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Sounds plausible indeed. Anyways, neanderthals operating a large scale fat production 125 thousand years ago could be a good plot for another hollywood movie scenario. Any takers?
You might enjoy Hominids by Robert Sawyer
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Are you suggesting our brains are getting better? I find it far more likely that our improved education techniques and our skyrocketing access to information as being the cause.
I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.
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Are you suggesting our brains are getting better? I find it far more likely that our improved education techniques and our skyrocketing access to information as being the cause.
I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.
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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.)
It kind of was, and one of the people you can thank for that is Norman Borlaug.
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> TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators All humans are. Neanderthals, Sapiens, modern humans, we are all apex predators. > occasionally raped human women The article doesn't suggest that. While it's plausible, there's also evidence of Sapien/Neanderthal cooperation and mingling: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.h... And lets not forget that all homin…
There is however a suggestion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Interbreeding > According to Svante Pääbo, it is not clear that modern humans were socially dominant over Neanderthals, which may explain why the interbreeding occurred primarily between Neanderthal males and modern human females. Unless read as suggesting "Neanderthal males were hugely charismatic"?
The answer isn't necessarily rape...
This 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... ).
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
It is a curious effect, I agree, I'd like to know why it was so, but probably I will not know for sure (I'm a big fan of a scientific method, but I don't believe it is up to a task), and so I personally prefer just ignore it.
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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.
Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.
Global food surplus.
The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...
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They were hunting elephants. It's quite clear that they weren't being forced to subsist on small herbivores.
"rabbit starvation" refers to a diet of mostly lean protein, deficient in fat. So much so that it results in malnutrition. Eating nothing but rabbits is one way to get it, but is not really about "subsisting on small herbivores". It's the fact that the meat is very lean, not fatty. Apparently "mal de caribou" is the same thing, and Caribou / Reindeer are not small.
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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 wit…
However, in this thread, we were discussing "the typical racist's use of IQs". Nobody was "arguing that IQ isn't real": you brought that up, unprompted. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
[1]: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan...