Mystery Humans Spiced Up Ancients' Sex Lives

ananyo writes "New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these 'archaic' groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known. The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia. 'What it begins to suggest is that we're looking at a 'Lord of the Rings'-type world — that there were many hominid populations,' says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work."

Comments

Re:Human Relatives

[hey!]

We also have compassion, cooperation and communication. Those are the "killer features" of human behavior, the things that make us the most adaptable animal species ever. These are such fundamental features of what it means to be human that it's easy to take them for granted.

You mention enslavement, pillage and plunder, and those make my point. Until you have built a society beyond small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, slavery makes no sense. Pillage and plunder as well are meaningless until your species has at least developed agriculture, and the social ability to band together to attack people who have converted agricultural surplus into property.

But in the end it isn't about being nice, it's about being adaptable. Being nice -- the things that make others want to spend time with us and cooperate with us -- just happens to be the best basic pattern for building a species with maximum behavioral adaptability. But it makes sense that we ALSO retain the ability to be not-nice. From time to time it's useful for survival -- just less than the 100% of the time that social Darwinists would have us believe. There are times when turning on your neighbor at least ensures someone from the neighborhood survives.

It's a tautology: a behaviorally adaptable species manifests many different kinds of behaviors. So it seems plausible that our distant ancestors made both love AND war with the other human species on the planet.

Remember, though: it was a much less populated planet in the Early Paleolithic. Even in the more populated Late Paleolithic period there were fewer people in the whole world than there are in the Portland OR metropolitan area today. There were maybe 3000 in all of Europe. If in all that underpopulated land you happened to meet another band of humans, which would be better for your genetic legacy? Exchanging genes or exchanging attacks? Screwing or stoning?