals being "stupider" than Homo sapiens may in fact be misleading. As articles about the research findings state, 'early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.' The data used in the study is available on-line along with a visual description of the process used."
Now what am I supposed to call my brother-in-law?
So easy a caveman can do it.
This is refuted by the discussions on this board. There are stupid neanderthals posting here every day!
as netherlands...
The Homo sapiens bought out the Neanderthals tools and buried them, thus ensuring the success of Homo sapien tools.
--- What?
We have known for a long time that Neanderthal had a larger brain than modern human and a sophisticated culture, including burial rites. There was no scientific consensus that Neandethal was stupid.
The researchers found that their research was so easy, a homo sapiens could do it.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Let this be a warning to you all.
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that's because Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens are the same species!
Netcraft confirms it: the Neanderthal is dead!
It's pretty simple. They weren't aggressive enough and we wiped them out through brute force like we do everything else that's different.
Big shock.
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
Since when did Geico start sponsoring science research?
D
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What shall become of the GEICO advert and that 'caveman' show?
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
We tend to try to compare individual intelligence but this is probably meaningless. The real reason for our species' success is not that we're individually brilliant, but that we are very good at dividing up large problems to solve collectively. This works thanks to our social instincts: respect for authority, sense of fairness, competitiveness, group belonging, etc. etc. The whole gamut, the reason why we read and post to Slashdot, because we're a social species and bloody good at it.
Neanderthals, larger, individually smarter, were presumably generalists that could do more by themselves but could not compete as well a group of modern humans, when it came to hunting and perhaps fighting.
Of course I'm defining "intelligence" very much in the sense of "how humanity thinks and solves problems". It's easy to claim superiority when one is the species writing history.
My blog
While there have been great advances, really we've been dealing with the same level of intelligence throughout history.
What has changed us is the quality of life.
When you don't have to slay a beast, drag water 4 miles and fend off hordes of enemies, robbers and the plague you can get 'more' done.
I'm sure in history there were many brilliant people. Some 4000 years ago with the documents we have people still had the same ideas, the same drama.
The Steven Hawking of 1000 years ago would starve or be stuck in a mud shack thinking about how to eat and if his family would leave him in the jungle. That doesn't happen in the developed countries.
After visiting the slums of Rwanda I often asked myself what these people would do if they had access to clean water. The answer - the same thing the Romans, the Greek, the Europeans, the French and the Americans. Build, expand and innovate.
D~y
They simply couldn't admit their own mistakes and learn from them; preferring self-rightious extinction over humbling erudition. Those few who remain are called Neocons.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
are our childrens stupider to neanderthals?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I still think white people are basically a cross between homo sapiens and neanderthals. Like, somewhere along the way, super strong neanderthal dudes came in, grabbed the homo sapiens women, and thus, white people were born. I think there's no other possible explanation for our horrific sense of fashion and penchant for shiny metal objects. I'm just about to tell my wife, that, I can't help my need for a quad motherboard and a 400 hp sportscar... I'm just genetically doomed because of my neanderthal genes.
This is my sig.
WTF? We've known for this for at least thirty years now; that the earliest modern humans had tool kits that did not vary in any great way from Neandertals. In fact, it's one of the great puzzles of evolution that modern human behavior did not arise until a long time after modern humans (anatomically, at least) had evolved. For chrissakes, just look at the Levant where modern humans and Neandertals shared the same territories for thousands of years, with little to tell them apart other than their skeletons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
After finding that the Neanderthals had purchased an iPhone 3g when no 3g service was available 20,000 years ago.
They reposted their original findings that Neanderthals are dumb.
they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Ah, that explains why Oog isn't around anymore, breaking heads with his Open Source CD.
The enemies of Democracy are
they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Let this be a warning to you all.
Um, don't open source the stuff you use to hurt other people with. Gotcha. So should we open source our election process/government or not? I'm not clear if we'd classify that as weapon/harmful medium to be controlled.
In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus...
Sorry, but you must not have gotten the memo about the new scientific method. The consensus is the standard of accuracy, all new theories must be judged against it. Neanderthals remain stupid until enough people in the news media and blogosphere believe otherwise.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
It turns out the the sticks that monkeys use to dig bugs out of trees are no more efficient than the sticks that biologists use to dig bugs out of trees. From this I can conclude that monkeys are equally as smart as humans.
I see an error on thier logic.
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They weren't intelligent enough to outlive Homo sapien!! Huzzah for us and our bad-ass ancestors!
And I was really waiting for Geico's caveman campaign to end. This just gives them even more reason to play their lame jokes.
I mean, I know we succeeded and everything, but doesn't it suck a little bit to be VHS?
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Albert Einstein looks just in the right place here. Do a search for 'Neanderthal' on Google Images, and next search for 'Homo Sapiens'. Then search for 'Einstein'.
RutSum.com
The conclusions of this study are not exactly news. It's been known for some time that early homo sapiens tools were no more advanced than Neanderthal tools. But at some point, there was an explosion of creativity and inventiveness in modern man that the Neanderthals could not equal, probably due to home sapiens having superior language skills and capabilities, and the ability to share and communicate ideas in ways the Neanderthals could not. Modern man then evolved superior cultures and technologies that surpassed the Neanderthals.
