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Neanderthals' demise caused by modern human invasion
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steddyeddy wrote: »I think they would have looked like a far more athletic powerlifter with a huge chest, arms and a tapered waist built on short but stocky legs their size would have been close to ape like in my opinion.
I think I've read somewhere that they actually had very wide waists compared to us humans...0 -
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,176 Mod ✭✭✭✭Join Date:Posts: 59103
steddyeddy wrote: »In my opinion you cant classify some of the higher order primates as strictly nocturnal or diurnal. Neandethal and many other hominids may have reduced competition with other higher order primates by hunting at night. This doesnt require biology adaptations for a clever animal. Just look at humans and look up the term hunters moon, native americans like many other tribes hunted by moonlight. This is not out of the question for a hominid. The other options are matuinal (hunting pre dawn) or vespertine (hunting at dusk).Regarding the look of the neanderthals I really dont think they looked like a particularly well built rugby player. I think they would have looked like a far more athletic powerlifter with a huge chest, arms and a tapered waist built on short but stocky legs their size would have been close to ape like in my opinion.Another thing to look at is the chance that neanderthals had an epicanthic fold as seen in many asian and inuit populations. The reason I say this is the epicanthic cold according to some the epicanthic fold developed in response to tribes traveling through snowing areas and the extra skin fold was thought to reflect some of the light. Neanderthals themselves were a cold adapted species so maybe this is possible?I think I've read somewhere that they actually had very wide waists compared to us humans...allibastor wrote: »no, there has been good evidence that neanderthal man did use spears and the like. they have found small evidence of spears with stone heads on them also, so i would strongly say that they used spears and other throwing devices. i am just saying that sapiens were better equiped for it is all. we were more long range hunters suited for flatter areas, like grass land or the like. as i said above just My opinion, but from the look of the skeletal frame of neandethal man v sapiens of that time, it looks like the frame would have been more suited to areas like hills, or forests, where strenght would have been more advantageous than speed or stamina.
Another possible reason for one bit of odd behaviour seen in them. They were cannibals. Most Neandertal skeletons show defleshing. Now to our psyches this is taboo and indicates a vicious unfeeling barbaric mind, but maybe not if we step back. For a start they needed food and lots of it. Meat is meat and eating members of the group or starving, members of the group it is. Like men adrift in lifeboats without food will eat others if pushed. Triple your hunger and calorie needs and cannibalism seems a good adaptation. It may well have been reverential(like some tribes today) to wrap up the need. But and it's a big but set against that deep need they appear to have been very caring with injured members of their groups. More than us at the time. These were sometimes "useless" members and another voracious mouth to feed. The Old man of Chapelle a good example. Riddled with arthritis and pain, a shambling man of little use in a close in hunt and like that for a long time. One arm had been lost and what was left atrophied(his other arm compensated though). Barely a tooth in his head so someone would have had to chew his food for him. Yet he lived 20 years without his arm and at least five without teeth. The two things kinda jar. So for me the cannibalism wasn't our idea of it. It was a practical thing and maybe loving thing. It also suggests that either this "old man" and others were still useful in a wounding exercise and/or they transmitted information and wisdom that made them very valuable, which suggests a bigger language ability. Which almost by definition would have to include past tense as well as judging the future tense.on the strenght item, yes i agree that older sapiens were more robust than us now, we are weak by comparison, but i am just looking at previous evidence of the frame of both, neanderthal man would have been a bit stronger, and if combined with an ambush approach to hunting would have made them very effective at this. that would be funny however, neanderthal versus cage figher like brock lesnar!!!! though it would be hard to spot the dsifference.Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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Well to be fair to earlier points they would have been significantly stronger. Experiments by a sports scientist with an interest in this appears to show that compared to the world champion arm wrestling champion, a young Neandertal woman would be 10-15% stronger than him. She'd beat him pretty easily and she was unlikely to have been the strongest lassie in the group. A Neandertal man in his prime? He estimated at least 50% stronger, maybe more. Poor old Brock would be... well in trouble by a Neandertal woman and would have to hope technique won out and she didn't get a hold of him.
