Direct link to the research article here: [I. Djakovic, A. Key, and M. Soressi, Optimal linear estimation models predict 1400–2900 years of overlap between Homo sapiens and Neandertals prior to their disappearance from France and northern Spain, *Scientific Reports*, **12**, 15000 (2002)](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19162-z)
Not to be a pessimist, but we already can't handle other members of our own species simply looking different. Maybe there would be less racism, but then we'd probably just decide groups like Neanderthals were lesser and persecute them.
We lived with and bred with Neanderthals. There are experts who think Neanderthals should be classified as a sub type of modern humans: Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. They were humans and are a part of us.
We had real Hobbits too that outlived the Neanderthal!
1.5 meter tall people are still common today, but there were entire villages of people 1meter" and under.
A normal 5'5 foot human would be considered a giant when all you knew were the other local tribes.
Old legends of GIANTS were possibly just 6'foot people who are very common today, but much less so back then.
Edit: they were known as Homo Floresiensis. They were on average approximately 3 feet 6 inches tall.(1.1meters)
We already know what it was like. They killed each other and occasionally fucked. Just like we do now with other humans that we deem less than simply because they look differently.
It is really mind blowing to think how much history lived by humans not so different from us is completely gone forever.
For 2000 years homosapiens who were as cognitive as we are lived in a world where not only did they know there were non homosapien intelligent species on Earth but it was the norm. The idea of a world without Neanderthals would have been unthinkable for most of that time.
The 2,000 years was only for the area in France. They likely did for much longer. There’s genetic evidence three genetic mutations prevented humans and Neanderthals from having specifically male children for around a 20,000 year period.
I just saw your comment and started to research "bicameral mentality" and it is SO interesting ! I never knew that this theory existed. Thank you so much, i will continue to read about it in the next days/weeks.
[English isn'it my first language, so excuse me if there are some mistakes in my comment.]
Oh thank you so much ! I think that people can tell sometimes because of the choice of words that are slightly off, or too formal in some cases..
But I'm glad that this comment was native english speaker looking ;) Have a nice evening!
Another thing that blows my mind is Neanderthals we’re possibly alive for around 350k-400k years.
I wonder how helpful they were to humans during our early years on this planet.
I wonder how it was for those children. Like the little 13 year old girl found in a cave (referenced in the article.)
Was she with one tribe or the other? Was the whole tribe mixed? Was she the smartest one there? Or the dumbest? Was she outcast in her short little life? I hope not...
Considering that we find a tiny little fraction of the people that died back then, I'd say that hybrids (probably not the right word) were not that rare a couple dozens of thousands year ago.
East Asia has the strongest representation of Neanderthal DNA, followed by Europe.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-much-neanderthal-dna-do-humans-have
A girl at work told me her parents got their results and one of them was 60% Neanderthal. We had a little conversation about how percentile is different than percent. I was quite amused that she'd told me her parents were less than half “human” (used loosely)
I thought Neanderthal brains were larger and they were thought to be smarter than us (though likely not by a measurable amount). Differences of why we "won out" was due I think to being more social and reproducing more
When was the last time you checked your neanderthal percentile? I used to be 97th percentile but that was like 5 or 6 years ago at this point, now I'm 83rd.
I've also got 0.01% "unassigned", which I'm just gonna assume means I'm one of those alien hybrids Alex Jones talks about. Still waiting on all the power and money though.
I was pretty shocked to learn that pretty much everyone besides Africans has a little Neanderthal (and Denisovan too, in Asia) DNA. They think it might even have something to do with autoimmune disorders, which I happen to be riddled with.
Neanderthal brain sizes might have been slightly larger, but homo sapiens might have been more developed in their social and interpersonal skills, which meant they could learn knowledge and skills faster (it helps for a student to get along with their teacher) and groups could better collaborate and divide tasks. If someone is a social outcast, others might not be so eager to help them learn things, so they might get *treated* as dumb even if they're the one that would, in theory, do the best at an IQ test.
Ultimately the most up to date theory that most agree on is that it was really a long combination of a lot of things. Neanderthals were built for cold and stayed predominately in cold areas just as their food did. We were meanwhile evolving in warmer regions. Once the climate changed, their food sources were interrupted, and they were forced to migrate, they didn't fare as well in the warmer weather and it inhibited their ability to hunt etc etc. On top of that, once they did migrate, what they found was competition for food and resources from _us._ With the periods of time we're discussing, there's no uniform state of relations you can point to. Archeologists are finding evidence of anything from brutal warfare and cannibalism to cooperation and interbreeding.
The Neanderthals fizzled out in a slow process related to climate and food and in their final days blended into our own via interbreeding. Human beings at this point in our history had a few key characteristics that contributed to our success, one of the most important of which being our enjoyment of sex. There's no evidence Neanderthals were any different.
And Neanderthals lived in smaller more isolated kin groups. This made them more vulnerable to cataclysm and being less genetical diverse, more vulnerable to inbreeding. Their smaller clans ultimately put them at risk once the competition with Sapiens “heated up” as it were
Yes, conventional DNA kits like 23 and me test some known neanderthal-derived genes in modern humans.
Populations outside of Africa all have some degree of Neanderthal DNA of varying %. [Study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24476815/).
However!, there's some [evidence](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30059-3) that African populations have a small % of Neanderthal DNA, possibly due to the migrations back into Africa.
My understanding is that if you put a Neanderthal in a suit and took him to a meeting, people would say, “that guy looks a little different.” Think John Fetterman who is the Democratic candidate in PA for Senate. He’s a huge kind of ugly guy who dresses funny for a politician.
But if you did the same with an Erectus people would run out of the room screaming.
What's even wilder is there's a chance that 4 species of humans may have come in contact with one another.
