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

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

#111

Post by retsibsi »

roysting wrote: post #85
jibal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong and confused in every possible way. Look up the Flynn effect ... it refers to an actual change in performance. That the scores on a given IQ test are occasionally renormalized so that the mean is 100 has no bearing on whether "IQ is a statistical distribution", whether intelligence or whatever the heck IQ measures can be measured absolutely, or on the validity and meaning of the previous statements by E…

I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise. It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”. Maybe if we are a bit more ge…

Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.

It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."

This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)

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

#112

Post by nobodyandproud »

peyton wrote: post #40
dismalaf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are numbers everything? Are sardines more evolved than whales? Anyhow, the traditional view is that Neanderthals were brutes who were actually out-competed and killed off by Sapiens. The more realistic view considering the evidence is that Neanderthals were much closer to Sapiens, equally or even more sophisticated, but less numerous, and thus their contribution to our DNA is smaller than Sapiens. But do keep in mind…

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.

I kind of agree. Though the old, brutish yet stupid was also likely wrong and more for self-comfort as a species.

Tangent and thought experiment: If we could re-engineer a viable population of neanderthals, should we?

If we further gave them the full gamut of modern knowledge and tools, and even a nation-state suitable for them what would be the outcome?

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

#113

Post by bonzini »

sokoloff wrote: post #101
cwnyth wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.

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

#114

Post by ant6n »

alanbernstein wrote: post #93
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 (…

As they say, history rhymes

Isn’t that what George Lukas said about Star Wars?

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

#115

Post by ant6n »

beezlewax wrote: post #52
sandworm101 wrote: post #41

Question: why do we know this was about food? Bones are boiled for other reasons. Boiling down bones is how you make basic glue. Could this have been something more industrial, the creation of a useful ingredient for weapon making?

Soup

Soap, soup, goop

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

#117

Post by bonzini »

namenotrequired wrote: post #106
jbotz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If it's 2% now after 2000-3000 generations, it must have stabilized because any number <.995 is basically zero when raised to the 2000th power. The neanderthal genes would have to be 1-10^-5 as fit as a the sapiens genes, which is basically noise.

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

#118

Post by wazoox »

dyauspitr wrote: post #65
echelon wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.

But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.

The minuscule sample of tools we have are more primitive, but we don't have any examples of their wooden tools, nor any trace of most of their activities, languages, rites, etc. They could have invented animal husbandry and wool spinning and build awesome wooden cities and we have no way to know because everything would have disappeared without a trace, crushed by glaciers of later ages. We know almost nothing of them.

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

#119

Post by prmoustache »

peacebeard wrote: post #72
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think we would have let a competing species exist?

Lions, bears, wolves, etc all survived us

Barely and only because some of use decided to protect them.

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

#120

Post by wizzwizz4 »

sokoloff wrote: post #104
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…

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 settl…

I don't see why it's surprising: IQ is one of the few tools that modern scientific racists have in their toolbox. One wouldn't expect them to let such trifling concerns as "evidence" and "testable models with successful predictions" take that away from them.
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