If you find this article interesting, I highly recommend reading “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
They also dig into these new archaeological discoveries, and start to reframe some aspects of the historical record in a way that is deeply compelling and perspective shifting.
I’m still in the middle of reading it, but I can’t help but feel that it’s one of the more important books to come into existence in recent times.
I found it amusing how it just took them a few chapters to make me naturally think of 17th century Europeans as barbarians in light of native North Americans
Am I reading the paper incorrectly? The finding was the opposite (i.e. that increased NeanderScore is correlated with reduced schizophrenia diagnoses/symptoms), wasn’t it?
The inspiration for the study appears to be to explore why humans do and animals don’t appear to have schizophrenia, and assuming Neanderthals are closer to animals.
I agree about calling it conjecture though. The finding had marginal p-values in a study that appears to be hiding its sample size (it doesn’t disclose the ratio of schizophrenia cases to controls in its four case-control datasets) and so is quite possibly underpowered.
In terms of neurological structure and function they seem likely to have had a more typical primate/mammalian appearance.
This assumption is commonly made because they don’t appear to have worked with abstract symbols and may not have been able to develop language beyond animal communication.
The article describes them as a different species — but doesn’t that mean we should not have been able to create viable offspring with them? What am I misunderstanding?
Species are somewhat arbitrary, basically at the time of species categorization was it common to think reproduction within this fuzzy group was more common than in some other proposed categorization, or something like that. Probably even less effort was put into it than that in some cases, some people just want to name a "species", no matter how dubious it is. Your definition must not say various sub-Saharan African groups are different species, despite their genetic diversity, or for that matter that there are more than one currently existent Human species, otherwise quite a few people will get mad.
Something I think it's interesting to contemplate is that there's no reason to think an individual Neanderthal was any less intelligent than an individual human.
Another thing to contemplate is that Homo Sapiens may not be the final hominid. There’s no reason why another can’t evolve between now and, say, 100,000 years from now. What will they be like? How big the brains?
Epigenetics allows a much faster rate of change, especially in structures which are not well preserved in the archeological record. For example, cortical folding patterns.
> Studying computational models and patterns of worker ant brain size, structure, and energy use in some ant clades, such as the Oecophylla weaver ant, Atta leafcutter ants, or the common garden ant Formica, showed that group-level cognition and division of labor may select for adaptive brain size variation. This means that within a social group where knowledge is shared or individuals are specialists at certain tasks, brains may adapt to become more efficient, such as decreasing in size.
Very few of us are selecting our mates based on their prowess in the gym. Usually its social convenience alone and proximity, these aren't traits that drive us into some more efficient species. Plus consider the fecundity of people. Do fit, and intelligent people have more kids? Studies say these people typically have fewer kids on average, that means the resulting next generations offspring is underrepresented by those from intelligent and fit parents and overrepresented by those types of parents that tend to have more kids on average.
In "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," Harari claims that human brain size has decreased since the agricultural revolution (which fits the whole downfall story of course).
A bit of googling for backup reveals that things may not be as simple, but it is not clear that current societies are selecting for brain size.
We are largely, but not completely modern humans. We are hybrids between modern humans and neanderthals. All the human sub/species throughout history existed on the werge of extinction, or were at best insignificant from the Nature point of view as a whole. We on the other hand took over the Earth in a few 10000s of years. There seems to be synergy in backmixing of populations that underwent the opposite specialization trajectories, group specialization vs individual skill specialization, where each specialization on its own would have likely death spiralled.
> Hybrid species of human, once seen by experts as science fiction, may have played a key role in our evolution. Evidence of the importance of hybrids comes from genetics. The trail is not only in the DNA of our own species (which often includes important genes inherited from Neanderthals) but also skeletons of hybrids.
People always keep saying idiocracy is like the worst case scenario for the future. Are you kidding me? That movie is close to the best case scenario. Everyone in the movie is just having fun doing whatever they want, and importantly, quite literally everyone is actually nice and just trying to do the right thing. There’s literally no villain just some misunderstanding.
Even the evil corporations actually turn out to be evil just because of incompetence (carls junior actually takes over child care if it deems their parents unable; the soda company genuinely was shocked that their soda shouldn’t be used to irrigate).
Except the one genuinely evil person (the pimp) who turns out is not from that time, and thankfully only pops up in the end to set up the sequel.
I would choose idiocracys universe to whatever we have even today, where a good fraction if not the majority of the world population has decided that selfishness and bigotry are the way to go.