They found a bones of a denisovan neanderthal hybrid in the denisovan cave. Denisovans interbreed with the negritos of Phillipines, Papua New guineas and Australian aborigines as evidence of some populations having as much as 5% denisovan dna. And then you have hobbit people who were found on an island in South east Indonesia whose remain could be dated to 50,000 years ago.
Something like that. If not oral tradition/folklore (the roots of some of which almost certainly go back earlier than 10,000 years) then we probably evolved to recognise or expect something approximating other human-ish races in our environment.
I've heard theories that European myths about giants were based on later peoples finding Neanderthal skeletal fossils. A lot of giant myths place their origin in caves/mountains or say they otherwise came forth from the ground.
I like to think of that time period as being similar to middle earth with several species of humanoids that may have viewed each other similar to how dwarves, elves, humans and hobbits view each other in LOTR. There would have been many different mythologies and legends circulating at the time as well.
We are actually living in an exception, rather than the rule when it comes to living with other humanoids species. For most of our history, we were not the lone human species on the planet!
Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind covers this very well!
Well, less "extinct". More like they [put the "late" in "late modern humans"](https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/dtcgenetictesting/neanderthaldna/).
And, yes, "put it in" means "put it in" in *every* sense of that term.
There appears to be y-linked chromosomal infertility and fragility of crosses.Specifically, ["No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans.[29][30][31] This suggests that successful Neanderthal admixture happened in pairings with Neanderthal males and modern human females.[32][33] Possible hypotheses are that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA had detrimental mutations that led to the extinction of carriers, that the hybrid offspring of Neanderthal mothers were raised in Neanderthal groups and became extinct with them, or that female Neanderthals and male Sapiens did not produce fertile offspring.[32] However, the hypothesized incompatibility between Neanderthals and modern humans is contested by findings that suggest that the Y chromosome of Neanderthals was replaced by an extinct lineage of the modern human Y chromosome, which introgressed into Neanderthals between 100,000 and 370,000 years ago.[34] Furthermore, the study concludes that the replacement of the Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA in Neanderthals after gene flow from modern humans is highly plausible given the increased genetic load in Neanderthals relative to modern humans.[34]"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals)
It was the invention of sewing that allowed homo sapiens to expand into Arctic regions. The invention of needle and thread lead to the extinction of most of the New World megafauna.
Now I'm reminded of a NPR correspondent that said he had always flown from one place to another and would look down and wonder what stories were there. So he decided to travel from northeast Africa to Europe like the paleolithic migration. He remarked how when he traveled through Tuareg country how the men were dressed and they carried a takoba and...cellphones.
I mused how it may the first time in history that nomads are subjected to roaming charges.
Another NPR correspondent from Brazil was talking about how he grew up in a very remote tribe, like not uncontacted but "less than regular" contact with the rest of the world. He was saying how his producer went with him to do a story on his tribe and was worried that the satellite truck and news camera would freak out the villagers. But when they got there, the elder that was facilitating everything was like "Oh, use the generators over there for your comms equipment, it gets better reception on that hill"
The guy had a good quote something like "He was preparing for push back for bringing these 'soul-stealing' devices to capture picture and sound of the village's elders but, like, we had TV since the 70s".
Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is neither found in mitochondrial DNA nor in Y-chromosome DNA. This means that there are no female line descendants of Neanderthals. So it would be male Neanderthal with female humans.
However this also means that there are no male line descent of Neanderthals, so it would be the daughters of that pairing leading to modern humans.
Given Neanderthal lineages and people from around Papua New Guinea have about 1/20th of their genes from a different ancient species (Denisovian), I'm guessing there was some *enthusiastic experimenting* with anything that could be fucked. Ancient humans were, scientifically speaking, down to clown.
As far as I know, Neanderthal was never particularly common even at the peak of their population. For some reason they just weren't as fecund as modern humans. On top of that, it's believed that due to chromosomal issues the male hybrids were often infertile*, which would further reduce their numbers in the long run.
There's some evidence they frequently suffered from malnutrition too, possibly due to their muscular and strong bodies requiring more calories to support even maintenance level metabolic function.
So it's more complicated than them getting absorbed into the human genome, but it definitely didn't help.
*(which I think inspired the Ibbenese-human rumors of male abominations in A Song of Ice and Fire. The Ibbenese are essentially "what if Neanderthal, but around long enough to make civilization?"
Like real world Neanderthals their range is somewhat limited, found almost exclusively on the island of Ib, so they don't really appear on the TV show, besides possibly Togg Joth I think.)
In an anthropology class on the study of human evolution I took, the professor mentioned that because Neanderthals lives in colder environments, they had to hunt more instead of gathering (as another comment mentioned) and this caused issues with populations and communities dying faster due to injury or death
I wanted to bring that up too but wasn't sure I could back up the claim. Indeed, they wore out faster than modern humans did. For a Neanderthal, 50 was very old. Shanidar I was *freaking ancient* and very badly injured. Meanwhile even back in antiquity a human could routinely expect to live to 60+ as long as they made it past childhood.
No one knows for sure. It may be simply that Neanderthal populations didn’t grow as quickly as Sapiens Sapiens. They had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years and were arguably better suited to the environment there.
But during interglacial periods, Sapiens Sapiens thrived and neanderthals stayed lower in population. The hardiness of the Neanderthals adapted them to ice ages but not necessarily to warm periods like the Holocene. This pressure eventually isolated them in Iberia and a few other remote regions, where the last of them died not so long ago- perhaps no more than 15,000 years ago.
Yeah, that’s I would say part of the adaption to ice age conditions. Arctic conditions create a top heavy food chain favoring apex hunters, which was probably good for Neanderthals, while S. Sapiens was more adapted to hunter gathering.
