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

science.org

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

#71

Post by piperswe »

lobf wrote: post #29
vintermann wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it has any relation to Celtic languages, then it's Indo-European by definition. We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.

Oh! Sorry- I meant to refer to the hypothetical proto-Celtic language! This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me.

Proto-Celtic is also an Indo-European language...

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

#72

Post by eru »

Fricken wrote: post #15
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…

Also nukes. We've got the whole place rigged to blow in case a few of us just doesn't feel like it anymore.

Nuclear war would be a major inconvenience, but it wouldn't nearly destroy the world.

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

#73

Post by sehansen »

davidkuennen wrote: post #54
oceanplexian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.

And just like that we just learned that parasites may have been good for us [1] [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8162934/

The fact that low-grade parasite-infections dampen autoimmune diseases isn't that big of a win. Presumably our immune system is as aggressive as it is in part due to the parasite-load our ancestors were exposed to.

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

#74

Post by eru »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #17
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…

> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents— especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history. What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.

Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

mock-possum wrote: post #45
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…

> There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by eru »

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…

Well, we have plenty of plagues to go around in Eurasia. There's plenty of diseases we barely notice, because pretty much everyone has enough immunity to mostly shrug it off.

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

#77

Post by eru »

t-3 wrote: post #62
Auracle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.

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.

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

#78

Post by gobdovan »

Nevermark wrote: post #26
gobdovan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't single out the concern new diseases if the population is small. Most diseases co-evolve intra-population. The lethal ones are the ones that suffer a mutation and are suddenly able to be passed to a different 'species'. So, if they already survived on a 'knife's edge', immune variety is of comparatively low concern (but still existential) on the list of things that can end your species (climate change, comp…

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 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0])

> Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.

Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out. Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza. Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an inter-connected population, requiring a critical community size in the hundreds of thousands.

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/2011/202...

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

#79

Post by Cthulhu_ »

justonceokay wrote: post #36
oceanplexian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.

Parasites are my main go-to when I meet someone complaining about the modern world. In the history of multicellular organisms on earth, only (some) humans—and only in the last ~100 years—have had the luxury of not being completely infested with parasites. Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.

This was / is likely a factor in the "kernel of truth" with the whole "deworming tablets cure covid-19" thing, the chances of survival of people in certain areas infected with the virus increased if they were administered deworming medication because they also had a parasitic infection.
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