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

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

#201

Post by selimthegrim »

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.

You might want to read about the Chadian introgression for the exception.

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

#202

Post by eru »

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.

I think plenty of animals eat acorns. It's just that humans can't really do much with them.

I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.

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

#203

Post by chmod775 »

jarjoura wrote: post #198
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…

One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer. It would have been especially horrific if you broke your foot or leg and weren't able to do anything about it. Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth. How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel. Mosquitos carri…

> One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer.

Yes, people back then suffered a lot of broken bones, even fractured skulls. But just like their bones tell that story, we also know that they often survived those injuries and their broken bones (and even skulls!) healed. People lived in groups and cared for injured.

Also a scratch is probably not going to kill you. It could, but likely won't.

> Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.

Going after the children of an organized group of apex predators is probably not going to end well for the attackers.

And yes, sometimes women died in childbirth, but not that often (otherwise you wouldn't be here to type that). Also there's still a decent risk of that if you live in the US.

> Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.

Extremely rare on a hunter-gatherer diet. Our ancestors lost the ability to produce their own vitamin C internally millions of years ago, because they just didn't need it. Most other mammals still can.

> Mosquitos carried pathogens

Human-adapted mosquitos hadn't evolved to the degree they have today, so bites would have been much rarer, but pathogens causing fun diseases such as malaria did already exist.

> the other food sources were also of random quality.

You mean the food sources we evolved to consume? Are you talking about parasites? Most of the nasty ones really only started becoming an issue when humans gave them breeding grounds in their settlements.

> If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.

I guess?

> I could keep going on,

Please don't. You are clearly just guessing and making stuff up as you go.

That said, of course hunter-gatherer life was much riskier than modern life, but that was just their normal. Hedonic adapation and all that.

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

#204

Post by jandrewrogers »

Retric wrote: post #46
jandrewrogers wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK. We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This…

1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire. Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far fro…

It is interesting precisely because we know it wasn’t smallpox and we know it killed a large portion of the native population in places like Mexico. 1545 was just the first year the disease was documented by Europeans. There have been a dozen epidemics of this into the 19th century and then it just disappeared, long before smallpox was eradicated. It also didn’t spread indiscriminately across North America, it was correlated with specific types of environments.

The particular epidemics in question killed both natives and Europeans. Furthermore, the manifestation of the disease was unfamiliar to the Europeans.

You are assuming facts not in evidence. This is actually pretty interesting because it suggests there is a latent pathogen with a very high fatality rate in the Americas. It wouldn’t be the first.

We saw this with the hantavirus. The Old World hantavirus species were never dangerous enough to even deserve a footnote, but the New World hantavirus species are essentially like Ebola. But outbreaks are very rare and hantavirus doesn’t seem to be communicable between humans, so the damage is localized. The hemorrhagic fever that killed millions of people in the desert-y parts of the Americas a few centuries ago was something else.

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

#205

Post by jstanley »

LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #193
jstanley wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good post on this topic: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mFqG58s4NE3EE68Lq/why-did-ev...

"Good" is a bit of a stretch, as it asks a few short questions, but doesn't answer them in any useful fashion.

Sorry, you'll want https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yxTP9FckrwoMjxPc4/why-everyt... as well

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

#206

Post by prplxd_nihilist »

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…

The basque and sardinians seem to have the most of DNA from the neolithic european farmers. The sharp features in the rest of europe might come from the steppe people. That way this totally makes sense.

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

#207

Post by Nevermark »

gobdovan wrote: post #78
Nevermark wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isolated populations are all going to be creating isolated variants of any disease doing well enough to stick around. And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that. Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn a…

> The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that. For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my 2-…

I think we are more or less agreeing, but emphasizing different valid sides.

After all, as much as cross over illnesses are orders of magnitude more dangerous, they are also orders of magnitude reduced in threat distribution, for any low population species.

The integrated surface x time surface area for transfer just isn't there. Lots of low population species last millions of years, or tens. And even then, die off for other reasons. despite their extreme and persistent low-diversity vulnerability to any successful cross over parasite/illness. Neanderthals are not exceptional on that count.

To be clear, I am agreeing with you (and me!).

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

#208

Post by roryirvine »

eru wrote: post #202
pfdietz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think plenty of animals eat acorns. It's just that humans can't really do much with them. I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.

Once you've worked out a good way to leach out the tannins, acorns actually become a really useful food. There are a variety of possible methods - boiling, prolonged immersion in running water, or repeated mashing and rinsing cycles.

The American west coast is probably the most famous example of where they were widely used, with all three methods of processing in use according to local resource availability.

Long-term storage was achieved by drying and grinding into flour, oak groves were actively managed, and yields were enhanced by regular burning of undergrowth.

They were a nutritious, reliable, and low-risk source of calories with widespread availability, and the processing was time-consuming but not particularly difficult. Before the genocide, they'd have been the staple foodstuff for most people in an area stretching from the Cascades down to roughly where San Diego is today.

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

#209

Post by remify »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #148
remify wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's new evidences that even Sapiens "introduction" in Europe happend multiple times in the scale of thousand years with migratory waves comming from Africa/Middle East. There's a 12h Collège de France course from Jean-Jacques Hublin that display new understandings that is really captivating. It's in French though

You're talking about "Sapiens remplace Néandertal"?

Yes

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

#210

Post by octopoc »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #173
IAmBroom wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It sounds like gp is saying non Africans are more narcissistic than Africans. So yeah that needs a citation (or clarification)
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