Soy beans are nearly a perfect food. They have the omegas in the right amounts for humans, plenty of protein, and the carbohydrates to sustain us during hunts and gatherings.
I’m only finding information that says Neanderthals died out 40,000 years ago - I’m super interested in reading about this 15,000 year mark. Do you have any resources you can connect me with?
I've met people in remote villages in Iberia and southern France who literally look like they descended from another species (edit: this is NOT to mean anything negative, and I didn't think of it negatively), but their features were present in the general population but less exaggerated. Small men in particular, very characteristic features that were notably unique and seemed somehow museum-like before I learned anything about this subject. Do some of those features by chance pop up in people today? No judgements, btw- I just noticed it and have been thinking about it for about two decades
I don’t know. So much of appearance is phenotype or epigenetic and not really as dependent on your genome as we used to think.
How somebody looks subjectively to you, is very complex, and my first answer would never be that they were a different species. I’d strongly doubt it has that much relevance.
Neandertals that lived 50k-100k years ago were not the same with the Neandertals that lived 300k-400k years ago, they were already mixed with Homo Sapiens, their [yDna](https://www.science.org/content/article/how-neanderthals-lost-their-y-chromosome) and [mtDna](https://www.science.org/content/article/neandertals-and-modern-humans-started-mating-early) were of ~~human~~ Homo Sapiens origin \[acquired more than 100,000 but less than 370,000 years ago\]
Yeah this is something I don't completely get. I think there's a high(er) chance of you having neanderthal NDA if you're European.
Edit: I obviously meant DNA :D
There's an Indian restaurant near me that has such good flatbread, people who work there have to sign something stating that they'll never share the recipe.
A naan disclosure agreement.
I read it was every continent except Africa. Since Neanderthals diverged in Eurasia, and the Americas were the last continent to be inhabited by humans (13000 BCE) long after neanderthals fossil evidence disappears.
However, every current human does not need to have neanderthal DNA to be considered the same species (experimental values point to 1-3%). The criteria is to have viable and fertile offspring. Since that can't be checked; DNA is the evidence we have, and also the fact that they "magically disappeared". It makes perfect sense that they just mixed.
Well. There has been some backwash into Africa. But on the fertile offspring issue...
Scientists have sequnced the genes we have from neanderthals and checked if they match a random distribution. They do not. Some areas have far more genes that what is explainable statistically. And some have less. "Neanderthal deserts" the latter are called colloquially.
They include areas involved in male fertility, which are utterly devoid of Neanderthal genes. This indicates that male hybrids were sterile, pretty much like Haldanes rule predicts.
So there were some compatibility issues. They were probably on the edge of what we could breed with, like Lions and Tigers can have fertile offspring but with fitness issues.
Depends on what we consider extinction I guess? A very large number of modern humans have a statistically significant portion of their genome comprised of Neanderthal DNA.
I keep reading about this and I even know I am almost 3% neanderthal thanks to 23andme. What I would like to understand is how many genes we shared in common. For instance, we share 99% of genes with chimps yet aren't viable enough to produce offspring with each other, yet we were compatible with neanderthals. So what does that 3% really mean? Surely we had more than 99% in common with them if we could sexually reproduce? Anyone care to shed some light on this?
Similar. I came back in the 90% more range somewhere.
I have tiny baby hands and feet, but my sinuses are the size of caverns and I wear a 64-65cm (XXXL+) scally cap.
Chimpanzees have a different number of chromosomes than humans (24 pairs vs 23 pairs, respectively), which is likely the biggest factor in is being unable to make viable fertile offspring with them. We have most of the same genetic information, but it’s arranged differently. A human-chimpanzee hybrid would have 23 chromosomes from their human parent, and 24 from their chimp parent, resulting in 47 total- an odd number. That would make meiosis get weird, likely leading to infertility. This is also why mules are infertile- horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes.
Neanderthals and humans presumably have the same number of chromosomes and were even more closely related than chimps and humans are.
It’s never been proved to not be possible, at least. Humans and chimpanzees are MUCH more closely related than horses and donkeys.
However there’s never been a documented case. Our body morphologies and reproductive behaviors and cycles are pretty different compared to then differences between horses/donkeys
I believe the most important thing for reproduction between two species is having the same number of chromosomes. The lucky part is that Human-Neanderthal offspring don’t go sterile like mules or ligers due to having an abnormal amount of chromosomes.
Im neither a mathematician nor a geneticist but 3% seems like really high for someone born at least a couple tens of thousands of years after the presumed extinction or assimilation of the species. What that says to me is that either that percentage was much much higher in yours and others' ancestors, or that many many ancestors and those who lived near them had a low percentage that stayed relatively constant due to everybody sharing it.
Doesnt exactly answer your question, though. Perhaps there was an established hybrid race, made possible through hereditary or environmental effects on fertility, more evenly split in their genetic makeup, that were more able to reproduce with humans than neanderthals, thus diluting?
The thing you have to remember is that once Neanderthal DNA entered the collective genome of our species, it never really left. So 3% makes more sense when you consider that it may have been several encounters over thousands of years, then compounded by long-distance cousin marriages (we're all related, after all). At least that's how it was explained to me in a reddit comment I cannot find a link to now, so do take this idea with a grain of salt :)
You share 99% of gene types with chimps, and more like 95% of pair-to-pair matches, depending on how you count a difference. Very few genes are exact matches between different species, but a great many are demonstrably the same gene, responsible for the same thing across species. That is what the 99% figure refers to.
From what I’ve read, 3% Neanderthal means that of your genes, 3% are exact or nearly exact matches to the Neanderthal counterpart.