One on one, raised without the benefit of language and culture, a modern man would probably be no brighter, and in fact considerably physically weaker, than a Neanderthal. But collectively, Neanderthals were no match for modern men with their more advanced languages, societies, and weapons.
... we still won.
One works with me a few cubicles over... They're called the telecommunications group!
...possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus...
Or a major contribution?
That's not really analogous at all. Sticks may very well be the optimum way of getting insects out of nests. But in the case of more advanced tool kits, there are certainly better kinds of tools for hunting and dismembering. The difference between the Paleolithic and Neolithic tool kits is substantial. The later stone tool kits used by modern humans included barbed fish hooks, spearheads and the like, innovations that simply did not exist among bipedal hominids. More importantly, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that a tool kit might hang around during the Paleolithic with little or no change, the Neolithic saw radical innovations at a relatively fast pace.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Neanderthals were gentle, nice, and played well with others. They were wiped out by the brutal, greedy Homo sapiens.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
See, now i viewed the GP as being nonsensical, and somewhat funny. But not nearly as funny as how seriously you took it!
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No one in Anthropology has seriously considered Neanderthals stupid for the last 30-40 years. The first Neanderthal skeleton was of an old, very arthritic male, hence the bowed posture and unlockable knees.
semantics are everything!
However, you better not try that debunking thing on Global Warming by pointing to studies by scientists working for corporations with a vested interest in continuing to burn fossil fuels that contribute to the problem. Try to present misconceptions unscientific, or non-evidence based claims, and you're dead meat.
There, fixed it for you.
If you can post inflammatory unrelated comments, so can I.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I always thought it was a common thought that Neanderthals were actually the smarter of the species, but their brains weren't built for multi-tasking. Meaning at making tools or using said tools, they were more efficient, but when a group of raiding Homo Sapiens came, they couldn't switch modes, so to speak.
Honestly, I can't think of where I learned this. Maybe I made it up?
Blades may not have signified a sharper cutting tool, but rather a more advanced way of imagining that cutting tool.
Aesthetics and how something is crafted is just as important as how effective it is at doing its job. That's what makes the homo sapiens more intelligent than their Neanderthalic counterparts.
I imagine an ancient homo sapien would pay a pretty Sumerian coin for a fancy dagger.
Lack of commerce and trade caused by "being different" and holding to mindless traditions (Creating weapons the old "flake" way). That's the kind of mindset which probably killed off Neanderthals, not whether or not they could hunt and gather with the tools they had.
This occurs in the modern day. Malnutrition restricts intellectual and physical development. In areas where nutrition is significantly improved, there are developmental booms.
I don't think we have any more individual 'intelligence' than other animals.
Welcome to the end result of a Politically Correct(tm) education, folks. Years of considering the strong and the weak as somehow magically "equal", and we arrive at this as the pinnacle (as in, highest point before we plunge off the evolutionary cliff) of Western culture.
I have to admit, though, that idea does logically derive from the false premise that we all have some innate equality and value. Still doesn't make it true, but a valid conclusion.
When you can see things from another individual's perspective and exchange ideas, it makes the world of difference.
No. You want to know why "we" won and the neanderthals ceased to exist? Because, at some point, we wanted their stuff, and they didn't want to give it to us. So, we applied our tool-making skills to the task of killing, and did it just a little bit better than they did. And then we wiped them out and took their stuff. Almost exactly the opposite of the "empathy" you would praise.
See, now i viewed the GP as being nonsensical, and somewhat funny. But not nearly as funny as how seriously you took it!
I wouldn't have replied that way if the GGP hadn't been modded INFORMATIVE! :-/
More importantly, he lacks the "sarcasm" tag at the end of his post when his tone makes him look completely serious.
In human fossils we see the skull and hence can deduce the size of the brain , but we've no idea the structure the brain itself had in peoples from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Its perfectly possible that they may have looked the same as us on the outside but mentally weren't quite there because our brains continued evolving (which doesn't necessarily mean getting bigger) after our bodies had stopped.
Compared to people living today, the Neanderthal adults had a more prominent brow ridge and some also had a chinless appearance. These features do not make them less human, nor do they make them primitive.
The bible describe people in the early parts of Genesis that lived for hundreds of years. One of the things that we have learned from modern science is that the bones of the head and face continue to grow through our entire adult life (though at a slower rate than when we are children).
What would the faces of people who lived for hundreds of years look like? Dr. Jack Cuozzo has studied both the Bible and the Neanderthal remains in depth, he believes these people would look like (and consequently are) the Neanderthals.
From http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/patriarch.html
More importantly, he lacks the "sarcasm" tag at the end of his post when his tone makes him look completely serious.
Yes, the GGGP post left off this tag. Is that a requirement of sarcasm? Should "A Modest Proposal" be modded as "troll"? I say the GGGP should me modded funny. Or offtopic. But troll? Not so sure.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The Creationist mods have,to mod critics down. Their invisible superbeings aren't capable of doing things on their own. And as a bonus: every downmod of rational thinking gets them one step closer to Heaven!
