Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by netcan » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

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.…

Heidlebergensis is no longer thought to be on the sapiens lineage. It's probably the ancestor of neanderthals and denisovans. 400kya is around the time of this divergence, based on recent genomics. They were the same species at this time.

The Sapiens lineage is now thought to have diverged significantly earlier.

Erectus existed, but in pockets.

Other lineages existed also. At the very least, Homo naledi. Probably other dwarf lineages, an African "ghost lineage" and probably others.

Neanderthals and denisovans are structured... With subspecies, hybrid zones and whatnot.

There are also many sapiens lineages with no descendants. Most of them.

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

#172

Post by IAmBroom » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #137

prawn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure sitting around a campfire and whittling away at something now feels more like mucking about than chore, because it is. You don’t actually need whatever it is you’re whittling. It would probably be less relaxing if your survival depended on your handiwork.

I have friends who handweave clothes, blacksmith tools, and of course garden for food for their families.

The stakes are lower, but not the work level required, and they all do it for funzies, essentially.

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

#173

Post by AndrewKemendo » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

IAmBroom wrote: post #169

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes tons of research There were multiple waves out of Africa but Most early anatomical human groups never left Africa as a result, there’s more DNA diversity within the continent than outside Africa Its confusing because the non-african group grew exponentially while the intra-African continent continued to mature The anatomically modern humans that left Africa spread rapidly and aggressively across the world basical…

Wow, so many judgments and racist descriptions in one paragraph attempting to describe scientific knowledge.

Everything typed above has empirical basis

Feel free to investigate each claim independently and come to your own conclusions

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

#174

Post by macintux » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

prplxd_nihilist wrote: post #140

The females in this article look exactly like modern age humans, the males have these long beard but apart from that there is no visible change in the looks. Far different from what we used to see depicting neanderthals. Is that AI generated?

Looks like those are stock illustrations for "cavemen". You can see more from the studio that created them:

https://www.dreamstime.com/gorodenkov-more-popular-photos

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

#175

Post by t-3 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #166

eru wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour, but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed of scraps or whatever they find around the house and garden. In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.

In North America, deer eat acorns, but apparently are not suitable for domestication.

Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have also been domesticated as beasts of burden across northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer) population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other, larger, native species like moose are usually considered too big and too aggressive to tame.

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

#176

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

Glyptodon wrote: post #2

I know even with humans pre-modern populations were drastically smaller, but it's still just astounding to me how small of a population size it seems like Neanderthals had.

FWIW the populations weren't actually as small as a lot of these articles (including about human bottlenecks) allege in the popular press. This comes from a knowledge gap in the public compared to a biologists understanding here. The biologists are talking about effective population size (1) in most all these cases. This is an idealized sort of population size based on the idea of using the smallest possible population size that can fully capture the observed genetic diversity. It makes sense to use this measure, considering you are never fully sure how large a real population can be beyond its effective population size. So you just use the effective population size and implicitly acknowledge its assumptions.

This is well past HS biology though so popular press just skips that nuance and equates it to true population size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size

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

#177

Post by hax0ron3 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

Saline9515 wrote: post #156

jarjoura wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive. Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks. You would never feel like you have time to just, be. Instead you're focused on getting your next meal, and finding a place to sleep. It only took a few ice-ages to force us to get smart about how we organize and then here we are.

On the upside they weren't stressed about the new "Grunt Hunt" models by Neanderthalic, which are likely take away all of the entry-level hunting jobs in the tribe.

Yeah but eventually they were stressed by Homosapiensthalic

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

#178

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

razorbeamz wrote: post #80

Perhaps some cultures' stories about "wild men" are about Neanderthals. Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.

Could also just be someone with mental illness ostracized from society at the time.

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

#179

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

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.

>His website goes back to 96' and it shows.

The thing loaded instantly. What a breath of fresh air in 2026. Hats off to Dad.

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

#180

Post by underlipton » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

hoppp wrote: post #147

MadDemon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Africa most people don't have Neanderthal DNA however in Europe probably everyone has. (I have no idea about Asia, maybe somebody can chip in) I think they probably mixed in and we just became one, sort of

That's a common misconception that turned out to not be true.

https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-surpr...

It also doesn't hold for the African Diaspora, especially in the Americas (and probably flowing back into Africa as we speak). It's also worth considering that many of the actual traits that Neanderthal-associated genes codes for probably have analogues in the much-wider African genome.