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

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

#181

Post by hax0ron3 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #110

hax0ron3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer. I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.

Around 90% of the people died of plagues. It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues. Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.

I agree that if the disease luck had gone the other way and a large fraction of Europe had died of disease then it's possible the Native Americans would have remained unconquered. If the disease factor was just taken out of the equation completely, I think the Native Americans would have been conquered, simply because of the great European advantage in technology. But the conquest would have looked more like England's colonization of India, and many more of the native cultures would probably have had a chance to evolve and assimilate modern technology, like India's cultures did, rather than just going extinct.

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

#182

Post by hax0ron3 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #98

tyre wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations. 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 arr…

The Americas were always going to be behind Euro Asia due to the shape of the continents. Going North-South you get big changes in climate and thus agricultural techniques and plants. Civilizations in the Americas could have spent thousands of years in a grow and bust cycle and never reach a similar level of development as the old continent.

The East-West thing probably does confer an advantage, but it might be overstated. I'm not sure that the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesopotamia and Europe was actually any smaller than the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesoamerica and North America.

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

#183

Post by tsoukase » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

paulnpace wrote: post #143

chmod775 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some food for thought: Something like that was their normal and they likely had all of these sorted out with relative ease, given that they'd be experts at that kind of living. Also wild food sources were plentiful. Overall they may have enjoyed more downtime than us, who have to do quite a bit to maintain our higher standards of living. Estimates are that hunter-gatherers "worked" around 20 hours / week to su…

I have wondered if animal husbandry played a larger role than agriculture, alone. The horse, as we know it, altered all of civilization.

Fire, pets, electronic chips, all advanced human civilisation step by step in different stages. It's hard to estimate the relative importance of each.

Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all these are means for achieving higher goals. How many people think about that today? Quantity is not followed by quality.

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

#184

Post by underlipton » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

Auracle wrote: post #57

AJMaxwell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared. IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.

I never understand the “lack of animals to domesticate” angle. They did domesticate animals, such as the llama and alpaca. More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…

The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement, because it did take place, but took a very different form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior) adapted other parameters they could control to the natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations.

E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...

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

#185

Post by poncho_romero » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

Vespasian wrote: post #94

razorbeamz wrote: post #80

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

Without being an expert that still seems very unlikely to me. The epic was written around 2000 BCE which was well over >> 10k years after agriculture and more than 4 times that much after neanderthals died out. It's possible but much more likely that they refer to something more contemporary. There are always "wild men" around no matter who you ask.

I believe Enkidu also became much more wild over time. In Against the Grain the author suggests earlier tellings of Gilgamesh presented Enkidu as unusual, but human. When the same story was being recorded a thousand years later, he was a monster. If the story was preserving some ancient memory about Neanderthals, such significant change seems unlikely.

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

#186

Post by astrobe_ » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

One thing that confused me in TFA is that it says that "[neanderthals were] maybe a couple of thousand breeding individuals", yet they were enough to inter-breed with sapiens at some point(s) [1]. In my mind, tribes of "far-flung populations of just a few dozen individuals" would be shy and difficult to find.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics

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

#187

Post by tim333 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

hax0ron3 wrote: post #7

It's wild to think how long very human-like beings and modern humans existed before the technological revolution really took off. Hundreds of thousands of years of existing on the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of hides, and fire. Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow. Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlock…

There seems a bit of an acceleration ~ 50-100k years from evolving brains similar to modern ones to agriculture, ~8k year from there to writing, ~4k to the printing press, ~400 till computers, ~40 till the web and so on. Each of those has kind of speeded intellectual progress and AI will probably be another speeding up.

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

#188

Post by AlotOfReading » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #171

jarjoura wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

We shouldn't use the word "species" lightly with hominins. There's no accepted way to properly classify archaic humans.

For example, some paleoanthropologists classify most archaic humans as h. sapiens. Anatomically modern humans become h. s. sapiens, neanderthal become h. s. neanderthalensis. This incorporates the middle pleistocene hominins from mainland Asia pretty well to boot. Many of those same people also use the "conventional" binomial terminology when they're not making a very specific point, so you can't just look at usages to understand where they're coming from.

There's also a hundred other classifications, some giving neanderthals their own species, others including it with heidelbergensis, and so on. None of them has clearly "won" and probably won't while we keep publishing "new" transitional forms every couple of years.

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

#189

Post by kabaka » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #164

ralferoo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any research about why Sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have Neanderthal DNA? Is the argument that the tribe of humans from Africa was good at repelling outside invaders, but themselves expanded outwards and assimilated (and then outnumbered) the other populations, or something else? It just seems a bit bizarre given that all humans elsewhere have relatively similar amounts (but quite a low amount) of Neanderthal…

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…

Why was this downvoted?

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

#190

Post by whymememe » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #163

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.

Exactly. I don't think there really was a clear separation between work and not-work back then. It's just life. Consider wild animals: do they work?

Yeah pretty much, it’s a pretty tough to pinpoint what work actually is without paid labour.