Third, open source is completely OFF TOPIC in this discussion!!
This sis Slashdot. Open source is always on topic. Just like bashing the RIAA.
Maybe this just means that we're getting dumb and dumberer as time goes on (backwards evolution)? I mean, if the Ancients, the race that built the Stargates, were fracking brilliant enough to reach ascension, then maybe the Neanderthals ascended, too. What's left were those of us that were too dumb to ascend,...
Wasn't that already one of the topics in the alien court in Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries? I thought that was common knowledge for some time already.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Actually those that "fear there may actually be a God" would argue that Neanderthals are actually just humans and that current science just mislabels them as different than us. At least those 6000 year folks.
But this idea doesn't really fit with the others; it's not as though our previous knowledge of Pluto was deficient in any way. Instead, with the discovery of similar (even larger, in the case of Eris) bodies in the Kuiper belt, the definition of a planet was refined to exclude Pluto, since it had lost notability.
A similar thing happened with Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt - originally classified as a planet upon its discovery in the early 19th century, it was also 'downgraded' when the rest of the belt was subsequently discovered.
No, we really are not that violent, and we are getting more peaceful as time drags on. As a human, the chances of dying in war are very small. In fact, your chances of dying a violent death have been rapidly plummeting as time has moved on. Even our most horrific industrial wars kill vastly fewer people as a percentage of the population than simple day to day tribal conflict.
If you want to compare us against animals, we really don't rate that high. Society wide genocide is pretty common for insects. Other primates are at least as aggressive as us and suffer far more violent deaths. Many animals suffer pretty grievous loses to violent conflict over mating.
The only thing humans have going for them when it comes to the mass slaughter is that we have absolutely blasted our internal social limits on empathy. As a human, you are hard wired to live in a society no big than roughly 400 people. That is the limit of how many faces you can keep track of at a time, a pretty well documented limit of purely egalitarian human societies. Egalitarian tribal societies that get that big inevitably split. Through various methods of division of labor and hierarchies we have slowly been bumping up the size of a viable society. We are now to the point where a few hundred million is a perfectly reasonable size for a society.
France is a great example. This is a society of 60 million people. In general, they feel that they share a common bond and they feel empathy for each other. In general, they trust each other more than they trust others, and they think of each others needs over outsiders. True, one Frenchmen doesnâ(TM)t have as tight of a bond as his fellow country men as two men in a 100 unit tribal society, but it is close enough where they are a clearly distinct society. Just a couple of weeks ago 10 Frenchmen were killed in war (in Afghanistan). That is 0.000016% of the population. Despite this, it was a big deal in France. People acted like their social order had just taken not worthy losses and reacted accordingly.
Hell, take a step back and look at something more âoehorrificâ. 9/11 killed roughly 3000 people. That is 0.001% of the US population. That is 1 in every 100,000 people in the US died. We are talking about a miniscule number of people as compared to the society as a whole, yet despite this, Americans took the losses psychologically like family members had died.
My point is this; our murdering of fellow man has not increased. It has actually dropped, and dropped by a substantial amount. Further, compared to nearly all other species, as a human you are vastly less likely to suffer a violent death. The only thing that makes humans unique, is our empathy. Human empathy has grown and increased to the point where we care about millions and millions of people, rather than three or four around us. In our growing empathy, our old brains hardwired for societies less than 400 people have not kept up. As a result we think that the loss of 1 person in a tribe of 400 is less of a tragedy than the loss of 3000 people in a society of 300 million.
To put it more succinctly, your old monkey brain is fooling you. Humans are remarkably peaceful creature who get more peaceful with time, your old monkey brain just canâ(TM)t grasp that.
More importantly, he lacks the "sarcasm" tag at the end of his post when his tone makes him look completely serious.
Yes, the GGGP post left off this tag. Is that a requirement of sarcasm?
When your writing looks serious, and given the abundance of trolls in slashdot, yes, it is necessary. Why do you think emoticons were invented in the first place?
FTA:
Mr Eren believes the most likely explanation is that Homo sapiens were simply able to breed more quickly.
"It's not that we were better than them," he said. "It's just that there were more of us."
Damn we're lame. We zerg-rushed them before they could advance in their tech tree and now they're extinct. :(
how is babby formed?
A lot of scientific consensus held by mainstream scientists is often no longer supported by evidence and needs to be debunked. As Max Planck said:"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus"
I thought once there was a scientific consensus the matter was settled? So does this mean global warming might not be so smart after all?
BTW, I am NOT a TROLL...
I AM A DWARF!
When you don't have to slay a beast, drag water 4 miles and fend off hordes of enemies, robbers and the plague you can get 'more' done.
Such as shop for groceries, drive in rush-hour traffic or pick up our medicine at the pharmacy.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Um, don't open source the stuff you use to hurt other people with.
Well then where does that leave sendmail?
There was talk all during the Pleistocene era that every year, *next* year was going to be *the* year of the Neaderthal. Sadly, though they thrived for a time and may have been structurally superior to their competitors in some ways, there weren't enough adopters of this "open-source" community to keep them in strong contention for worldwide dominance.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
That's pretty simplistic, and of course wrong.
