I was a bit intrigued by the twin sculptors in the video and ended in their website [1], they seem to have created a wealth of amazingly detailed and realistic sculpts of various extinct hominids with a lot of character to boot, definitely worth a look.
One thing always bothers me when reading about Neanderthal extinction.
The fact that we have proof that interbreeding occurred between Sapiens and Neanderthal should open the possibility that they quite simply were blended into a larger Sapiens population instead of mysteriously disappearing.
The answer to that question is the entire field of phylogenetics, especially computational phylogenetics [0]. Essentially, we sequenced a bunch of humans and neanderthals and the simplest explanation has certain genes evolving in the latter.
One thing we're very confident in is that anatomically modern humans (i.e. us) are not neanderthals.
> One thing we're very confident in is that anatomically modern humans (i.e. us) are not neanderthals.
We’re not neanderthals, but they are largely no longer considered a separate species. Neanderthals are now commonly known as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis in the literature. Their genetics are not that different from sapiens and the difference is only about twice as much as the variation in the global gene pool so they’re more an extinct branch of a much more diverse species which suffered a genetic bottleneck leaving only us.
The word "largely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It's nowhere close to consensus in any literature I'm familiar with. I do find it interesting that even among the people who are vocally supportive of the subspecies classification almost never use the terminology for it. In any case what I said is true regardless of the taxonomy.
It was based on the differences in mtDNA, but it's actually not true that such differences are unusual.
The most striking example is from the Taï forest, where the 19 haplotypes show greater diversity than the entire human clade, even though they occur in a single breeding group.
I have never heard of an example in earlier human history when two groups of humans have blended peacefully after their territories became in contact.
I believe that the idea of blending by peaceful interbreeding is just wishful thinking based on modern ethics.
Some Neanderthals have probably blended into modern human tribes, most likely some children or women. Other hybrid humans may be the result of random encounters.
The majority of the Neanderthals have disappeared during a relatively short time span, of a few thousand years. Some of them might have died as a result of direct fights with the expanding modern humans, the others might have been forced to retreat into worse territories that provided less food, so their population has dwindled.
The initial contact might not always have been peaceful, but the actual blend often is. Germany is not at war inside even though there is huge mixing between its states and the states themselves are not all historically "cut", one was also created by people voting to merge. People actually wanted to blend the various smaller states into one back in the 19th century (so the other way around).
Nah, the vast majority of groups of humans we think of as extinct (I mean in the historical era, say avars, thracians, cumans, vandals, etc. etc.) not in prehistory (of prehistoric groups hardly anything is known) blended into later populations and did not go extinct by the way of each member being killed. The further we go back into the past, such mass killing would be less possible technologically not more so.
>I have never heard of an example in earlier human history when two groups of humans have blended peacefully after their territories became in contact.
Mexicans are roughly half Native American, half European.
>The majority of the Neanderthals have disappeared during a relatively short time span, of a few thousand years.
People did something that killed off the megafauna, and made people deformed at the same time. Genetically we are one species.
It is weird to provide Mexico as an example of peaceful blending.
After most conquests, which have established a new ruling class in some territory, there has been a mixing between the former invaders and the previous native population.
In many cases, the former invaders were less numerous than the natives, so after a few generations the mixed population has begun to resemble more the previous natives than the new incomers.
Nevertheless, I do not consider that these are examples of peaceful blending. In all cases the original war has inflicted serious losses on the natives and the reason why in more recent times no more of them were killed than necessary was because they were needed as a work force.
Before the organized states, which were able to tax the work of everybody, and before the use of slavery, there were no reasons to keep alive any vanquished tribe, which would compete for the food resources of the territory.
The losers would have been forced to run away to other territories, to stay alive. Except perhaps for women and children, they would have never been adopted by the victorious tribe, to blend in it.
The climate changed and the hunting grounds the Neanderthals were most fit for, disappeared. Sapiens were better adapted to the changed environment. The two groups existed in parallel for a long time. Also IIRC Neanderthals were always isolated in smaller groups compared to how Sapiens lived, even before Sapiens entered the shared stage.
This event must have happened in prehistoric rather than historic times, but even in historic times, peaceful blending has happened. Not that everything was peaceful; human history is riddled with war and violence, even within homogenous groups of humans. But there are plenty of examples where one group conquered another and then assimilated into the population they conquered. We're quite often not genocidal.
So it's entirely possible that Neanderthals were assimilated into Sapiens tribes.
Neanderthal portraits strike me as morally offensive, reflecting an arrogant and ignorant form of control over interpretation. These depictions reduce a complex ancient species to biased stereotypes, perpetuating assumptions that prove inaccurate over time. It's a distorted construct falsely asserting superiority by condescendingly looking down on our evolutionary past.
> What's behind the evolution of Neanderthal portraits
the answer is:
> Science braided with sociopolitics.
But I would say the answer is only a little to do with science... It's really just acts of imagination. The idea of 'Neanderthals' allows for an opportunity for different human groups to help guide how humans think of themselves. So it's an interesting narrative pivot point.
