today at 9:46 AM
today at 7:49 AM
These findings always seem to be suggesting that we more or less warred (fought, disputed territory ranges - pick your euphemism) upon them opportunistically over centuries and didn’t lose.
E.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1376-z.epdf
today at 9:02 AM
There is a bit more to the story. There was interbreeding, which we can make up explanations for but none have any evidence to support them. Neanderthals were also under a lot of environmental stress. They were very inbred well before Homo Sapiens shared their range. We have no evidence they hunted from range (no arrow heads, for example, and their shoulder joints are not adapted to throwing) but relied on close range attacks. This would have become increasing more difficult in the Ice Age, due to the nature of the terrain and the increasing size of the megafauna.
There is a good case to be made that Homo Sapiens were just lucky to be based in the milder climate of Africa, and by chance being more adapted to hunting megafauna due to our body structure. Homo Sapiens are also very inbred. IIRC there are two main genetic bottlenecks that have been detected in our DNA. We almost didn't make it.
yesterday at 1:33 AM
Pluto and the modern day understanding of Neanderthals are probably Top 5 learning corrections in my lifetime.
today at 8:13 AM
What was it about Pluto?
today at 8:55 AM
Presumably that it’s now considered a dwarf planet and that there are multiple other d. planets in the system, of similar size such as Haumea (minor-planet number 136108), Eris, etc.
today at 9:21 AM
The dwarf planet is just a naming thing. I don't know if beyond oluto bodies are a new or recent thing. I was thinking someone discovered something completely different like totally new findings about its geology or something like that.
today at 8:37 AM
Pluto is Mickey Mouse's pet and is not anthropomorhic. Not to be confused with Goofy that is an anthropomorphic dog and Mickey's friend.
today at 8:46 AM
And Minnie is a mouse and has a cat as a pet, Figaro.
today at 9:04 AM
Here's the funny thing about cartoons and confusion. In the comic Popeye the antagonist is named "Bluto" but only sometimes. He was renamed as "Brutus" because of a misunderstanding of rights ownership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluto#Bluto_vs._Brutus
However, because it was a misunderstanding, his "Bluto" moniker was later restored, and even retconned as the name of twin brothers.
Popeye has never been a Disney property. But the funny thing is that my father told me that they renamed "Bluto" so that he wasn't phonetically confused with "Pluto", who is obviously a different character in a different property. And that premise is the one that I grew up believing, until Wikipedia was invented.
today at 5:19 AM
still to come, the sasquatch in Canada
today at 6:37 AM
You forgot the "2 = 5" one
today at 8:14 AM
I've read what happen to Nederlands ...
today at 9:33 AM
We ate them (and married)
today at 9:41 AM
As I understand it, their mitochondrial DNA does not survive, so they were always the fathers of any hybrids that contributed to the modern human genome.
" recent Science study found evidence that couplings followed a distinct pattern: Neanderthal males with modern human females."
The article links to this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/science/human-evolution-n...
today at 10:07 AM
That is an interesting factoid, thanks.
yesterday at 3:59 AM
One thing that i think should be considered in human archaeology is the narratives/stories/myths from different cultures featuring "different sorts of people". Many were handed down orally from the misty past before being written down and hence may contain some truths to them.
We are often quick to dismiss them as mere fanciful story-telling of primitive cultures but i am not so sure.
today at 7:37 AM
I have a soft spot for such folklore. Strictly speaking, much doesn't hold up to scrutiny but I see no wrong with wild conjecture for the fun of it.
For starters, some catastrophes do shine through more recent history:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Then, Nuclear Evangelism is a fun idea, proposing a religion teaching us to stay away from nuclear waste for 10k years: https://www.nahomatsuda.com/nuclear-evangelism
Or you can poke around linguistics
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics
- https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/does-your-name-belong-...
The Arthurian legends and Robin Hood are two English-speaking examples of folklore snowballing into what we have today. I bet James Bond will join them in a few hundred year's time.
today at 8:41 AM
You are mixing up a lot of timelines (mostly in AD) and hence not a good comparison.