Ask yourself - why do we have clean water and they don't ? According to you there is no reason, as we all have the same innate intelligence. In the real world somebody has to organise the people to guarantee the clean water supply. And that's what's missing in places like Rwanda. They are too busy fighting amongst themselves to provide the basic necessities of life properly. So for them to progress to western levels they actually have to progress - it doesn't happen naturally by mere right of existence, or the existence of "intelligence".
And exporting better technology to these places might provide a short term boost, but is worthless if no-one is learning the basics to create their own technologies. Somebody has to be able to fix this technology or they are forever dependent on the west. At some stage thinking has to turn into doing.
I can imagine the scene in any western country if the government were to suddenly cease to exist. Things would just stop getting done. Sure the people with the knowledge would still exist, but the guy who fixes the water main isn't going to get paid for turning up every day. Pick your utility - the same situation applies. We would be back in the dark ages within 20 or 30 years, maybe excepting small pockets of rich people who could keep their lifestyle going. So like I said, back to the dark ages. And people still don't seem to realise that if you forget the mistakes of the past you get to repeat them.
All in all, intelligence is not the driving factor in "civilisation", cooperation is. And that cooperation usually has to be enforced, hence government. Your standard of living depends on the quality of the government, not how bright each individual is. Bad government uses guns to get its own way, so doesn't need a happy healthy population. Good government knows that it costs less to keep people happy than to fight them, and they can enjoy the benefits of that cooperation too.
The Creationist mods have,to mod critics down. Their invisible superbeings aren't capable of doing things on their own.
Maybe they are. Have faith, and remember you don't get to meta-moderate God.
When you miss that step and start to fall, you will pass a large sign that reads "Next time, use the elevator... FOOL!"
This proves that God has a sense of humor as much as anyone.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Maybe they are. Have faith, and remember you don't get to meta-moderate God.
Only because God doesn't post on Slashdot.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
That's hardly unsurprising. As far as I understand it, Neanderthal had a larger brain. Larger brains require more protein to remain effective. That means they had higher animal protein requirements, ergo they had a lower threshold for things like famine.
From what I understand, it's more likely that they were actually -more- intelligent than we were due to their larger brain size to body size.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Then, explain now, who wrote the code for Windows Vista?
The meek inherit the Earth; maybe Homo Sapiens inherited it from the Neanderthals. (Rest in Peace.) Was there an inheritance tax at the time?
Some of us still think digital watches are pretty neat.
There is more to estimating intelligence than just measuring the brain size. There is the question of what parts of the brain are larger. A creature that depends on its sense of smell has more of the brain devoted to smelling. The same goes for the other senses and body parts. Another example is modern man where a large parts of the brain are devoted to the sense of sight and the thumb. One has to look at the whole picture including such intangible things such as culture when estimating intelligence.
Also there is the question of what exactly is intelligence. I know many very smart people as measured by "book learning" that do not have a bit of "street smarts" (and vice versa).
and eugenics and social darwinism
eugenicists and racists, for whatever reason, are fixated on the idea of superior intelligence and physical fitness, and that evolution has stalled for (pick whatever political reason here)
it has always been my contention that a group of highly coordinated subintelligent physically handicapped people can outcompete a lone supergenius with superhuman physical gifts
that, contrary to popular belief, communication skills is what makes homo sapiens superior, not intelligence, not any physical gift
that, in the end, racism and eugenics and social darwinism have flawed starting assumptions about what being superior really means: its superior communication skills that matter, nothing else, not intelligence, not any physical attribute
and, since most champions of social darwinism/ eugenics/ racism are lone crackpots with subpar communication skills, it kind of makes sense on a number of levels why and how these people are fizated to doomed, flawed models
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A mod +1 interesting just doesn't seem to fit the bill...
Why Neanderthals went extinct is the subject of much debate. If you take a strictly Darwinian view of the issue, they somehow were not as well adapted to the CURRENT environment (at the time) as Homo Sapiens was. For the ice age, Neanderthals were able to cope with those conditions pretty well. They existed for quite a bit of time. The environment changed (probably got warmer) and they probably were not so well adapted. Add into the environmental pressures the fact that modern man was expanding his range into the Neanderthals range and you have the conditions for extinction. Recently I read that there appears to be no purely Neanderthal genes in the genome of modern man tends to discount the interbreeding theories.
I do not pretend to have the answer of why Neanderthals went extinct but this is something to ponder.
Didn't get a low ID number and is now too embarrassed?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Shouldn't "Although" be capitalized? It IS a new sentance. You, sir, fail as a Grammar Nazi.
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Haha! Wish I had mod points.
Maybe this just means that we're getting dumb and dumberer as time goes on (backwards evolution)?
This implies that there is some goal to evolution. I assure you that there is no forward or backward, just change. We might indeed be changing into something that is dumber but this is not backward progress ITS JUST CHANGE.
Ah, that explains why Oog isn't around anymore, breaking heads with his Open Source CD.
Have you ever been to any Linux events?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Emoticons were invented for those unable to express their meaning using those complex entities sometimes known as words, right?