It’d be nice though if the images were also understood as just acts of imagination.
You could take a chimp skull, use the same techniques used to ‘reconstruct’ Neanderthal faces, and you’d get a similar result - a smiley fellow with a tad narrow forehead, big teeth, and long hair.
Why can’t we just accept that we have no idea?
Take fur for example. We have a species of primates that evolved in frigid conditions, who seem to have had skeletons indicating adaptations to cold, who most likely couldn’t make clothes, nor the type of shelters that can be efficiently heated, yet they didn’t have fur.
We have woolly rhinos and mammoths, but Neanderthals didn’t have fur because obviously lol, they’re our cousins after all. We don’t even know why we don’t have fur, and at what point we stopped having it. The leading explanation is basically just conjecture.
> who most likely couldn’t make clothes, nor the type of shelters that can be efficiently heated, yet they didn’t have fur.
This is absolutely not true. The popular consensus, however, is so steeply biased towards anything labeled "homo sapiens" that there's no consideration given to how other humanoid species might have lived.
You assumption is correct, that they could not have survived in the freezing cold if they were also just stupid. In reality, if they were to survive in the freezing cold in small groups (most Neanderthals lived in groups of 8-40 individuals) they would have had to be
- incredibly conflict-avoidant
- very emotionally stable
- would need to have a great amount of calories to last the winter, which means they would need to start preparing at least a year in advance
- would also need to be strong and be able to work together in a group well
- maintain quality over quantity -- mouths to feed that can't contribute to the group would be disastrous.
- The last point implies that they had very stable social situations and likely little to no arguments over who should marry whom. Probably also had a very stable social hierarchy
The tools Neanderthals have built have been found to have through multiple stages of preparation and multiple layers of coating. They domesticated many, if not most, of the animals that we now keep as pets. They also revered their elderly and gave proper consideration to their dead.
These are all signs of an advanced manner of cognition, certainly not animals. In fact you could certainly make the argument that with the high social trust and extended time spent "hibernating" (waiting for it to get warm enough) inside a cave, they were more like mad geniuses working on large problems for months on end. Considering just how long they survived, they would also have been great at passing down things from one generation to the next, which is yet another point in favor of them having a rich culture.
Can you point me to some sources about Neanderthal animal domestication? That’s very interesting, I’d like to read more on that!
Specifically about clothes and shelters though. To my knowledge we really don’t have finds indicating that they could or would do this.
Regarding group size, I think you’re reading much too much into it. The group size is similar to wolf packs. Wolves are smart too, are great at hunting in groups, have stable social hierarchies, and have been around for a long time.
There has been at least one find of a needle that is presumed to be of Denisovan origin. If the Denisovans already had needles, it is very likely that the Neanderthals also had them.
In general the needles are the oldest evidence for the existence of clothes in all human groups, because the clothes themselves are much more perishable.
I have never heard of any evidence for animal domestication by Neanderthals.
If they had any domestic animals, that would have been possible only for a single species, i.e. dogs. For all the other domestic animals all the evidence is consistent with a domestication only during Neolithic, i.e. during the last ten thousand years.
Moreover, except for dogs they would not have had with what to feed domestic animals. At most in rare cases some child could have raised a small pet, but it is very unlikely that they normally had such food surplus to afford to share it with a pet that did not provide any useful service.
Sewing technology is something that preserves quite well in the fossil record though. Maybe some Neanderthal group somewhere had a needle, but we really don’t have any evidence for any sort of widespread use of that tech, as we later find in Homo Sapiens sites.
Sure, maybe they just did something else. I think people have proposed them having used birch tar as an adhesive that could be used to craft clothing.
Or, maybe, you know, they didn’t need to do that in the first place.
>Can you point me to some sources about Neanderthal animal domestication? That’s very interesting, I’d like to read more on that!
The popular consensus is that Neanderthals did not domesticate animals at all. Slowly, the consensus is warming up to the fact that they were great hunters. I have multiple reasons why I think Neanderthals could have domesticated animals (IMO not a trait that has to be exclusive to a single species):
- Neanderthal civilization lived for much longer than Sapiens
- Long periods of time spent indoors
They could have taken an animal pair indoors, maybe for food or maybe just for fun, and ended up keeping them for a while. They likely figured out how to manage these animals and after a couple of thousand years we end up with dogs.
- High calorie requirements
Specifically, during six to eight months when it was too cold or food was scarce. They had to keep up muscle mass if they wanted to hunt in the summers. This means they had to have a source of nutrition that was high in protein and fats. This points to dairy. Raw dairy doesn't go bad, it changes into cheese and is incredibly versatile and keeps "fresh" for very long. They would have to necessarily been able to manage animals. Any possible solution would have to be generally applicable to most instances of the kind of shelter they lived in. After all, we aren't fixating on one single group of Neanderthals.
They were also hunters. So being able to release animals (domesticated or otherwise) at a whim when hunting bigger prey would have been an advantage.
