If I enable reader mode on this article on my iPhone, I get an AI summary instead of the article text. I’d it the sure doing that or my phone? I hate it either way as there’s no way to read the article in reader mode
Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
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Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#12university of leiden is a great institution and i am blessed for having studied there despite dropping out!
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#13This 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... ).
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Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#14Earlier 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
Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence.
If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence. If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.
For any given IQ test, the norming sample is taken once. So if everyone gets twice as smart as before, everyone's IQ, as measured by any existing IQ test, would go up.
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence. If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.
True, but irrelevant.
Or, false and irrelevant.
People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#17“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firstly, this is completely orthogonal. But it's also improper reasoning. If Neanderthal had bigger brains (they did) or had different cognitive abilities, there's a chance they were baseline smarter than homo sapiens at the time. Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.
> Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play. Considering most human groups have a % of Neanderthal DNA, they didn't exactly lose... Based on the % of Neanderthal vs. Sapien DNA, it seems Neanderthals were simply outnumbered.
What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play. Considering most human groups have a % of Neanderthal DNA, they didn't exactly lose... Based on the % of Neanderthal vs. Sapien DNA, it seems Neanderthals were simply outnumbered.
What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?
Ants won over humans? Worms?
Re: Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
#20Do we know how many people were in the community? Maybe I missed it in the article? 2000 people worth it food a day is hard to put into perspective otherwise. Though it's all very impressive regardless