Oh my God, imagine a Neanderthal woman during her PMS!! :eek: I bet even sabertooths ran away XD0 -
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[Wrote this yesterday--I see it duplicates a lot of what you guys/gals are talking about, more the better. Wouldn't post yesterday, hope it does today.]
Here's an interesting set of ideas about Neanderthal clothing, or lack thereof.
http://web.me.com/duncancaldwell/Site/Neanderthals.html
I'm very interested in this idea that Sapiens-sapiens only mixed genes with the Near-Eastern Neanderthal population. I had not heard that level of detail considered before; although I did note that people spoke of the Near-East (in the first few tens of thousands of years of behaviorally modern humans' dispersal from Africa) as being when and where moderns and Eurasian Archaics first met and interbred, I hadn't read anywhere that the genetic information that's been analyzed had shown that gene-mixing with more northern populations was ruled out. Does someone have a link to that info?
Also, I wonder if there was interbreeding with African species of Archaics before Moderns' dispersal (because I've been wondering if modern African people, like the rest of the world, has in their genetics some links to admixture with African Archaics that hasn't been teased out yet). All this depends upon African Archaics at the appropriate time depths, of course. And, at least as importantly, how the date went. To me, it's clear that there's been at least a modest amount of interesting interactions between different Homo lineages for a long, long time. I even wonder if, given the new discoveries of the Denisovan people and Homo Florensis, there was meeting and mixing with people that we might think of as closer to Homo erectus than to Neanderthal/Heidelbergensis., perhaps in East Asia, but who knows?
Recently, I've been thinking that some of our Moderns' genetic diversity may have occurred outside of our direct lineage, and that these extra-sapiens contributions will be able to be identified (possibly), much like how our Neanderthal heritage has been. Of course, if DNA cannot be extracted from non-sapiens bones, any comparison and identification would have to (?) be done by internal comparison (comparison of extant Modern genomes). I think that this process may actually be analogous to internal comparison used in Historical Linguistics; historical linguistics also required, as its first step, the comparison of "foreign" ancient texts to European ancient texts; but once the methods were established, it became possible to compare related languages for which no ancient texts existed. And I think that the some of the same limitations of this kind of internal comparison of languages will also limit our ability to tease apart the genome; but there will be a lot that can be seen, and in many ways the genome will be easier to decipher than languages. In this context, I hope that anyone doing this analysis will be sure to emphasize how incomplete and uncertain this picture will be for years to come, especially to the general public.
The opinion in that first link above draws an analogy between brown bears and polar bears, a rhetorical practice that interests me because I sometimes think of human evolution in terms of canid evolution and diversification, to which it bears some similarity, in my mind. For instance, the population of coyotes in North America is currently expanding eastward and northward, into the current and former range of the grey wolf and 'red wolf.' (I put red wolf in quotations because there is some controversy about the species-status of the red wolf--whether or not it was ever really a species; whether it might always have been a coyote-wolf (latrans-lupus) hybrid population; whether, if it at one time was a distinct species, it still is distinct.) As we all know, coyotes are a less-robust, differently-intelligent species of canine which were/are at least as maligned than the grey wolf, but who haven't suffered as much from man's eradication efforts, and which are now, for several reasons, expanding their range into the former habitat of the grey wolf.
One thing I've learned in the last couple of years: Grey wolves do not tolerate coyotes in their territory (although hybrids do occur in nature). Shades of Neanderthal/Modern Human? ;-)
http://www.pinedaleonline.com/news/2009/06/Coyoteandwolfinterac.htm
That link right there is a little taste of an interesting topic in interactions between social omnivore+carnivore cousin-species.
There are interesting similarities between our four species--Canis latrans, Canis lupus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens sapiens--and the interaction between the canine species and the human species.