Oh, and :P
You want to know why "we" won and the neanderthals ceased to exist? Because, at some point, we wanted their stuff,
Either that or neanderthals were simply good eating...
*worships*
... is that when the Grays came and manipulated our society the genetic changes worked better with the 'modern' human gene then the Neanderthal. The Neanderthal experiment was terminated as a failure and allowed to die out while our gene line survived.
(putting away the tinfoil hat, now)
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Again? Are you kidding me? Even more new evidence has appeared showing that Bush was wrong and there was no WMD in Iraq?
God doesn't post on Slashdot.
What is he, too good for us? What a self-righteous bastard.
How do we know that Neanderthals are in fact a different species from Homo Sapiens? If we are discovering that they are in many ways extremely similar to humans, is it not possible that they are just another race of man that was killed off or died out in a catastrophe many years ago?
Even today, there is a wide variety in skeletal structures among humans. This is a fact that helps forensic scientists determine the identity of an individual from skeletal remains -- the race can usually be easily determined. While I do not condone racism in any way, it is verifiable that there are at least five distinct races of man.
If we had never heard of the Pygmy races and discovered a Pygmy burial site, would we be likely to conclude that the bones were from a separate species? How can we determine if a specimen is truly a new species just from bone samples? Could the Neanderthals even be a variation of one of the races that exist today?
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
The real advances that Homo Sapians made were in matters of social development. We have advanced so far not becuase anyu individual was smart enough to develop a new tool but becuase we are so good at learning things from other individuals. So we used the same tools as Neanderthals, but did we have better social skills?
Found him. God
Suppose that is an embarrassingly high number for a superbeing.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
ONE study does not "debunk" anything. A handful of studies don't even "debunk" something.
The way that word gets misused around here is infuriating. Newsflash people, a bunch of studies that agree with your position DO NOT debunk anything, especially when the opposing position also has research backing them.
The fact that a study you like or agree with exists does not magically make opposing research vanish.
What really sets us apart is our communication skills.
I'm not too sure about that. My daughter's cats understand me, but I have a very hard time understanding them. Seems to me their communications skills are better then mine. I've seen them argue verbally (although I have no clue what they're going on about) then fight tooth and claw.
We have no clue WTF the chirping birds are talking about, probably about how stupid we crippled (can't even fly) humans are, what with working our asses off instead of eating and fucking like an intelligent animal would.
So far, the only thing I see that makes us any different from other animals is humor. I wonder about that, too - what is the evolutionary use of laughter? How did laughter come about in the first place?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The problem with this theory is that prior to around 70k years ago (in some locales, possibly earlier), there's little evidence of any fundamental differences in social behavior. Of course, for bother Neandertals and moderns, we only have their remains, some tools, a few burials and the like to judge by, but when we compare these to sites that we know positively are from modern humans (both anatomically and behaviorally), the differences are clear. Prior to the great leap forward in whatever it was that made modern humans human in the way we are, there just didn't seem to be the same capacity for innovation, symbolic thinking, preplanning and culture. Neandertals and anatomically modern humans before this key evolutionary step showed only the rudiments of those key behaviors we find in every extant human population, whether Khoisan or Swedish, Australian Aborigine or Japanese Anu.
I suspect that the major innovation was some neural rewiring that was responsible for the rise of fully modern languages. I have little doubt that proto-languages had been around for a good chunk of Homo's history (maybe even earlier, and there's a good deal of evidence that other Hominidae like chimps and gorillas possess some proto-linguistic abilities), a fully evolved language is another entirely.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm not arguing that paleolithic tools are easy to make. They are complex, do demonstrate a substantial ability to visualize in some detail the finished product, and are, as you well know, very effective.
The problem is not in the technology itself, but rather in the fact that the various Paleolithic tool kits would remain static for tens of thousands of years. The innovation was glacially slow. You get to the Neolithic, and suddenly your seeing not just different tool kits, but entirely new tools. Your seeing items made that appear to have no real utility at all, or decorations on tools. There's a whole new world of symbolic thinking going on that, if you find it at all at earlier H. sapiens and H. neandertalis sites, is only incredibly rudimentary. You may be able to explain away arrow heads, but you can't explain away something like a fish hook.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
yes i do
NO SIG
I realize you're a troll but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
What evidence there is (which is highly questionable) is that white men are not the most intelligent thing going.
What you gave was a couple of random examples. This is not evidence. Also, Einstein was Jewish (not just in religion but also in race) so he wouldn't have counted as a white guy in the 19th century.
You do realize that the exact traits that allow us (or any other animal) to kick-ass/kill and survive in the wild are what you are referring to as "flaws"?
That Neanderthals were not stupid is not a new idea. Perhaps in popular culture they have been relegated to cave man status, but not in anthropological circles. As long as 40 years ago at least any standard textbook admitted, for example, that Neanderthal brains were bigger than those of modern man or Cro Magnon. This may be a statistical anomaly due to a smaller sample size, but it is still there. The stone tool kit has always had the best of praise. Although once in awhile someone would suggest Neanderthal's couldn't talk (an unlikely event) they have always been well-known for their burial practices which suggest high form thinking including religion. As one text book from 1965 said, "Put him in a Brooks Brothers suit and send him down to the supermrket for some groceries and he might pass completely unnoticed." It seems to me the entire premis of this article is flawed.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Some of us just get tired of this incessant and unresolvable baiting and bickering. And the long stupid rants by both sides of an unresolvable argument. You're wasting your time as well as everyone else's.
shouldn't the "evidence" be in quotations?
