Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
That's stoned, not stupid :)
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
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?
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.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
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
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.
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.
Yes, but Neanderthals open sourced the design of their tools. Unfortunately, the designs are considered not as user-friendly and the better advertised homo sapien tools prevail. The good news is, I just read an article telling me that this is FINALLY The Year of Neanderthal Tools!
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.
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
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
Didn't get a low ID number and is now too embarrassed?
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.