Neandertals may have taught us...

Wibbs

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24031-first-bone-tools-suggest-neanderthals-taught-us-skills.html#.UgotwI7us5s

Interesting. Its not so long ago that the idea Neandertals were even using bone as a tool material would have been considered out there. Now we know they did and if you add in the wonderfully preserved carved wooden objects(some sort of trowel/spoon/stirrer)and the strong evidence they had jewelry before we showed up, then these guys are getting more sophisticated and more like us by the day. Which in turn makes it even stranger that they went extinct*





*as a separate sub species. Their DNA legacy is still in us.

Rubecula

My own take on this, and I emphasise it is only my own take on it, is the Neandertals were POSSIBLY wiped out by disease, possibly caught from us, to which they had no defence.

Incidentally in Irish mythology, didn't some of the ancient heroes kill off or drive out some sort of beast men? I seem to remember reading something like that but I am not certain. Firbolgs? Not sure now.

Adam Khor

Rubecula wrote: »

My own take on this, and I emphasise it is only my own take on it, is the Neandertals were POSSIBLY wiped out by disease, possibly caught from us, to which they had no defence.

Sounds likely... modern day apes are very vulnerable to human diseases, particularly respiratory ones...

And then there's the fact they interbred with humans... wasn`t there talk about AIDS being originally a chimp/gorilla disease that was eventually passed on to humans? I'm not well informed on the subject...

Wibbs

I've been musing on their extinction/diffs to us of late. I don't think it was disease. After all I'm sure they had diseases that would drop us like we'd been poleaxed. Diseases don't just go one way. Indeed aren't some researchers reckoning that the DNA we picked up from them stuck because it gave an immune advantage to the incoming Africans?

I've wittered on before about how there seem to be some parallels between them and us and wolves and dogs. That we look more like juvenile Neandertals(and previous humans), that in some way we became "domesticated" humans(only we selected this internally). Just like dogs compared to wolves, we've become less robust, with flatter faces, smaller dentition etc. So I thought let's really run with this analogy and see if other stuff might come into play.

One biggie is social behaviour. Wolves form small familial "packs" that command a set territory and contact between such packs is kept to a minimum and when contact occurs it's often violent. Other than man, the biggest threat of injury and death to a wolf is another wolf. Wolves are extremely xenophobic. The "other" is not to be trusted. New blood rarely comes into their circle unless the mating pair is compromised. They also level out to an ecological equilibrium within the environment. They don't cause extinctions. They're also quite narrow genetically. They're also near exclusively meat eaters.

Neandertals also seem to have had small family groups in a territory, with little contact between groups, except maybe when striking out on their own looking for mates. The lack of evidence for any real trade may mean they were also xenophobic in nature. Injuries they sustain may also show intergroup territorial disputes. They also reach an ecological equilibrium within the environment, don't cause extinctions and are also quite narrow genetically.

Dogs contrary to popular don't form packs. When dogs go feral they form loose and dynamically variable social groups of varying sizes depending on circumstance. This can happen closer to home, if dogs are allowed roam. They can form loose groups and go off worrying sheep etc and then come home and act like the family pet with their primary group. They're far more accepting of new blood throughout life IE they're much more socially adaptable as a consequence/byproduct of domestication. You can see that with pets. You can rehome an old dog with a new owner. If you had a "pet" wolf you simply couldn't do that. They also can rapidly become a problem in an environment, spreading and overtaxing local resources etc. Sound familiar?

Now in areas like Russia where large numbers of feral dogs exist in areas where wolves exist a couple of things happen. Matings between the two occur, but are rare and wolves become squeezed out, pushed further and further into the wildlands. This has happened in Italy too, where the feral dog population has had an impact on the wolf population. Interestingly and expanding on the disease hypothesis, they do spread diseases more rapidly simply because they're more gregarious with strangers and this has an effect, but the social structure has the bigger effect.

If humans disappeared tomorrow and all our dogs went feral, I'd put money that if you came back a 1000 years later, dogs would have begun to rapidly outcompete wolves and the latter would be slowly going the way of the dodo.