Actually we don't know that Homo Sapiens hunted down Neanderthals either.
Warfare only appeared in Homo Sapiens around the time we discovered bows and arrows, about 20,000 years ago, in Africa. It's hard to tell if that was cause or effect or just a spurious correlation, but suddenly we get mass graves of people with arrow heads embedded in their bones and cave paintings of groups of archers shooting at each other.
At any rate:
1. There is no evidence of warfare before that. Neither in Homo Sapiens, nor in Neanderthals.
2. By the time missile weapons arrived in Europe, the Neanderthals were going extinct on their own. The long decline in numbers and area had happened before that.
Vengeful we may be, but killing someone in melee is actually an extremely traumatic thing. Unless you're a sociopath, you're still wired like an animal to not kill members of the same species. Overcoming that is very traumatic. The Romans for example recognized that and rotated the rows of a legion, so the soldiers would get some time to recover in the middle of a fight. Ranged killing seems to actually be easier, and it puts a wall of plausible deniability between you and the victim. Maybe it wasn't your arrow that killed that guy, after all.
From there we learned to manipulate people and use group-think to make them kill each other even in melee. But it took an awfully long time to get there, and the Neanderthals were already extinct by then.
Furthermore, Neanderthals were, if you'll pardon the bad WoW metaphors, all survival-spec hunters. Melee hunters. _Everyone_ hunted with spears, including the women. And they seemed pretty capable to cooperate in a group. Plus, see that thing about using the women too. If someone actually managed to start a war back then between a tribe of Homo Sapiens and one of Neanderthals, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter would have had the upper hand.
Exactly why they went extinct... now that's still a good question.
One theory was that they were strictly carnivore and their prey was going extinct due to both climate change _and_ over-hunting. Another one is that they just couldn't compete with us. The Homo Sapiens were hunters _and_ gatherers, and could survive and continue hunting a species into extinction even past the point where predator-prey balance would normally allow the prey to rebound. The Neanderthals relying only on that prey, would have been royally shafted.
Me, I'm wonder if we didn't kill them sexually, so to speak. Consider the following:
A. See, one way to get a species of, say, insects extinct, is to release lots and lots of sterile males. If enough females of that species mate with those, the population drops very fast.
B. There seem to be _no_ genes we inherited from Neanderthals. Considering that the areas for us and them overlapped for thousands of years, I find it unlikely that _no_ horny male of one species wouldn't find a female of the other species attractive enough, or viceversa. I mean, so they were short and stout lasses with sloped foreheads. A lot of people screw worse looking women nowadays. And conversely going to the pub and getting laid by a neanderthal is still a tradition for some girls ;)
It is very likely that the offspring of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals were either sterile or non-viable. Plenty of closely related species produce sterile offspring when crossed. E.g., lion and tiger, horse and donkey, etc.
C. The sterile case is actually the funniest, because it may not be immediately obvious that it's a dead end. And in a lot of species such hybrids are bigger and stronger (a liger is twice the weight of a tiger, for example), so for a primitive sentient species it may even look like giving your children more chances of survival that way.
D. Both species had a chronic shortage of women, due to a life expectancy disparity. Death in birth or from resulting complications took a heavy toll.
So _if_ they were desirable enough (e.g., because Homo Sapiens tribes
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This was possibly the largest volcanic eruption during human existance.
Welcome to the notion of a superior human species touched by God. You kind of prove my point.
Hmmmmm. I sometimes wonder how some people would react to a stronger species if it actually came along. That's nothing like what was being implied as the strong and weak argument was at the heart of it (just what is it that made us strong, because it wasn't intelligence), but anyway, please continue.
Hmmmm. Let's wander off on a completely orthogonal bullshit tangent (whatever it is) and try and make myself look clever.
You might care to explain why that happened. The above is just simplistic bullshit we already know that explains nothing. There is a mechanism as to why that happened though, and why 'we' did it better than 'they' did, with a lot of towing and frowing as to why that was in the scientific world. You've added jack shit to that debate, but it's what I've come to expect from the current IQ level of the average Slashdotter these days (and modded insightful too!).
Check out the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel". The author makes a pretty convincing argument that the difference in development between different cultures is based primarily on how early each individual culture developed agriculture, which in turn is dependent more than anything else on how suitable the area they live in was for developing agriculture. For example, 5 out of the 6 large domestic animals and almost all of the worlds most productive crops are native to central Eurasia, and quickly spread throughout the rest of Europe and Asia. The sole other domesticated animal and many of the other productive crops were native to Central and South America, which at the time they were "discovered" by Europeans was home to the most advanced civilization outside of Eurasia. (In particular, they where the only civilization outside Eurasia to develop literacy.) On the other extreme, the most "primitive" of modern people are the Aboriginees of Australia, a continent that was almost completely unsuitable for basic agriculture, and the only continent where food production was never developed natively.
