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Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

science.org

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Re: Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

#121

Post by prawn »

whymememe wrote: post #112
mcv wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hunter-gatherer tribes had exactly that: time to just be. Their lives weren't governed by this rat race to always move up. Except for the harshest circumstances, they probably worked only 15 hours a week. Of course their play was partially training for that work, but I think in many ways, they lived more relaxing lives than we do. Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It…

I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual number of hours varies massively - seasonally and geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.

I'd bet that a lot of that in-camp work didn't feel excessively laborious when it was done while socialising within your group, and without a sense of "wish I was playing video games". Sitting around a camp fire now whittling away at something is more mucking around than chore.

Re: Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

#123

Post by [deleted] »

oceanplexian wrote: post #19
atleastoptimal wrote: post #13

350,000 years of just chilling, picking berries, you die in identical technological and cultural environment as when you were born. Now we got to be around when God is made in a data center

Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.

[deleted]

Re: Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

#125

Post by alsetmusic »

kelnos wrote: post #68
alsetmusic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages. They did. Natives didn't have agriculture: > It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late. The unfortunate t…

Commenter upthread said they "did not invent it quickly enough", as you quoted, which is not the same thing as "did not invent it". They just meant that the Native Americans invented it later than the Europeans did, such that the natives had less time to develop advanced (military) technology.

Do you really think that a process that was discovered repeatedly throughout the world was thousands of years behind on one side?

Edit: We're talking ~10k years difference.

Re: Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

#126

Post by poulpy123 »

Fokamul wrote: post #119

Seventy years ago, a scientist published a book about Neanderthals. According to his scientific opinion, they didn’t speak; they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to sleep early because they couldn’t see those gestures at night, lol. In my country, there is an area with archaeological sites of Neanderthal villages and their mammoth hunting grounds. In one area, there are thousands of mammoth bones…

> they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to sleep early because they couldn’t see those gestures at night, lol.

LMAO did he never saw a dog or a cat in is live ? They don't speak but can still use sounds to communicate

Re: Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

#127

Post by poulpy123 »

tren wrote: post #6
lobf wrote: post #3

I spent a year of high school in the Basque Country, and it always stuck out to me that a common feature of the Basques, especially the beefy ones, was incredibly caveman-like. I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderth…

My Dad wrote an article about this 25 years ago or so: https://aoi.com.au/LB/LB705/ (How the Neanderthals became the Basques). He would really get a kick out of people reading it (he's 90 now). His website goes back to 96' and it shows.

Sorry for your father but nothing in the article makes sense

Re: Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

#128

Post by eru »

mcv wrote: post #113
eru wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear war would be a major inconvenience, but it wouldn't nearly destroy the world.

Unless it's a very limited nuclear war, it would probably destroy the world as we know it , but that's a vague and flexible concept. It would likely destroy countries, societies, our way of life. Many people would die, but humanity would survive. Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.

I agree. My much more limited point was that we don't actually have enough nukes to glass the planet; but I could probably have made that more explicitly.

Re: Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

#129

Post by MadDemon »

jarjoura wrote: post #81
netcan wrote: post #61

>somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years, longer than modern humans have been on Earth. These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing. Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan diverg…

> Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. Heidelbergensis is the last common anscestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and us. We were all around for just as long, 400kya+, and before that, it was Homo Erectus. All of them, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens were walking around at the same time. There's plenty of fossil records we've uncovered that show that to be true.…

Did they really die out, or did the population just merge with modern humans? Most people on the planet have some Neanderthal DNA, so clearly there was some intermixing. If modern humans were a much larger population, it makes sense that the Neanderthals only contributed a small amount of DNA to the gene pool. I could imagine that they were just slowly absorbed into the much larger Sapiens population.
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