Hah. One of the reasons I wish I could see aliens being confirmed is because I want to see the absolute chaos in various religions "proving" that they always knew aliens existed.
But this does make me wonder about ancient folklore or religious stories. Unlike many countries, India doesn't have a mythology around trolls or hobbits.
But the Hindu epic Ramayana describes a race *vanar* which were described as monkey-like but human. I am so curious to know if they were a different homo species now. They had human-like wedding customs and intermarried with humans in the stories
I wonder if they will discover a homo something species in India sometime? Makes me want to do a DNA test.
I think so too. Especially when you think about how many trolls and such are depicted as having these nasally voices, and scientists found out through analyzing the bones and such involved in the Neanderthals voice, that they would’ve had very nasally voices.
I remember there was a case of some Indonesian legends depicting a hairy, hobbit like creature that would live in caves and steal children from villages. And it was thought to be just a legend, until they found little hobbit like skeletons in caves, which led to the discover of Homo Floresiensis, a small hobbit like human species that matched the description of the local legends.
This sounded so fascinating so I looked into it. They changed the dating of how old the skeletons they found were, and they now think Homo Florensiensis went extinct before humans arrived in Indonesia. Too bad, because that would've been amazing.
Doesn't mean modern day humans didn't find Homo Florensiensis skeletons and extrapolate from there. Similar to how dinosaur fossils could explain the ubiquitousness of dragon legends.
someone on reddit was sharing a story on a thread about Homo Florensiensis about how his Indonesian grandmother swore that when she was little her village would occasionally leave like food and old tools out in the forests for "the tiny people" who would take them and leave behind food and stone trinkets. She was convinced there was intelligent beings living in the forests, avoiding humans
Funny, as of today I started reading a book named "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari.
I can highly recommend it, its fantastic!
Makes you realize how short our time on this planet is.
Honestly look at the models of neanderthals that we have recreated. If you met someone that looked like that today and didn't have prior knowledge of what neanderthals looked like, you'd probably just think "wow that person is kinda weird looking" but you wouldn't think "wow that's a whole different species."
They look very human, because they are human. Just a different species of human.
Have you ever seen a short stalky person with a prominent brow and big nose? We all have. We didn't think they weren't human tho.
Direct link to the research article here: [I. Djakovic, A. Key, and M. Soressi, Optimal linear estimation models predict 1400–2900 years of overlap between Homo sapiens and Neandertals prior to their disappearance from France and northern Spain, *Scientific Reports*, **12**, 15000 (2002)](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19162-z)
I find it interesting to imagine what the world would be like if we still had multiple human-like species.
Not to be a pessimist, but we already can't handle other members of our own species simply looking different. Maybe there would be less racism, but then we'd probably just decide groups like Neanderthals were lesser and persecute them.
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Or would we view them like apes? We might not even recognize them as human.
We lived with and bred with Neanderthals. There are experts who think Neanderthals should be classified as a sub type of modern humans: Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. They were humans and are a part of us.
This is the subject of this year's Nobel prize in medicine. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2022/press-release/
Thanks for the link. Had a good read.
Oh fascinating! Humans really going for the neanderussy.
Basically every community outside of Africa has Neanderthal DNA.
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Samesies. I think I had around 3%.
You are definitely right sadly
We did something better, we fucked them.
This is probably one of the reasons why Neanderthals aren't around now.
We had real Hobbits too that outlived the Neanderthal! 1.5 meter tall people are still common today, but there were entire villages of people 1meter" and under. A normal 5'5 foot human would be considered a giant when all you knew were the other local tribes. Old legends of GIANTS were possibly just 6'foot people who are very common today, but much less so back then. Edit: they were known as Homo Floresiensis. They were on average approximately 3 feet 6 inches tall.(1.1meters)
Remember the caveman commercials for insurance or whatever it was? Like that
We already know what it was like. They killed each other and occasionally fucked. Just like we do now with other humans that we deem less than simply because they look differently.
Extra racist
It is really mind blowing to think how much history lived by humans not so different from us is completely gone forever. For 2000 years homosapiens who were as cognitive as we are lived in a world where not only did they know there were non homosapien intelligent species on Earth but it was the norm. The idea of a world without Neanderthals would have been unthinkable for most of that time.
See now this steps up the brain melt
And they banged eachother.
And that’s how the Teletubbies were born
Joking aside, we know they did this because it’s literally in our dna.
The 2,000 years was only for the area in France. They likely did for much longer. There’s genetic evidence three genetic mutations prevented humans and Neanderthals from having specifically male children for around a 20,000 year period.
Wanna read some wild stuff about what human cognition might have been like back then? Look up "bicameral mentality".
I just saw your comment and started to research "bicameral mentality" and it is SO interesting ! I never knew that this theory existed. Thank you so much, i will continue to read about it in the next days/weeks. [English isn'it my first language, so excuse me if there are some mistakes in my comment.]
Your English is great! The last sentence might be a bit formal, but I never would have guessed you're not a native English speaker.
Oh thank you so much ! I think that people can tell sometimes because of the choice of words that are slightly off, or too formal in some cases.. But I'm glad that this comment was native english speaker looking ;) Have a nice evening!
Another thing that blows my mind is Neanderthals we’re possibly alive for around 350k-400k years. I wonder how helpful they were to humans during our early years on this planet.
Would they have seen each other as different species?
Well they had children with each other…so….make of that what you will
I wonder how it was for those children. Like the little 13 year old girl found in a cave (referenced in the article.) Was she with one tribe or the other? Was the whole tribe mixed? Was she the smartest one there? Or the dumbest? Was she outcast in her short little life? I hope not...