I am talking about records from 5000-7000BC (deducing from Sanskrit literature) by which time they had already been orally transmitted for eons. So they are truly ancient with layers upon layers of grafting of realities/myths/stories over time.
today at 8:56 AM
Some Aboriginal Australian cultures have folklore describing the rise of sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Also, Songlines are fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline
today at 9:16 AM
It is really not far-fetched that these passages describe some ancient memories of coexisting with another quasi-human race. And certainly the narrative of interbreeding is tantalizing. Perhaps if it did not actually happen this way, we believe it now, because many Christians would need to interpolte truth about the past and reconcile these passages.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/genesis/6?1
1 When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them,
2 the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased.
3 ...
4 The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
27 They do not rest with the warriors
who fell in ancient times,
who went down to Sheol fully armed.
Their swords were placed under their heads
and their shields laid over their bones;
For there was terror of these warriors
in the land of the living.
33 There [in Canaan] we saw the Nephilim* (the Anakim are from the Nephilim); in our own eyes we seemed like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”
today at 9:37 AM
Neanderthals were fully human. They were the same species (Homo sapiens) as us. We could interbreed and produce viable offspring and we often has similar customs (burial of the dead, lithic art, tool manufacture and use). There was no coexistence with a quasi-human "race", there was just coexistence with different peoples.
today at 10:05 AM
As far as I know, the discussion is ongoing and H. neanderthalensis is still a current classification. But yes, the consensus is moving in the direction you describe.
We'll probably never know how they were perceived in society back then, if it was e.g. like Asians versus westerners now.
today at 9:56 AM
Neanderthals are classified as Homo neanderthalensis and not Homo sapiens.
yesterday at 5:14 AM
Agreed. Considering the range from neaderthals to homo florensis etc...
today at 8:18 AM
Floriensis is a particularly good one, due to the Ebu Gogo mythology - and they seemingly died out 50kya ago. The locals specifically didn’t have giant humans in their mythology, rather tiny ones.
And then you go look at where there were Denisovans and Neanderthals, and those cultures have mythologies with trolls and ogres.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - in fact, it is speculated that floriensis perhaps hung on much, much later than 50kya ago - and I see no reason the same shouldn’t apply to Neanderthals or denisovans.
On a similar note - cultural memory runs deep. Take hill forts in the U.K. for instance. Commonly accepted as defensive structures. Except… the populations of these places, the topography, all of it, made them pretty crap defences - and the top of a windy hill, far from water, isn’t such a great place to live. So why? My take: the doggerland flood, and cultural memory. When the sea is slowly encroaching, building on top of a hill, building a dyke, a berm, sensible.
5000 years later, still doing the same thing. Why? Nobody quite remembers, but it’s important.
today at 8:37 AM
They don't live on top of the hill, all the time. The local chief, maybe. It is a defensive place to retreat to when under attack.
yesterday at 4:35 PM
In the Hindu Sanskrit literature of Itihasas and Puranas it is actually made explicit that Humans ("Manusya/Manava" in Sanskrit) are distinct from other beings (eg. "Devas/Asuras/Vanaras/Gandharvas" etc. in Sanskrit), each with their own specific characteristics. And also there are plenty of stories of interbreeding amongst them.
It is fascinating to note that the distinctions are pretty clearcut throughout the vast corpus which implies it was common and wellknown at that time. There seem to be some good parallels to our anthropological knowledge of different Homo species.
In particular, the "Vanaras" were a humanoid ape-like species who have all the human psychological characteristics but with ape-like physiology. This was one source of inspiration (amongst others) for the "Na'vi" in James Cameron's Avatar movies.
today at 4:57 AM
The vanaras were probably conceived of around let's say generously 3000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago. You live ten times closer in timeline to the original Ramayana story than neanderthals did.
It's just not very plausible that hindu mythology is a corrupted record of living with multiple species of hominids. Timeline-wise, it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
today at 5:20 AM
Not that I 100% believe that the Vanaras were cultural memories of Neanderthals, but it's pretty hard to prove or disprove this. Maybe they were. Maybe a whole bunch of stories we tell throughout the world are cultural memories of events long past.
I kinda choose to somewhat believe in this hypothesis because it's mighty fun, and makes the past look so much more romantic!
today at 6:40 AM
I am not talking about what might actually have been; but merely pointing to parallels in one specific culture which has maintained links to its hoary past via oral and then written literature.
> The vanaras were probably conceived of around let's say generously 3000 years ago.
