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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)

#121

Post by wildzzz »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #100
nullorempty wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we got smarter in the last 20+ years. Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.

I'm in Alberta (Canada), and I just saw some in the grocery store last week. I actually can't recall ever seeing a store without 3.25% milk here. It's usually called "homo(genized) milk" rather than "whole milk", but those two phrases both mean the exact same thing.

Whole refers to the fat content and homogenized refers to a process used to better suspend the fat in the milk to prevent separation. Almost all milk you buy is probably homogenized. They don't technically mean the same thing but if the only thing you see is homogenized on the container, it's probably whole milk.

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

#123

Post by mapt »

retsibsi wrote: post #111
roysting wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.

Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.

Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).

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

#124

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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?

Not necessarily, it could also mean that homo sapiens was just more successful - better fed, bigger population, etc. It's not likely that early sapiens was so organized that they intentionally genocided neanderthals, it's more like they were subsumed etc. A slow process across thousands of years.

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

#125

Post by Cthulhu_ »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #60
peacebeard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common misconception, more likely outcompeted

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

Depends on whether they were considered competing, and whether "we" were as organized, single-minded and competitive as this statement seems to imply - "we" probably weren't, not until larger kingdoms and empires started forming ~4000 years ago.

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

#126

Post by dzonga »

Epa095 wrote: post #5
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

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.

the 'IQ' people conveniently ignore how the IQ test is such a poor measure for intelligence & resourcefulness

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

#127

Post by djaro »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #120
sokoloff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is such a thing as general intelligence which differs between different people. Arguing that IQ isn't real because IQ tests are imperfect, is like arguing in the year 1500 that temperature isn't real because all thermometers are imperfect.

Our lack of ability to precisely measure something does not mean the underlying thing is not real. There is such a thing as general intelligence which correlates strongly with almost every type of performance and life outcomes.

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

#128

Post by pixel_popping »

scott01 wrote: post #103
nullorempty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Going fat-free will ruin your health and energy, going sugar-free will only improve it.

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

#129

Post by deafpolygon »

nomilk wrote: post #70
deafpolygon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in there. > At this location, researchers found that Neanderthals not only broke bones to extract marrow but also crushed large mammal bones into tens of thousands of fragments to render calorie-rich bone grease through heating them in water.

AFAIK Neanderthals didn't have clay pots - how would they hold the water to heat it and put the bone pieces in? EDIT: I asked claude and it doesn't know for sure but guessed "stone boiling into an organic container — animal stomach, hide, or a bark vessel — remains the most plausible explanation for how they heated the water."

They can use skulls of animals, shells of tortoises in direct heat (though not in direct flame). If they were harvesting megafauna like elephants, presumably their skulls are large. It's not implausible to assume that they were capable of controlling heat to the point where they can get the amount of heat needed to boil just water/heating up water to get marrow out.

Animal stomach, bladder can be heated to boil water indirectly (fire to heat stone, stone to heat said vessel).

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

#130

Post by contubernio »

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…

Most likely scenario is a more aggressive, bloodthirsty, violent species of comparable intelligence came along ...
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