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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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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.
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?
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.
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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While I would certainly like to believe that, and held to that belief for many years, mtDNA and nuclear DNA evidence seems to point in the other direction. Certainly, there is always more evidence that can be collected, but most of the good genetic evidence indicates that H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis were/are distinct, though related, species. See, for example, Sequencing and Analysis of Neanderthal Genomic DNA.
Rhapsody in Numbers
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
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.
...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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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"Neanderthal" is the correct spelling. However, it is German, so it is pronounced as you spell it.
Rhapsody in Numbers
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!
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.
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?
It is not so much inconclusive as it is a matter of how you define "species." Generally, among animals, species are distinct populations that do not/cannot interbreed. Because, as you say, we cannot get access to non-osteological anatomical data or behavioural data (beyond inferential data from tools and burials), we are forced to rely upon genetic data to see how well this definition fits. This evidence indicates that the Neanderthal and anatomically modern human lines split before the rise of anatomically modern humans, and that there is no Neanderthal DNA running around today in human populations. If they were the same species (i.e. they were capable of and did interbreed), we would expect to see Neanderthal DNA in the modern line of humans, and we would not expect the split to be so far back. This would seem to imply that H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis are/were different species, about as conclusively as anything in genetics/paleo-genetics.
That being said, nothing in science is ever entirely conclusive -- everything is tentative.
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.
I think there's no other possible explanation for our horrific sense of fashion and penchant for shiny metal objects.
I guess you haven't seen the gangsta rap crowd walking around with their pants half way down their asses and 50 pounds of bling around their necks.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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 is, actually, a possible speciation event. Remember, it is "do not/cannot" interbreed, not simply "cannot." If there are geographical or behavioural reasons that members of a population cannot interbreed, then they are generally considered different species. The problem is that species is such a nebulous concept, and there are not clear lines between them. While the lines are clearer in the animal kingdom (plants and microbes are very hard to clearly pin down), there are still things like ring species that muddy the waters in the animal kingdom. So, again, it comes down to how you define "species," and what evidence you require to make the distinction.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Didn't get a low ID number and is now too embarrassed?
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
*worships*
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.
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.
The Creationists are the ones with no point to stand on. They have yet to present a single iota of verifiable scientific evidence for their wild claims.
Biologists, on the other hand, have endless reams of evidence.
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!).
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.
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.