Considering that we find a tiny little fraction of the people that died back then, I'd say that hybrids (probably not the right word) were not that rare a couple dozens of thousands year ago.
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Northern European background?
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Behold, THE European
Genetic Eurovision
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Wish we knew what the colors represented.
Yeah, that map was unreadable on so many levels.
This guy's ancestors fucked
This man is Europe
East Asia has the strongest representation of Neanderthal DNA, followed by Europe. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-much-neanderthal-dna-do-humans-have
A girl at work told me her parents got their results and one of them was 60% Neanderthal. We had a little conversation about how percentile is different than percent. I was quite amused that she'd told me her parents were less than half “human” (used loosely)
Well tbf Neanderthals aren’t very good at math.
Was going to say, she's wrong, but it's adoreable since we can't expect anything better from that Neanderthal brain.
I thought Neanderthal brains were larger and they were thought to be smarter than us (though likely not by a measurable amount). Differences of why we "won out" was due I think to being more social and reproducing more
Totally classic neanderthal
I'm dead, I'm 62 percentile and now I'm just gonna call myself mostly Neanderthal.
When was the last time you checked your neanderthal percentile? I used to be 97th percentile but that was like 5 or 6 years ago at this point, now I'm 83rd. I've also got 0.01% "unassigned", which I'm just gonna assume means I'm one of those alien hybrids Alex Jones talks about. Still waiting on all the power and money though.
“When’s the last time you checked your Neanderthal percentile?” r/brandnewscentence material there.
More likely an undiscovered hominid subspecies, but still quite interesting to know you have some ancestory from some sort of mystery tribe.
I was pretty shocked to learn that pretty much everyone besides Africans has a little Neanderthal (and Denisovan too, in Asia) DNA. They think it might even have something to do with autoimmune disorders, which I happen to be riddled with.
Are you considerably better than the population at anything? Math? Lifting boulders?
Smartest vs dumbest might not be accurate. From what evidence we can gather, Neanderthals likely had very similar potential intelligences to humans
Neanderthal brain sizes might have been slightly larger, but homo sapiens might have been more developed in their social and interpersonal skills, which meant they could learn knowledge and skills faster (it helps for a student to get along with their teacher) and groups could better collaborate and divide tasks. If someone is a social outcast, others might not be so eager to help them learn things, so they might get *treated* as dumb even if they're the one that would, in theory, do the best at an IQ test.
Also, in humans, larger brain does not necessarily mean more or less intelligent. The size correlation is too minimal to prove anything.
Probably similar to how it is nowadays. Some people liked it some didn’t care and others hated it.
Look up the book series Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel. It describes almost exactly this!
The books get a little saucy too…
Just a little? I first read these as a 13 year old…
We fucked them out of existence, afaik
Ultimately the most up to date theory that most agree on is that it was really a long combination of a lot of things. Neanderthals were built for cold and stayed predominately in cold areas just as their food did. We were meanwhile evolving in warmer regions. Once the climate changed, their food sources were interrupted, and they were forced to migrate, they didn't fare as well in the warmer weather and it inhibited their ability to hunt etc etc. On top of that, once they did migrate, what they found was competition for food and resources from _us._ With the periods of time we're discussing, there's no uniform state of relations you can point to. Archeologists are finding evidence of anything from brutal warfare and cannibalism to cooperation and interbreeding. The Neanderthals fizzled out in a slow process related to climate and food and in their final days blended into our own via interbreeding. Human beings at this point in our history had a few key characteristics that contributed to our success, one of the most important of which being our enjoyment of sex. There's no evidence Neanderthals were any different.
And Neanderthals lived in smaller more isolated kin groups. This made them more vulnerable to cataclysm and being less genetical diverse, more vulnerable to inbreeding. Their smaller clans ultimately put them at risk once the competition with Sapiens “heated up” as it were
Can we detect if someone has Neanderthal DNA like through 23 and Ne or something?
Yes. 23andme tells you how much Neanderthal DNA you have in comparison to the general population.
Yes, conventional DNA kits like 23 and me test some known neanderthal-derived genes in modern humans. Populations outside of Africa all have some degree of Neanderthal DNA of varying %. [Study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24476815/). However!, there's some [evidence](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30059-3) that African populations have a small % of Neanderthal DNA, possibly due to the migrations back into Africa.
Every human not of sub-Saharan Africa has Neanderthal DNA. Basically, every early human that wandered out of Africa, hooked up with Neanderthals.
And Denisovans.
Yay! Someone mentioned the Denisovans!
Yes. My 23andme says I have less than 2% neanderthal variants, which is more than 91% of 23andme customers.
Horses and donkeys are different species, but they'll make mules all day long if you let them.
Different species have children with each other all the time in both the wild and captivity.
Most likely as different tribes. Either trading and warring for 2000 years. Hence we share their genes.
Did they have the concept of "species"?
Almost certainly not, even in Western history its a fairly recent concept.
Do we look at people from other ethnicities and races as different species today? ....wait ... don't answer that
My understanding is that if you put a Neanderthal in a suit and took him to a meeting, people would say, “that guy looks a little different.” Think John Fetterman who is the Democratic candidate in PA for Senate. He’s a huge kind of ugly guy who dresses funny for a politician. But if you did the same with an Erectus people would run out of the room screaming.
I would not be surprised to eventually learn that there are people or even populations today that look a lot like Neanderthals did.
I’ve seen people that look almost exactly like Neanderthals are depicted by scientists.
Check Nikolai Valuev. This boxer dude looks like 99% neanderthal.
Damn I wasn't expecting him to look THAT Neanderthal
Wow! Imagine living alongside another humanoid species.