On this note, does anyone have any guesses about the likely average group-size of Neanderthals? I've often read the number 50 used as an average for early humans, which is pretty large. Wolf packs are typically larger than coyote packs, who function more like a nuclear family.
OK, just some thoughts! Never been to this board before--very interesting. Does anyone have any thoughts about this kind of thing? I don't often post to these kinds of things, so I'm curious what other people think.
Cheers!0 -
Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,176 Mod ✭✭✭✭Join Date:Posts: 59103
Porkupine73 wrote: »I'm very interested in this idea that Sapiens-sapiens only mixed genes with the Near-Eastern Neanderthal population. I had not heard that level of detail considered before; although I did note that people spoke of the Near-East (in the first few tens of thousands of years of behaviorally modern humans' dispersal from Africa) as being when and where moderns and Eurasian Archaics first met and interbred, I hadn't read anywhere that the genetic information that's been analyzed had shown that gene-mixing with more northern populations was ruled out. Does someone have a link to that info?Also, I wonder if there was interbreeding with African species of Archaics before Moderns' dispersal (because I've been wondering if modern African people, like the rest of the world, has in their genetics some links to admixture with African Archaics that hasn't been teased out yet).Recently, I've been thinking that some of our Moderns' genetic diversity may have occurred outside of our direct lineage, and that these extra-sapiens contributions will be able to be identified (possibly), much like how our Neanderthal heritage has been. Of course, if DNA cannot be extracted from non-sapiens bones, any comparison and identification would have to (?) be done by internal comparison (comparison of extant Modern genomes).One thing I've learned in the last couple of years: Grey wolves do not tolerate coyotes in their territory (although hybrids do occur in nature). Shades of Neanderthal/Modern Human? ;-)On this note, does anyone have any guesses about the likely average group-size of Neanderthals? I've often read the number 50 used as an average for early humans, which is pretty large. Wolf packs are typically larger than coyote packs, who function more like a nuclear family.Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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African folks have the deepest genetic heritage of any humans alive today and I'm 100% sure (as a hunch:)) that a good chunk of that came from previous folks in the same continent.
What can you tell us about the differences (like, anatomical-physiological or whatever) between African folks and the rest of us? Some say there are actually several important differences although it seems that today, talking about such things is "racist"...
And if it is true that there are differences, are these purely the result of adaptation to a particular lifestyle/habitat, or could some of them be inherited from non-sapiens ancestors?The evidence from Neandertals is that they were smaller closely related bands.
Makes sense if they were more adapted as predators...0 -
Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,176 Mod ✭✭✭✭Join Date:Posts: 59103
What can you tell us about the differences (like, anatomical-physiological or whatever) between African folks and the rest of us? Some say there are actually several important differences although it seems that today, talking about such things is "racist"...
And if it is true that there are differences, are these purely the result of adaptation to a particular lifestyle/habitat, or could some of them be inherited from non-sapiens ancestors?
Then you look at the diversity within Africa itself. As well as the deepest genetics they also have the most diverse. About the only thing in common they have is dark skin and brown eyes. European by comparison are much more related to each other at the genetic level. Where Europeans do differ is in the diversity of their phenotype. European external appearance is about the most varied of modern humans. The old racist line of "oh the Chinese, they all look alike to me", while daft, because Asian folks vary a lot, that variability is more subtle in the obvious ways. Take hair colour. East Asians are nearly always black straight haired and brown eyed. Europeans can be blonde, red, all the way to jet black, never mind going from extremely curly to laser straight. Eye colour can range from near silver, through brown, green, blue, even violet. Skin colour can go from Dracula pale with freckles to very dark. And you can even get that variability within a family. Clearly there was a strong selection pressure in Europeans in the last 40,000 years to give rise to these outward differences.Makes sense if they were more adapted as predators...Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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I wonder how much Neanderthal I have in my DNA... me being a real mashup when it comes to heritage and all that:pac:0
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