Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

universiteitleiden.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 179 posts

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#101

Post by sokoloff »

cwnyth wrote: post #42
sokoloff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Precisely why is this hard to square away?

If the measured cognitive abilities of a typical 2000-era Homo sapiens are statistically significantly different from 1900-era Homo sapiens, to me that casts some doubt as to how likely similar a 125K years ago and since out-competed species was.

Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?

(This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#102

Post by card_zero »

dismalaf wrote: post #54
peyton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think especially given TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators who occasionally raped human women. I don’t much believe the friendly smiling museum depictions that have lately become fashionable. Their eyes alone would have made them something you didn’t want to run into at night.

> TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators All humans are. Neanderthals, Sapiens, modern humans, we are all apex predators. > occasionally raped human women The article doesn't suggest that. While it's plausible, there's also evidence of Sapien/Neanderthal cooperation and mingling: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.h... And lets not forget that all homin…

There is however a suggestion here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Interbreeding

> According to Svante Pääbo, it is not clear that modern humans were socially dominant over Neanderthals, which may explain why the interbreeding occurred primarily between Neanderthal males and modern human females.

Unless read as suggesting "Neanderthal males were hugely charismatic"?

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#103

Post by scott01 »

nullorempty wrote: post #13
irdc wrote: post #2

This pairs nicely with the recent publications around Neanderthal cognitive abilities and how there likely similar to ours ( https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/neanderthal-brains-m... ).

[flagged]

It’s convenient to buy fat-free products to lower caloric density of everyday food. Given mostly sedentary lifestyle, maintaining healthy caloric intake is pretty hard, and limiting fats (not only fat-free dairy, but also lean meats) and sugars really helps. Note limiting, not excluding — going extreme fat-free is definitely bad for health, and it also takes huge effort compared to just limiting.

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#104

Post by sokoloff »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95
sokoloff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it. Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted? Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important. Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their…

It seems obvious that IQ test scores can be improved with interventions and further that actual [as opposed to measured] general intelligence can be affected by environmental factors that shape whether the brain develops under good, neutral, or damaging conditions (nutrition, sleep, language usage, stress, etc.).

With all the energy that's been spent on the topic, I'm slightly surprised that this isn't entirely settled by now and any opposing view being relegated to fringe/flat-earth territory.

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#105

Post by Qem »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95
sokoloff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it. Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted? Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important. Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their…

> Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

The ban on leaded petrol probably also helped.

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#106

Post by namenotrequired »

jbotz wrote: post #53
askos wrote: post #46

Fascinating. Considering the industrial scale fat production that the neanderthals managed to operate according to this article, it makes me wonder even more whether we still understand why exactly they went extinct in 80 thousand years later.

The answer that seems to be emerging from several different lines of research is that a) they always had fairly low fertility and b) they didn't really go extinct as such, they just intermixed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and because the later had much higher fertility, Neanderthal genes got diluted down to the present ~2% in the Eurasian population.

I thought even after the merge the Neanderthal genes continued to get rarer, indicating natural selection against them

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#107

Post by sokoloff »

Qem wrote: post #105
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it. Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted? Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important. Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their…

> Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted? The ban on leaded petrol probably also helped.

The timeline doesn't match.

The Flynn Effect covers from around 1930s to 1980s and the phase out of leaded gasoline happened during the very end of that timeline, meaning adolescent IQ measurements during the time the Flynn Effect covers would have all been raised in an environment where leaded fuel was either dominant or at least common.

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#108

Post by newsy-combi »

russellbeattie wrote: post #25

Here's something random about "Neanderthal". The word comes from the Neander Valley (Neander-thal) where their fossils were originally discovered. It was named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century German pastor. Neander is a latinization of his family name Neumann, meaning "new man". So not only did we discover a new type of man in a valley named new man, but the computers that are used for artificial intelligence (…

Wait till you find out we live in a Von Neumann Universe

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#109

Post by bonesss »

egeozcan wrote: post #58
peacebeard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common misconception, more likely outcompeted

Doesn't outcompete include murder? We are a very tribal species, and the history is full of genocides and mass murders, so from a very uneducated viewpoint, this sounds reasonable. If not that, is it that we depleted the resources they depended on?

Outcompeting includes murder, rape, war, and cannibalism. But we have population overlap for millennia, so that’s kinda factored into numbers.

All primates are resource competing, so outcompeting is also drinking up their milkshakes. But, again, that’s the baseline.

Non-conclusively, from my lay understanding, the tail end of falls into general bi-lateral competitive practices and breeding rates leading to ‘us’ not ‘them’. All columns all the time, not one crisp incident or behavioural change.

[And there’s no indication that ‘they’ geno-rapo-ate us any less than we them… if being slightly better at mass murder was the difference, then yay for our side?]

Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

#110

Post by Qem »

shevy-java wrote: post #87

That also must mean that Neanderthals must have been very clever, early on. We already knew they were clever, but 125.000 years ago is really pushing that further. Now the main question is still why and how they went extinct. We have some pieces of the puzzles (mitochondrial DNA found in human mitochondrial DNA) but not a complete picture yet (or, somewhat more complete; we can obviously never reconstruct all pieces…

Perhaps they were very smart, but also they were all autistic[1], so they had poor social skills and had a hard time coordinating large groups against encroaching H. Sapiens Sapiens tribes.

[1] https://communities.springernature.com/posts/neanderthal-dna...

Post reply on HN