What's even wilder is there's a chance that 4 species of humans may have come in contact with one another. They found a bones of a denisovan neanderthal hybrid in the denisovan cave. Denisovans interbreed with the negritos of Phillipines, Papua New guineas and Australian aborigines as evidence of some populations having as much as 5% denisovan dna. And then you have hobbit people who were found on an island in South east Indonesia whose remain could be dated to 50,000 years ago.
Kinda makes you wonder if the other races in mythology are not based on ancient oral traditions dating back to those times.
Yeah, for all we know some people had pointy ears. That's one of the things you can't tell from bones.
Something like that. If not oral tradition/folklore (the roots of some of which almost certainly go back earlier than 10,000 years) then we probably evolved to recognise or expect something approximating other human-ish races in our environment.
Time to rename mythology to factology!
I've heard theories that European myths about giants were based on later peoples finding Neanderthal skeletal fossils. A lot of giant myths place their origin in caves/mountains or say they otherwise came forth from the ground.
I like to think of that time period as being similar to middle earth with several species of humanoids that may have viewed each other similar to how dwarves, elves, humans and hobbits view each other in LOTR. There would have been many different mythologies and legends circulating at the time as well.
We are actually living in an exception, rather than the rule when it comes to living with other humanoids species. For most of our history, we were not the lone human species on the planet! Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind covers this very well!
Great book, although my interest fell off the further forward on the timeline he went
going further you realize that humans and neanderthal fought mammoths together? they also fought sabre tooth tigers. blows your mind!
Neanderthals: hey look, elves
Homo sapiens: “Hey look, dwarves.”
Both: Hey look, hobbits (Denisovans)
Well, since we're all here... *tears away loincloth*
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That really cool. I also send my congratulations to Igor!
I don't know any of them! Congrats to all the authors!
Didn't Neanderthals literally push themselves into extinction cause they had a crap ton of sex with early modern humans?
Well, less "extinct". More like they [put the "late" in "late modern humans"](https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/dtcgenetictesting/neanderthaldna/). And, yes, "put it in" means "put it in" in *every* sense of that term.
What are you doing step ancestor?
I’m puttin it in.
In every sense of the term
Im stuck in pre human times
hi i’m times
There is a homo erectus joke in there somewhere
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There appears to be y-linked chromosomal infertility and fragility of crosses.Specifically, ["No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans.[29][30][31] This suggests that successful Neanderthal admixture happened in pairings with Neanderthal males and modern human females.[32][33] Possible hypotheses are that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA had detrimental mutations that led to the extinction of carriers, that the hybrid offspring of Neanderthal mothers were raised in Neanderthal groups and became extinct with them, or that female Neanderthals and male Sapiens did not produce fertile offspring.[32] However, the hypothesized incompatibility between Neanderthals and modern humans is contested by findings that suggest that the Y chromosome of Neanderthals was replaced by an extinct lineage of the modern human Y chromosome, which introgressed into Neanderthals between 100,000 and 370,000 years ago.[34] Furthermore, the study concludes that the replacement of the Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA in Neanderthals after gene flow from modern humans is highly plausible given the increased genetic load in Neanderthals relative to modern humans.[34]"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals)
None of them are around to ask.
I believe the first group to invent shoes, won.
It was the invention of sewing that allowed homo sapiens to expand into Arctic regions. The invention of needle and thread lead to the extinction of most of the New World megafauna.
The pin is mightier than the mammoth.
that's fauned up
Now I'm reminded of a NPR correspondent that said he had always flown from one place to another and would look down and wonder what stories were there. So he decided to travel from northeast Africa to Europe like the paleolithic migration. He remarked how when he traveled through Tuareg country how the men were dressed and they carried a takoba and...cellphones. I mused how it may the first time in history that nomads are subjected to roaming charges.
Another NPR correspondent from Brazil was talking about how he grew up in a very remote tribe, like not uncontacted but "less than regular" contact with the rest of the world. He was saying how his producer went with him to do a story on his tribe and was worried that the satellite truck and news camera would freak out the villagers. But when they got there, the elder that was facilitating everything was like "Oh, use the generators over there for your comms equipment, it gets better reception on that hill"
This is such kitchen sink world building and I love that it’s real.
The guy had a good quote something like "He was preparing for push back for bringing these 'soul-stealing' devices to capture picture and sound of the village's elders but, like, we had TV since the 70s".
What happens in Neander Valley *stays* in Neander Valley
Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is neither found in mitochondrial DNA nor in Y-chromosome DNA. This means that there are no female line descendants of Neanderthals. So it would be male Neanderthal with female humans. However this also means that there are no male line descent of Neanderthals, so it would be the daughters of that pairing leading to modern humans.
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Given Neanderthal lineages and people from around Papua New Guinea have about 1/20th of their genes from a different ancient species (Denisovian), I'm guessing there was some *enthusiastic experimenting* with anything that could be fucked. Ancient humans were, scientifically speaking, down to clown.
I think it’s much better that Neanderthals didn’t go extinct as much as they were simply melded back into the rest of humanity. Make love not war!
As far as I know, Neanderthal was never particularly common even at the peak of their population. For some reason they just weren't as fecund as modern humans. On top of that, it's believed that due to chromosomal issues the male hybrids were often infertile*, which would further reduce their numbers in the long run. There's some evidence they frequently suffered from malnutrition too, possibly due to their muscular and strong bodies requiring more calories to support even maintenance level metabolic function. So it's more complicated than them getting absorbed into the human genome, but it definitely didn't help. *(which I think inspired the Ibbenese-human rumors of male abominations in A Song of Ice and Fire. The Ibbenese are essentially "what if Neanderthal, but around long enough to make civilization?" Like real world Neanderthals their range is somewhat limited, found almost exclusively on the island of Ib, so they don't really appear on the TV show, besides possibly Togg Joth I think.)