>Specifically about clothes and shelters though. To my knowledge we really don’t have finds indicating that they could or would do this.
I think clothes are pretty simply explained: to live in the biting cold, even in the summers, you couldn't survive unless you had protective clothing. It's very plausible that they at the very least had clothes made of multiple layers animal skins held together by fragments of bone / rock. It's easy enough. They also killed large cold-adapted animals, so finding insulating hides wouldn't have been very difficult.
And as for shelters, nothing comes close to caves (on the surface or a ways underground) for insultation.
>Regarding group size, I think you’re reading much too much into it. The group size is similar to wolf packs. Wolves are smart too, are great at hunting in groups, have stable social hierarchies, and have been around for a long time.
I don't know what exactly you're criticizing but I think the group sizes would be small because:
- Cold climates limit movement, forcing your group to a certain region. And the region has to be allowed to "regenerate" resources, which caps the number of people it can support
- The more people you stuff inside a cave the more food you need.
- Consensus breaks down after 10 (8?) or so people. I doubt it would be possible to live conflict-free with too many people inside a crammed space. Plus, Dunbar's Number. To make even 20 people work for that long you'd have to be honest to a fault and guileless. I think it's likely that even though they lived in small groups in caves, they might have had some contact with other nearby Neanderthal groups. It's easy to conclude that this would help them basically live with their friends (aka people they don't bear animosity towards) for 6-8 months of the year.
Most of this would readily show up in archeological record. And it really doesn’t.
And because it doesn’t it’s pretty clear they hunted all year round. This is substantiated by research pointing towards them having adaptations for having good vision in low light environments.
Also, bone collagen research indicates that at least the tested specimens ate meat almost exclusively.
Them hunting all year round is much more plausible than having cattle in caves throughout the winter.
I don’t know what’s your experience when it comes to animal husbandry, but just the amount of manure that this activity would generate somewhere in a corner of a cave is something that we would’ve found.
There’s no shortage of mammals surviving winters by hunting in biting cold. From foxes to wolves to lynx.
>and likely little to no arguments over who should marry whom.
What makes you think they even had marriage? We've seen in pre-contact societies (such as on Hawaii) that many do/did not have the concept of monogamous marriage that modern people have. The whole idea of marriage and monogamy seems to have developed with the rise of agricultural societies and land ownership. Before that, kids were just raised by the tribe and people probably didn't care much about who fathered which kid.
I agree with you. In small, genetically insular groups mixed / confused parentage would be the norm. I doubt this rules out marriage or monogamy, though. Confused parentage could be used as a very effective group consensus tactic.
I don't think it rules out monogamy, but I think our current assumption of it is flawed. Just because modern humans largely practice it, doesn't mean humans always have, or that Neanderthals did. Bonobo monkeys, for instance, are infamous for being very promiscuous. And today, lots of people are experimenting with "open relationships". I think there's a good argument that monogamy was invented mainly after the rise of agricultural and larger human societies (rather than small tribes) as a way of providing social stability. In a village/tribe of 50-100 people where there's no real concept of money, private property, or land ownership (and probably no/rare STDs since the group is isolated), there isn't much need for it if promiscuity is socially accepted: why bother chaining yourself down to one partner permanently if you don't have to? People might temporarily concentrate on one partner for emotional reasons, but this doesn't equate to a lifelong commitment with the threat of becoming a social outcast if you have sex with someone else.
Or they might as well have had social structures similar to chimps, or lions. With an alpha male on top of the hierarchy enforcing social cohesion through violence and having near-exclusive mating rights.
> You could take a chimp skull, use the same techniques used to ‘reconstruct’ Neanderthal faces, and you’d get a similar result - a smiley fellow with a tad narrow forehead, big teeth, and long hair.
>"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."
>The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States.
>An inquiry later established that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.
>"Their stories about him were increasingly bizarre. After a while it was hard to take it seriously. You had to laugh. It was just unbelievable. At the end of the day what he did was incredible."
>During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.
>Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made things up.
>In one case he had claimed that a 50 million-year-old "half-ape" called Adapis had been found in Switzerland, an archaeological sensation. In reality, the ape had been dug up in France, where several other examples had already been found.
I wasn’t really talking about passing a chimp skull for a Neanderthal one. I was dissing the method of reconstruction itself. It basically assumes a Homo Sapiens like soft tissue morphology and works from there. And then you get those very modern looking guys and girls. I’d really like to see someone do the same just with a chimp skull. I doubt anyone would though, as that’d effectively undermine their work.
I really wish we could develop the science and technology to view the past like movies, but without needing it to be recorded on film. It would be amazing to have a kind of time telescope, enabling us to see far back in history, not just across space.
This whole article is barely on the level of a senior secondary school student. There is so much false and incorrect, predated and misrepresented information that are simply a regurgitation of current societal norms
I re-read the article after reading your comment. I can't find any obvious false, incorrect, predated or misrepresented information. Could you please point out what is false and incorrect etc?
1: https://www.kenniskennis.com/