More to your point, "cooperation" (from a societal standpoint) only meaningly develops when a society has developed food production to the point where it can afford to have a large population of people who are dedicated to pursuits other than gathering food. The problem in Sub-Saharan Africa is that none of the civilizations had yet developed to that point (due to lack of native domesticable plants and animals) before the arrival of Eurasian influence. As a result, while they have access to Eurasian technology, they are still in many ways playing catch-up in the area of societal development. The difference in Africa versus the Americas and Australia was that in Africa the native population was left largely in place by European explorers, while in the Americas and Australia, the native populations were mostly replaced by settlers from Europe, who brought with them the enormous head start of Eurasian food processing and societal development.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
What about the late silicon-based tools? I think homo sapiens thrashes Neanderthals to a pulp on that one.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Why not? I certainly do it. God mods men who lie with men as "-1 abomination", and I meta-moderate god as full of shit.
I guess Geico will have to apologised to those Neanderthals. Perhaps a nice lunch will do?
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
Can anyone be stupider tham Homo sapiens?? I guess only Homo sapiens sapiens can....
Welcome to the notion of a superior human species touched by God.
"Hmmmm. Let's wander off on a completely orthogonal bullshit tangent (whatever it is) and try and make myself look clever."
You kind of prove my point.
You mean that I, as a member of one of the six self-aware (though by no means "as intelligent as us") species on this planet (and perhaps anywhere), using a tool that allows me to disagree with you from (potentially) the opposite side of the planet in mere milliseconds, demonstrate the non-superiority of a species that can, if it so chooses (and has in the past), eradicate any other single species (or for that matter, all of them)?
I suppose we'll have to just "agree to disagree" on that one. I won't claim the power of destruction as the greatest thing ever, but it sure as hell beats the other end of the stick.
I sometimes wonder how some people would react to a stronger species if it actually came along.
That particular drama has played out countless times throughout history, so we really don't need to wonder all that much - The weaker side fights back, loses, appeals to the stronger's mercy. If the stronger side has none, the weaker side ceases to exist, simple as that.
You might care to explain why that happened.
"Every morning, a gazelle wakes up knowing it must outrun the fastest lion, or be killed.
Every morning, a lion wakes up knowing it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or starve to death.
It doesn't matter if you are the gazelle or the lion: When the Sun comes up, you'd better be running."
That about do it for ya?
In the English language, the plural of virus is viruses.
Physicians and biologists say "viruses", but some geeks insist on using "virii" instead of "viruses". It probably started as a joke, but many geeks now believe that it is the correct word. My opinion is that they probably have a limited vocabulary outside the world of computers.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Third, open source is completely OFF TOPIC in this discussion!!
This sis Slashdot. Open source is always on topic. Just like bashing the RIAA.
I think you meant:
Off Topic? This Is SLASHDOT!
/me hangs head in shame
http://slashdot.org/~God ID# 5268
I dunno, sounds low to me.... of course, there could be as many as 5267 gods before him!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
at least until Russia and the USA start using some of those advanced nuclear tools they have fashioned.
I feel it is important to point out that Albert Einstein was not religious in any way shape or form. Despite numerous theists' attempts to twist the meaning of his words (such as "God does not play dice"), he was adamant throughout his life that he did not believe in any god.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Hundreds of Cavemen world wide are saying "Up Yours" to Geico
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I am not an Archaeologist, but....
I thought Neanderthals went extinct because they required more meat per individual than humans, and as a result did not reproduce as rapidly or successfully, and was just plain weeded out by humanity's viral nature.
For all we know they could have been much more intelligent than us in various ways, perhaps even having "super-powers" like infrared vision (night vision), brain electrical communication (telepathy), or super-human strength. None of those would have mattered though, when they starve faster than humans, and there are so many more of us. Even if they did not directly compete for environments, eventually they would lose out any way.
Maybe a more educated archaeologist can explain it in more detail:
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
"Although" would only be properly capitalized if there were a period before it; as the elipsis contoins only three dots, there isn't.
The elipsis, however, is a poor choice of punctuation.
Here's your sig.
Maybe they just haven't looked closely enough.
That beastie in Alien, the one that was supposed to scare the bejeebers out of you as some sort of paragon of mindless violence; it's just a variant of creatures that are commonplace right here. A little bigger than most perhaps.
The face-hugger thing wouldn't raise a compound eyebrow in the caterpillar world. They face that sort of parasitism every day. And killing things and eating them as fast as you can whether they are still alive or not is standard. You only bother killing them if their wriggling might be a problem.
Certainly, but he was ethnically Jewish. It's hard to find a time in history that the white men who consider themselves superior would include Jews in their number.
(the CIA had yet to invent AIDS)
[...]
You young fellows don't know what you're missing. Man, I really miss the stone age.
No offense, but based on the above comment, I don't really think you ever really left.
May have checked out, though.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Trying to prove there is no god I see.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Only because God doesn't post on Slashdot.
Not quite. ~God
Hm. Looks like he's got something better to do right now.
Ni.