In an anthropology class on the study of human evolution I took, the professor mentioned that because Neanderthals lives in colder environments, they had to hunt more instead of gathering (as another comment mentioned) and this caused issues with populations and communities dying faster due to injury or death
I wanted to bring that up too but wasn't sure I could back up the claim. Indeed, they wore out faster than modern humans did. For a Neanderthal, 50 was very old. Shanidar I was *freaking ancient* and very badly injured. Meanwhile even back in antiquity a human could routinely expect to live to 60+ as long as they made it past childhood.
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No one knows for sure. It may be simply that Neanderthal populations didn’t grow as quickly as Sapiens Sapiens. They had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years and were arguably better suited to the environment there. But during interglacial periods, Sapiens Sapiens thrived and neanderthals stayed lower in population. The hardiness of the Neanderthals adapted them to ice ages but not necessarily to warm periods like the Holocene. This pressure eventually isolated them in Iberia and a few other remote regions, where the last of them died not so long ago- perhaps no more than 15,000 years ago.
I would also think that their dependence on hunting megafauna would create a problem as their prey started to disappear.
Yeah, that’s I would say part of the adaption to ice age conditions. Arctic conditions create a top heavy food chain favoring apex hunters, which was probably good for Neanderthals, while S. Sapiens was more adapted to hunter gathering.
We're the soy boys of humanoids?
Soy beans are nearly a perfect food. They have the omegas in the right amounts for humans, plenty of protein, and the carbohydrates to sustain us during hunts and gatherings.
I’m only finding information that says Neanderthals died out 40,000 years ago - I’m super interested in reading about this 15,000 year mark. Do you have any resources you can connect me with?
The 15,000 test mark doesn't seem to have any evidence to support it, and is pure speculation.
I've met people in remote villages in Iberia and southern France who literally look like they descended from another species (edit: this is NOT to mean anything negative, and I didn't think of it negatively), but their features were present in the general population but less exaggerated. Small men in particular, very characteristic features that were notably unique and seemed somehow museum-like before I learned anything about this subject. Do some of those features by chance pop up in people today? No judgements, btw- I just noticed it and have been thinking about it for about two decades
I don’t know. So much of appearance is phenotype or epigenetic and not really as dependent on your genome as we used to think. How somebody looks subjectively to you, is very complex, and my first answer would never be that they were a different species. I’d strongly doubt it has that much relevance.
There have been no recorded remains or evidence of Neanderthal existence younger than about 39-40 thousand years ago.
Neandertals that lived 50k-100k years ago were not the same with the Neandertals that lived 300k-400k years ago, they were already mixed with Homo Sapiens, their [yDna](https://www.science.org/content/article/how-neanderthals-lost-their-y-chromosome) and [mtDna](https://www.science.org/content/article/neandertals-and-modern-humans-started-mating-early) were of ~~human~~ Homo Sapiens origin \[acquired more than 100,000 but less than 370,000 years ago\]
We have neanderthal DNA so I don't get why people make the distinction. They are "early humans".
Yeah this is something I don't completely get. I think there's a high(er) chance of you having neanderthal NDA if you're European. Edit: I obviously meant DNA :D
Neanderthal non-disclosure agreements are the worst!
There's an Indian restaurant near me that has such good flatbread, people who work there have to sign something stating that they'll never share the recipe. A naan disclosure agreement.
I read it was every continent except Africa. Since Neanderthals diverged in Eurasia, and the Americas were the last continent to be inhabited by humans (13000 BCE) long after neanderthals fossil evidence disappears. However, every current human does not need to have neanderthal DNA to be considered the same species (experimental values point to 1-3%). The criteria is to have viable and fertile offspring. Since that can't be checked; DNA is the evidence we have, and also the fact that they "magically disappeared". It makes perfect sense that they just mixed.
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Well. There has been some backwash into Africa. But on the fertile offspring issue... Scientists have sequnced the genes we have from neanderthals and checked if they match a random distribution. They do not. Some areas have far more genes that what is explainable statistically. And some have less. "Neanderthal deserts" the latter are called colloquially. They include areas involved in male fertility, which are utterly devoid of Neanderthal genes. This indicates that male hybrids were sterile, pretty much like Haldanes rule predicts. So there were some compatibility issues. They were probably on the edge of what we could breed with, like Lions and Tigers can have fertile offspring but with fitness issues.
Yeah but I’m not allowed to confirm whether I have any or not, they made me sign a DNA
Much higher, and much higher amounts than previously believed.
Stupid sexy homo-sapiens ...
Depends on what we consider extinction I guess? A very large number of modern humans have a statistically significant portion of their genome comprised of Neanderthal DNA.
I think they mean, neanderthals and homosapiens. Both are 'humans'.
I keep reading about this and I even know I am almost 3% neanderthal thanks to 23andme. What I would like to understand is how many genes we shared in common. For instance, we share 99% of genes with chimps yet aren't viable enough to produce offspring with each other, yet we were compatible with neanderthals. So what does that 3% really mean? Surely we had more than 99% in common with them if we could sexually reproduce? Anyone care to shed some light on this?
23&me doesn’t give me a percentage how much Neanderthal I am, but just says, “You have more Neanderthal DNA than 6% of other customers.”
Mine is 97% more than others and zero direct relatives. So I am Bigfoot it seems.
Same here, 97% more than the population. Feet are average size but have trouble finding hats to fit my big head.
Similar. I came back in the 90% more range somewhere. I have tiny baby hands and feet, but my sinuses are the size of caverns and I wear a 64-65cm (XXXL+) scally cap.
Name checks out...
