Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54k years ago at Mandrin • Hacker News Board

Re: Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54k years ago at Mandrin

#101

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Feb 11, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #97

soperj wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Europe didn’t send its best people, but disease, better weapons and toxic politics carried the age. It was mostly disease. The muskets at the time were tragic. A properly trained infantry soldier could fire at most 4 rounds per minute.

The muskets (arquebuses) used by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century were even slower than that. They were lucky to fire 2 rounds per minute. But they also had crossbows, steel weapons, armor, and horses — as well as tactical doctrine which completely outclassed any of the primitive New World civilizations. But disease did wipe out the majority of their adversaries, so they had a relatively easy time dealin…

Also horses. I wouldn’t envy a soldier with a stone/mica blade facing a mounted, armored cavalryman with a steel sword.

Re: Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54k years ago at Mandrin

#102

Post by AvocadoPanic » Fri, Feb 11, 2022, 8:14 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #90

AvocadoPanic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence for statisticly significant increases in IQ that persist into adulthood as a result of education? Success in education is correlated with high IQ. Much the same way high IQ is correlated with many forms of success.

Education does actually raise IQ. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29911926/ …Whatever that means. It's meaningless to say fluid intelligence can't be improved with education, that's a tautology.

... we did not identify any studies that tested whether these effects persisted into adulthood. These estimates should thus be regarded with caution.

Re: Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54k years ago at Mandrin

#103

Post by int_19h » Fri, Feb 11, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

HappyDreamer wrote: post #52

Juliate wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence is also highly context-specific. Context today is not the same for the average human 200 years ago, even more different 2000 or 20k years ago. I'm not sure high IQ people from today would make it far in more ancient times, and not because smarter or dumber, but only because they are unadapted.

> Intelligence is also highly context-specific It's not though. It's the opposite, and that's what makes it interesting, and why it's being measured. The g factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) General intelligence is related to the ability to learn new things in general, no matter the context. And today's humans, would, if they got to start as babies 20k years ago, learn all there was to kno…

If today's humans got to start as babies 20k years ago, their IQ as adults would be correspondingly lower due to poor nutrition while growing up.

Re: Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54k years ago at Mandrin

#104

Post by int_19h » Fri, Feb 11, 2022, 10:39 PM UTC

robbedpeter wrote: post #35

ivanhoe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly didn't treat other humans anything different. In those days "us" meant the tribe or family group. Everyone else was "them", sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, depending on the situation, resource scarcity and the power of both sides. And those were the violent times, so when there was no enough food for everyone, competition (whether it's human, neanderthal or animal) had to be either scared away or d…

It's important not to underestimate the intellectual life of ancient cultures. They were humans, with language, and probably had music, stories, traditions, religion, conflict, politics, and more. Methods of oral traditions have been identified that are essentially equivalent to modern memory athlete techniques, hundreds of thousands of factoids could be transferred with very little "bitrot" over generations. There a…

We are a lot less violent on average, though. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to war a lot. We don't see it as high-intensity conflict because of the low casualty numbers and lack of pitched battles. But when you look at it as percentage of the overall population, it turns out to be worse than our worst conflicts.

(To be clear, not all hunter-gatherer societies are like that. Some are more peaceful than others, and there are extremes like the Moriori. But the average is what it is.)