You know, it's kinda funny. Neanderthals stagnated for hundreds of thousands of years, then gradually went extinct. Homo Sapiens stagnated for some 150,000 years, then nearly went extinct. Kinda makes you wonder what happens there. Sure, you can blame it on volcanoes and climate change, but I wonder if they didn't happen to discover management back then. I mean, I can imagine it:
ACT 1
Zog enters stage left, limping and with a bandaged foot.
Urg: Zog, what happened?
Zog: Gah. We went hunting mamoth with that idiot Hrgh again, and the retard still doesn't know which end of the spear goes forward. Put it right through my damned foot.
Urg: I thought we decided to send him to gather berries and mushrooms with the women.
Zog: Yeah, well, have you seen what he was trying to dump in the pot yesterday? The idiot had gathered poisonous mushrooms and goat droppings. Good thing Lana stopped him.
Urg: Damn. Sounds like him, though. I swear he's too stupid to piss holes in the snow.
Zog: I'm getting an idea, though. How about we make him chief? That way he stays in the cave and we can hunt safely.
Urg: Dude, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Surely we're not going to reward incompetence.
Zog: Then you go hunting mammoth with him tomorrow.
Urg: By the great spirits... ok, I see your point. I'll go convince the others.
ACT 2
The tribesmen are gathered around a fire, with chief Hrgh showing them some stick-figure paintings on the cave walls.
Hrgh: Week before I chief, tribe hunt 1 mammoth. See in this slide: 1 mammoth.
Points at a crude drawing of a few stick-figures with spears against a mammoth.
Zog: Chief, the good berries are ripe and the antelope migration started. Shouldn't we be out there hunting and gathering?
Hrgh: Me no like your attitude, Zog. You no good team member.
Zog: Right. Carry on.
Hrgh: Yes. Week after I chief, tribe hunt 2 mammoth. See slide 2: 2 mammoth.
Points at another crude drawing with more stick figures and 2 mammoths.
Zog: Yes, well, and two weeks before you were chief we hunted 3. Luck comes and goes.
Urg elbows Zog in the ribs.
Urg (under his breath): Dude, shut up. You want to go hunting with him again?
Hrgh: Silence! Me say at this rate, by next year tribe hunt big heap of mammoths each week. Because me great chief.
A few tribesmen clap politely. A few in the back shake their heads.
Hrgh: From now on, me not just Chief, me Chief Executive Officer. That how great chief Hrgh is.
ACT 3
Urg and Zog sit on a log, talking.
Urg: You know, that idea of yours seemed to work well. Sure, we have the least stored for winter in many years, but also no more accidents.
Zog: Told ya.
Lana enters from the right.
Lana: Guys, do you figure we could make Grarg some kind of chief too?
Zog: Oh, that retard. What's he done this time?
Lana: Fell into his own trap again, and scared the hunt too. But mostly I just don't have the heart to see him injured every other day.
Urg: Heh, well, as long as he only hurts himself...
Lana: Yes, well, last week he drew some sabertooth tigers to where Hrug was hiding.
Zog: Hmm, ok, but we can't have two chiefs.
Urg: Let's make him Chief Information Officer.
Lana: What the hell would that do?
Urg: Be in charge of paints and cave walls for Hrgh's presentations.
Zog: Heh. I like the way you think. Ok, let's go convince the guys. Lana, you talk to the women.
ACT 4
Hrgh: Dis time we hold meeting in new cave.
Zog: Not as much a cave as an indentation. Well, at least the light is better.
Hrgh: Yes. CIO tell me we need new cave, me buy dis one from Black Feet tribe.
Urg: Wait, wait... you _bought_ this... little place under an overhang?
Hrgh: I let CIO explain.
Urg (under his breath): This better be good.
Lana: Hush, guys.
Grarg: Well, see, the old cave was old technology. Painting on walls there was too slow and needed highly skilled people.
Zog: Heh. So basically you bought a new cave because you're bad at drawing?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The same as our ability to efficiently process and store food in anticipation of several days or scarcity was a survival advantage that is now a disadvantage. Different environments create different requirements.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
No. It's the same old meaningless bullshit claptrap that people masquerade on Slashdot as 'scientific discussion'. But, whatever. Yer, we know it's a case of strong versus the weak. However, the scientific discussion about our superior place on the planet revolves around just what it was that enabled us to be superior and be stronger, and on this evidence, it wasn't our outright intelligence.
There's a more interesting question with Neanderthals this raises here too.
Humans have enough problems with race as it is. Can you imagine had the Neanderthals actually survived to the modern era, being an entirely genuinely separate species?
The cultural and social effects of that would be fascinating, especially if they really were in fact equally intelligent. They might approach problems in hugely different thought processes that we can't even really envision right now, since we all share the same wetware fundamentally.
Now presume something like a human liger, or mule... healthy, intelligent, strong offspring between a human and and a Neanderthal that is unable to breed? Would religions and cultures proclaim them abominations? What would their perspective bring to society?
The optimist in me is fascinated by what could have been. The cynic in me is horrified at what would have happened.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
IIRC, some research by the philosopher of science Larry Lauden? showed that not to be so.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
Shouldn't "Although" be capitalized?
No, it shouldn't.