So IMHO if you want to get a glimpse of the dynamic between Neandertals and Sapiens when in the same area, look to the dynamics of wolves and feral dogs in an area. I reckon this would be how it played out all those thousands of years ago.

Rubecula

I like your thinking Wibbs. No idea if it is an accurate analogy but it is very logical and it made very good reading.

Now go off and fit foxes into the equation LOL

Adam Khor

Wibbs wrote: »

If humans disappeared tomorrow and all our dogs went feral, I'd put money that if you came back a 1000 years later, dogs would have begun to rapidly outcompete wolves and the latter would be slowly going the way of the dodo.

It may be my undying love for wild animals or my relative dislike for dogs but I find this scenario highly unpleasant.

Besides we all know that house cats will inherit the Earth. :pac:

yoke

Nice theory Wibbs - you make a good argument for it as well.

I think you may be right, or at least quite close.

Wibbs

Rubecula wrote: »

Now go off and fit foxes into the equation LOL

Well all predators in an area with a large enough feral dog population start to get squeezed out. Even mountain lions in the US get hit by their presence.

There are a few ways I can see where selective pressures of domestic dogs impact the local apex predators, in this case wolves. Hybridisation between the groups which dilutes the wild population, increase in disease transmission which weakens the wild population, they reproduce more and direct and indirect competition for resources which can really screw over the wild population.

With us and the Neandertals, we have direct evidence of hybridisation going on, at least when we first meet(and I suspect later). Looking at Otzi the iceman, he has significantly more of these genes than modern populations. Makes sense as he was closer to the events. However he was only a couple of thousand years closer, so I'd suspect go back say 20,000 years or more and that level of Neandertal genes would be much higher. To leave such loud echoes down to today, it requires a pretty loud bang in the first place. On the other side I'll put money down that late Neandertals will be found to have a fair whack of our genes going on(which may explain them showing some signs of being more like us culturally. They also started to look less robust than classic mid period Neandertals).

Disease transmission is up for grabs. AFAIK there's no great evidence of it as yet and I'd say it would be hard to find, unless you find pathogen DNA on samples and even then how to tell if it's endemic in a population or bought in from outside.

On the reproductive front, from what I've read it seems they had a very similar birth interval as us, so birth rates might have been similar. Then again over a few thousand years even a 1% difference on one side could make the diff. PLus even if birth rates are similar, but you're keeping within small family "packs" it may not reach the tipping point of population increase.

Competition for resources is a grey enough area. Still it seems quite clear that when we moderns enter an area a pattern of extinctions soon follows. While the jury is out on the causes of some local extinctions modern human predation/competition is a very strong possibility, if not probability. You can near trace our global movements by the extinctions that occur. Neandertals lived in Eurasia for nigh on 300,000 years and nothing like that seems to happen. If they are akin to wolves, if anything they keep stability in an ecosystem. Even when competition with domestics isn't an issue, as in the case of the Ethiopian wolf, hybridisation and disease squeezes the population hard and forces the pure breds further and further into the wild.

Another aspect of all this and also represented in the wolf/dog model is differences in maturity and play. One of the biggest things domestication selects for is neotony in an animal. IE they remain semi juveniles for life. In many ways a dog is basically a wolf forever stuck in puppyhood. While adults wolves play, they don't do so to nearly the same degree as adult dogs. Play is many things. Practice for adult activities, group bonding, but also exploration of the world. An animal with that ability to play for life has some serious advantages over one that matures early and gets locked in as "adult". While Neandertals were clearly clever human beings and seem cleverer with each discovery, they were missing something that we had and I'd put good money down it was this lack of mental neotony. IMHO it's one of the big reasons why they innovated less over time compared to us. Add in a xenophobic bent and any innovation would likely die with the innovator.

Neandertals have been described as wolves with knives(which set off this train of thought in me). If so, then I'd describe us as Wolves with knives. And lego.

Rubecula

I like the idea more as I think about it Wibbs. Dogs and wolves make a great analogy all round. I can't actually think of any other creature that does it so well.

Apart from the domestic cattle and the Aurochs?? The domestic breeds are all over the world and the aurochs is extinct...... The aurochs was more heavily built and apparently a lot tougher.

Oh well not as good as your example.