> a good fraction if not the majority of the world population has decided that selfishness and bigotry are the way to go.
agree, this is an unfortunate Nash equilibrium. I will say it is much more present in US society than Europe.
Also, it is an artifact of current society. It can be unlearned. People, as social animals, have a strong inner drive to take care of their clan. That won't fix the bigotry, but it sure can tamper down the selfishness. We've just split ourselves into atomic units instead of molecules and materials, and build so much of our world around our individualistic pods.
While waiting for the cool neon and chrome cyberpunk dystopia from the movies to show up, the boring, black and white with blue LED cyberpunk dystopia slipped in instead.
We won't get the Hollywood version of Idiocracy, either.
The real version of Idiocracy would be everyone back to tribal warfare. Which, I suppose, would bounce humanity back in the other direction.
My hope for that not happening is that we’ll end up genetically altering our babies en masse, which sounds…not great, but it’s probably better than the alternative.
They would have effectively died off starvation if Joe hadn't come along. Everything was falling apart and they were coasting on the remnants of the work before them.
The labor situation was glossed over, but it also looked like sex work was far more prevalent. I'm not saying that sex work is inherently bad, only when by force (either explicit or implicit due to opportunities).
> For thousand years all we had to fill up our ignorance was Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark and all those dumb religious fairy tales.
Myths are more than mere stories. Joseph Campbell illustrated four functions of myths: metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological. Campbell also neatly summarizes in his 1949 work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind.
An astute quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein is very applicable to your shallow description,
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
To give you some extra context, because I sympathize the OP's message, while acknowledging the wording is disrespectful - growing up in a religious environment you are taught that certain things are true, and can encounter strong opposition to basic questioning. This can lead to a state where eing exposed to an alternative truth is exciting and interesting.
To provide a counterpoint, that is true for some religious environments but not others.
In some you are taught that the world is a beautiful and fascinating place. To question, explore, and try to understand it gives you a greater appreciation for its maker.
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.
With sympathy to the parent poster, who may have grown up in a religious tradition that tries to equate biblical truth with historical/scientific truth across the board, remember that the concept that there is such a thing as scientific truth, or at least a scientific explanation, is itself pretty modern.
The origin stories are about creating identity and revealing deep aspects of psychology and sociology. They may also contain echos of earlier events.
They were not written to fill up ignorance, but to teach wisdom.
Taught that way, they contain many helpful insights.
The claim that Adam and Eve is "literally what happened" is ridiculous on its face. Talking snakes? Really?
"One telling of Hadza's oral history divides their past into four epochs, each inhabited by a different culture. According to this tradition, in the beginning of time the world was inhabited by hairy giants called the akakaanebee "first ones" or geranebee "ancient ones". The akakaanebee did not possess tools or fire; they hunted game by running it down until it fell dead; they ate the meat raw. They did not build houses but slept under trees, as the Hadza do today in the dry season. In older versions of this story, fire was not used because it was physically impossible in the earth's primeval state, while younger Hadza, who have been to school, say that the akakaanebee simply did not know how.
In the second epoch, the akakaanebee were succeeded by the xhaaxhaanebee "in-between ones", equally gigantic but without hair. Fire could be made and used to cook meat, but animals had grown more wary of humans and had to be chased and hunted with dogs. The xhaaxhaanebee were the first people to use medicines and charms to protect themselves from enemies and initiated the epeme rite. They lived in caves.
The third epoch was inhabited by the people of hamakwanebee "recent days", who were smaller than their predecessors. They invented bows and arrows, and containers for cooking, and mastered the use of fire. They also built huts like those of Hadza today. The people of hamakwabee were the first of the Hadza ancestors to have contact with non-foraging people, with whom they traded for iron to make knives and arrowheads. They also invented the gambling game lukuchuko.
The fourth epoch continues today and is inhabited by the hamayishonebee "those of today". When discussing the hamayishonebee epoch, people often mention specific names and places, and can approximately say how many generations ago events occurred."
“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.”
Inability to adapt is a powerful way to select. If the government didn't support people these days, our society is so complex that at least 50% of the population would probably starve and die.
Modern society just got too complex for most people to survive. They spent a million years just grinding corn or herding sheep, and most truly peasant grade people never got beyond that.
Not being able to survive a winter is a good way for nature to select.
They also dig into these new archaeological discoveries, and start to reframe some aspects of the historical record in a way that is deeply compelling and perspective shifting.
I’m still in the middle of reading it, but I can’t help but feel that it’s one of the more important books to come into existence in recent times.