181–190 of 231 posts
I feel like either I am very confused about something, or the author is: > the population of humans dropped to as few as 50 individuals. Something terrible happened to the human race. > When did this population bottleneck occur? A number of teams have analyzed mutation rates to find out. The mutation rate in our Y chromosomes suggests the bottleneck occurred 37,000 to 49,000 years ago. Is the author really suggesting…
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We should be careful not to chastise people from the past from the viewpoint of our comfy and safe lives. It's easy to sneer at our ability to divide people into 'us' versus 'them' over meaningless differences, when it's not you worrying about a night raid where you get scalped and your wife raped.
Meh. The vast majority of people subscribed to some religion or another and all the major religions say don't do rape or murder. I think it's reasonable to point out the moral failings of the past relative to their own morality. Seems perfectly reasonable to say "these people did bad things". If you want to then go a step further and say "they did bad things because reasons" that's fine, but the bad things were still…
What I was trying to allude to is that it's easy to sit on our high horses and bash people from bygone times about how stupid they were for dividing people into 'we' and 'them' over minuscule differences, when they were mostly just faced with a simple choice - 'we' dead, or 'them' dead.
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That's kind of tricky considering how much stronger and more robust an average Neanderthal would have been compared to an average Sapiens.
They were approximately the same size as us. Shorter but wider and on the whole around the same weight.
The first comment on the substack links to this article, from 2010, that basically refutes this theory and this book. https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2010/10/killer-neandertal...
"Proves" and "refutes" are both pretty vague words in a historical context. In my experience when historians say "I will prove this to you" they typically mean "not only is it a good story, but unusually I have at least 1 piece of actual evidence". So in the loose world of history where nobody has any idea, maybe the idea is refuted. Realistically, probably both posts are wrong but we'll never know about which aspect…
Wow, that describes Internet posts (and HN comments), but it's utterly unlike the serious histories I've read, which are filled with primary evidence and incredible amounts of research, with the historians traveling around the world digging up new evidence in archives and museums.
If you want far better histories than what you've encountered, I suggest looking up the topic you are interested in on a college syllabus. The Open Syllabus Project[0], which collects millions of college syllabi and offers statistics too (most assigned, etc.) is a great resource. Or better, ask a reference librarian in the topic at a research library (e.g., a university) - I find they will often help people with recommendations if you are polite and show that you've made an effort to learn what you can without them.
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> there's no actually knowing anything, so we may as well pick whatever just-so story we like? What do you think is going on here? There isn't enough evidence to create an accurate truth, we've got no way of deciding if an accurate truth has been uncovered and it doesn't matter at all anyway. The process by which "truth" is found has a heavy bias towards good storytelling and typically strong political overtones. Do…
> What do you think is going on here? Well, to go by your prior comments, you're confusing "pick whatever just-so story you like" with how history is done. Feel free to continue, of course; I've more or less given up arguing with post-truthers in general, and certainly see no point in doing so here.
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This is what I thought when was evoked cannibalism: what if those were the traces of sapiens festing of neanderthalis (and not neanderthalis eating neanderthalis, as seems to be supposed in the text)?
As far as I understand Neanderthal genes in Humans don't actually exist in the Y chromosome. That means that only female Neanderthals transmitted their genes down the Sapiens gene tree. This could mean all sort of things. Maybe Neanderthal Males with Female Humans didn't generate viable off-spring. Maybe Our selection process favored non-Neanderthal genes and it was phased out of the Y chromosome gene pool? Maybe as…
That would be right if the only genes a man passes to his children are on the Y chromosome, but a man passes 23 chromosomes to every one of his children. (One of those 23 will be either an X or a Y.)
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Why not both? The Conquistadors had guns and steel armour and swords, versus the Mesoamericans' copper, bronze and obsidian weapons plus bows & atlatls. Technologically, the Spanish had the advantage, and won militarily. In addition, the indigenous population was ravaged by disease brought by the colonisers. Having better weapons is not an argument to ethnic superiority. It comes down to geography and history. The my…
That's interesting what you say about the wheel because the narrative I've heard is instead about gunpowder: the Conquistadores had gunpowder weapons that frightened the Aztecs and dispersed their armies without a fight, even though they had numbers on their side. I've also heard the same thing about horses: the Aztecs were afraid of horses and so broke and run at the sight of the Spaniards on horses. These are not v…
When these strange foreigners showed up and offered an alliance, their mysterious/inscrutable prowess (technology, foreign backing of unknown power, clear ability to ship in men and arms) helped give the rebels the confidence to give it a go.
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I always personally thought descriptions of Grendel were very much that of a silverback gorilla. Fangs, Fur, Loping gait, strength. Its a pretty good image.
grendel-as-neanderthals is actually the premise of a novel from the 1970s by michael crichton, eaters of the dead/the 13th warrior
Why do we have to posit non-human monsters as explanations for these myths? After all, there were (and still are) real monsters out there that would kill, rape, kidnap and torture people - people from other communities. Strange danger was serious business back in the day, why could that not evolve into all kinds of boogeymen?
That bloodshed, for that Cain slew Abel, the Eternal Lord avenged: no joy had he of that violent deed, but God drove him for that crime far from mankind. Of him all evil broods were born, ogres and goblins and haunting shapes of hell, and the giants too, that long time warred with God - for that he gave them their reward.
The original Old English text refers to the monsters as eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, swylce gigantas, and other translations seem to disagree on their meaning; however, orcneas meant evil spirits, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and to Tolkien (who was a leading scholar of Old English in his day job).[0]
(I assume you are not saying that "people from other communities" are actually monsters, but referring to historical ignorance.)
[0] If you can access the OED, see the entry for orc.
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They were approximately the same size as us. Shorter but wider and on the whole around the same weight.
Size and weight being the same doesn't mean they weren't far strong than homo sapiens. We are quite a bit bigger and heavier than chimps, but chimps are about twice as strong as a typical human.
The probable explanation is that they were extremely human in nearly all respects.