No, that is purely your speculation since we don't have evidence one way or the other.
> it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
This is the oft made comparison which is a meaningless red herring, since we know Tolkien wrote his stories in modern times (20th century). Not so with Sanskrit literature; they are accumulations over time, first orally and then written down gradually.
One must not be glib in dismissing ancient narratives/myths/stories, and equally, accept it as fact without thought and corroboration (of whatever type).
David Frawley coined "Frawley's Paradox" w.r.t. Sanskrit literature vs. Archaeology, where on the one hand you have a massive corpus of quite advanced texts on various subjects, while on the other hand, you have evidence of advanced civilizations (Indus valley, Harappa etc.) with no decipherable/surviving textual evidence.
If you now consider the various ancient vernacular languages (i.e. Prakrits and Proto-Dravidian) their actual archaeological evidence predates Sanskrit!
It is all highly fascinating and gives one a lot of food for thought as we add to history using modern means. But as i said in the beginning, we should not limit ourselves to archaeology exclusively, but look at the sum total of what a culture says about itself and has maintained over time w.r.t. linguistics/literature/narratives/myths etc.
today at 7:48 AM
Those myths and legends are old enough to contain traces of shared Indo-European beliefs, so the real old stuff should be found, in some form, in other cultures, like Greek or Norse mythology. But I don't think it is true in this case
today at 8:26 AM
> shared Indo-European beliefs, so the real old stuff should be found, in some form, in other cultures
No, this is pure speculation.
While there does seem to be some commonalities (ancestral) it is also the case that entire species lived in different parts of the world following different timelines and experiences with no knowledge of each other's cultures. Thus not everything can be mapped to common ancestral factors.
That is why Sanskrit literature is so fascinating since there seem to be records of "different types of people" coexisting. Note that i am merely drawing parallels and not that they were actually distinct species of Homo.
today at 8:48 AM
> No, this is pure speculation
What is? Shared cultural ancestry between the people speaking early Sanskrit and many of their European counterparts is common knowledge at least since the 19th century, it's very well researched and not really contested at this point.
today at 7:34 AM
They live in Netherlands now
today at 8:32 AM
That would explain so much here.
today at 7:47 AM
Yeah I misread that too at first.
today at 9:48 AM
(In fact, the Neander valley, where they were first found, is just east of DĂĽsseldorf, only about 60 km from the Dutch border.)
today at 8:04 AM
today at 6:11 AM
Can anyone summarize for us troglodytes without NY Times subscriptions?
today at 6:48 AM
Read it on archive: https://archive.is/jaqsJ
It is fascinating.
today at 6:59 AM
it's not clear to me how they determined that these were in fact different species and not just variation/evolution within the same species
today at 7:50 AM
When biologists, botanists, etc. use the term "species", they are not using it in a principled way. The distinctions are oftentimes quite arbitrary, I'm very sorry to say.
For what it's worth, there isn't even much agreement on what constitutes a genus or species among professional philosophers of science (i.e. academics who care about giving a principled definition for species/genus), even for those that share many of the same views otherwise (like ur-Platonists, Aristotelians, Thomists, Scotists, etc.).
today at 8:00 AM
This is a broader fundamental question which you are better off asking AI to give you an overview. It involves various techniques like;
1) Paleo genomics i.e. DNA study of any surviving material.
2) Statistical study of Human Morphology i.e. variation w.r.t. current day human (and close primates?) biological structures. Eg. Current-day human cranium sizes vary within known limits. So if we find a fossil cranium which is outside these limits then there is a high chance it might be a different species.
3) Fossil dating shows different species (w.r.t. above data) occupying the same geography and within overlapping time periods.
today at 9:57 AM
TLDR: we are the result of that other theory of evolution, also started by Charles Darwin. The one that is still wildly controversial. It is sometimes referred to as "island species theory". If 2 species or races that occupy the same niche exist in the same environment, only one comes out alive ("extant"). Nothing remains of the smaller group except trace DNA.
Controversial, because of the prediction it makes for human populations. If we keep traveling the world, it is a matter of (a surprisingly short) time before only a single race survives. If the current situation continues, in about 5 centuries all our kids will be the same race.
today at 7:04 AM
Wiped out by a more violent variant.
today at 8:28 AM
[dead]