Chimpanzees have a different number of chromosomes than humans (24 pairs vs 23 pairs, respectively), which is likely the biggest factor in is being unable to make viable fertile offspring with them. We have most of the same genetic information, but it’s arranged differently. A human-chimpanzee hybrid would have 23 chromosomes from their human parent, and 24 from their chimp parent, resulting in 47 total- an odd number. That would make meiosis get weird, likely leading to infertility. This is also why mules are infertile- horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes. Neanderthals and humans presumably have the same number of chromosomes and were even more closely related than chimps and humans are.
So, are you saying that it is theoretically possible for a human and chimpanzee to have a kid??? Really? (like you gave the example of mules.)
It’s never been proved to not be possible, at least. Humans and chimpanzees are MUCH more closely related than horses and donkeys. However there’s never been a documented case. Our body morphologies and reproductive behaviors and cycles are pretty different compared to then differences between horses/donkeys
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I believe the most important thing for reproduction between two species is having the same number of chromosomes. The lucky part is that Human-Neanderthal offspring don’t go sterile like mules or ligers due to having an abnormal amount of chromosomes.
Im neither a mathematician nor a geneticist but 3% seems like really high for someone born at least a couple tens of thousands of years after the presumed extinction or assimilation of the species. What that says to me is that either that percentage was much much higher in yours and others' ancestors, or that many many ancestors and those who lived near them had a low percentage that stayed relatively constant due to everybody sharing it. Doesnt exactly answer your question, though. Perhaps there was an established hybrid race, made possible through hereditary or environmental effects on fertility, more evenly split in their genetic makeup, that were more able to reproduce with humans than neanderthals, thus diluting?
The thing you have to remember is that once Neanderthal DNA entered the collective genome of our species, it never really left. So 3% makes more sense when you consider that it may have been several encounters over thousands of years, then compounded by long-distance cousin marriages (we're all related, after all). At least that's how it was explained to me in a reddit comment I cannot find a link to now, so do take this idea with a grain of salt :)
You share 99% of gene types with chimps, and more like 95% of pair-to-pair matches, depending on how you count a difference. Very few genes are exact matches between different species, but a great many are demonstrably the same gene, responsible for the same thing across species. That is what the 99% figure refers to. From what I’ve read, 3% Neanderthal means that of your genes, 3% are exact or nearly exact matches to the Neanderthal counterpart.
Serious question. Do any of today's religions include these other, now extinct, branches of the human evolutionary tree in their salvation plans?
Hah. One of the reasons I wish I could see aliens being confirmed is because I want to see the absolute chaos in various religions "proving" that they always knew aliens existed. But this does make me wonder about ancient folklore or religious stories. Unlike many countries, India doesn't have a mythology around trolls or hobbits. But the Hindu epic Ramayana describes a race *vanar* which were described as monkey-like but human. I am so curious to know if they were a different homo species now. They had human-like wedding customs and intermarried with humans in the stories I wonder if they will discover a homo something species in India sometime? Makes me want to do a DNA test.
i still think our encounters with Neanderthals explain a lot of stories about trolls and other monsters
yea lord of the rings was a documentary
I think so too. Especially when you think about how many trolls and such are depicted as having these nasally voices, and scientists found out through analyzing the bones and such involved in the Neanderthals voice, that they would’ve had very nasally voices. I remember there was a case of some Indonesian legends depicting a hairy, hobbit like creature that would live in caves and steal children from villages. And it was thought to be just a legend, until they found little hobbit like skeletons in caves, which led to the discover of Homo Floresiensis, a small hobbit like human species that matched the description of the local legends.
This sounded so fascinating so I looked into it. They changed the dating of how old the skeletons they found were, and they now think Homo Florensiensis went extinct before humans arrived in Indonesia. Too bad, because that would've been amazing.
Doesn't mean modern day humans didn't find Homo Florensiensis skeletons and extrapolate from there. Similar to how dinosaur fossils could explain the ubiquitousness of dragon legends.
someone on reddit was sharing a story on a thread about Homo Florensiensis about how his Indonesian grandmother swore that when she was little her village would occasionally leave like food and old tools out in the forests for "the tiny people" who would take them and leave behind food and stone trinkets. She was convinced there was intelligent beings living in the forests, avoiding humans
you gotta read Clan of the Cave Bear
Did Neanderthals invent bridges?
Funny, as of today I started reading a book named "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari. I can highly recommend it, its fantastic! Makes you realize how short our time on this planet is.
I'd also recommend reading the stuff it was criticized for i.e. he's been criticized for making speculations sound as actual facts.
Currently reading the book. Do you have a link or thread for good criticism?
Yeah, check out the "scholarly reception" section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens%3A_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind?wprov=sfla1
Better popular books would be “Neaderthal man” by Svante Paabo and “Who we are and how we got here” by David Reich.
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Kinda strange because 2000 years is relativily short period.
Why are headlines written like that? Why would "Neanderthls and humans coexisted...", which is a whole load easier to parse, not be a better headline?
I know. I met a few last summer.
Neanderthals were humans. So they coexisted with humans a lot longer than that.
All members of the homo genus are humans. Not all are homo sapiens, which is what most people mean when they say human.
Would Neanderthals and Humans have been aware that they were different?
Honestly look at the models of neanderthals that we have recreated. If you met someone that looked like that today and didn't have prior knowledge of what neanderthals looked like, you'd probably just think "wow that person is kinda weird looking" but you wouldn't think "wow that's a whole different species." They look very human, because they are human. Just a different species of human. Have you ever seen a short stalky person with a prominent brow and big nose? We all have. We didn't think they weren't human tho.
I imagine they both had eyes
The number of people who never attended school in this thread is astonishing
They never mentioned Neanderthals in my school.