It basically says that, when climate change caused forests to decrease, Neanderthals could not hunt as efficiently on the resulting open plains, because they were not nearly as agile or as good at long-distance running as homo sapiens sapiens. I don't know. I'm not sure this is the whole story, but it's fascinating to find out a little more about them.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:They subjected two modern humans with very different body shapes to cooling in an ice bath. One had the long limbed, athletic shape of a runner, the other had a stockier, heavily-muscled body plan closer to that of a Neanderthal.
The heavily muscled person lasted longer in the ice bath, so it seems that Neanderthal would have had an advantage.
Lasted longer? Until what?
Bigger brains, higher voices, but less agile. Poor neandrethals.
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But people can have different thresholds of discomfort. In that case, it would be about as scientific as whether two particular people prefer Pepsi over Coke.
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posted
I've also read of some evidence that Neanderthals had much more complex vocal abilities than humans, but it's all very speculative.
It's interesting that even in my high school years in the late 90's, early 2000's, the common wisdom was that Neanderthals were hunted out of existence by humans, or, as older textbooks suggested, we interbred. Now of course all of our assumptions are in question, and frankly I don't buy this one any more than the others.
There's no compelling reason to suggest humans are more adaptable except for the simple fact that we survived, and the Neanderthals did not. The self evidence of superiority, even just circumstantial superiority, is questionable.
All the same, it is hard to understand how an advanced race of probably-intelligent beings became completely extinct. There is even evidence that Neanderthals lived within recorded history, in Iberia, but that it was human civilization, and not the human population per se, that outmoded them in the end.
Still, the Neanderthals left evidence of a sustained culture that dates back over a million years. Much, much longer than ours.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
I guess what I mean is, there is not reason to assume that we were superior in our abilities to adapt, but circumstances may have dealt an unusually harsh hand to the Neanderthals, for instance, by way of a natural disaster, disease, what have you. Our appearance in Europe could have just been easy pickins, and there's really no evidence to suggest that it was an inevitable result.
Edit: Also, I think speculating on this level given the mere skeletal evidence gives a kind of false assurance, that we won out because we were better, and that we are not living in a fragile system that could easily, in a mere stroke of fate, blot us out. Therefore I think the conclusions we will tend to draw about the fates of other homo sapiens has a lot to do with our self-centered wishes. If we were just looking at the Neanderthals as a species that once existed, and not as the one that died when we thrived, we would not assume that they died out of weakness, or deficiency. It's equally likely that humans and Neanderthals each faced the brink of extinction man times in many different circumstances, and chance favored us, where it could easily have been the other way. They may have endured far longer than we would have, faced with circumstances as harsh as theirs.
And at the end of the day, it could have been a massive tidal wave that swept across the northern hemisphere and killed a majority of the population suddenly, and there are many other possible explanations of events transpiring by chance, that we could not elucidate today.
posted
This reminds me, in a general sense, of an article from Discover that I read. It mentioned that, in a general sense, "desert" cultures have slowly been crowding out "woodland" cultures, for thousands of years. Think about the "desert" culture of Christianity, and how it dominated Western Europe, and largely replaced the woodland culture there. Similarly, how Islam has dominated Indonesia and the Phillipines. I think there may be something there. Of course, it could also be that I'm crazy. Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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Cool article. Did anyone read the short story in Keeper of Dreams by OSC. This makes me think about it. the one about neanderthals (i forget the name) Posts: 856 | Registered: Jun 2007
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It's a bit nonsensical to assume superiority has anything to do with survival. eg It ain't as if the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculeum failed to leave descendents due to being inferior to other humans. The Toba eruption may have left as few as 1000 breeding pairs of humans as survivors. And that probably was due to sheer luck of being in the right location. With that type of reduction in the total population, Neanderthal could have easily just had the bad luck of being in the wrong locations, with the survivors of the initial catastrophe ending up too isolated from each other to maintain the culture that ensured long-term survival of their species.
Heck just random flips of the coin to decide whether any given individual's gene gets passed on to the next generation ends up producing a survivor pool consisting solely of the descendents of some "Mitochodrial Eve"s and "Y-chromosome Adam"s after a sufficient number of generations have passed. Given that the choice of whose genes were passed on to the next generation were totally random in this case, it's a bit absurd to assume that those original "Mitochondrial Eve"s and "Y-chromosome Adam"s were superior to the folks surrounding them.
posted
The thing about species like humans and neanderthals (extremely complex, advanced, intelligent species) is that they tend to take a looong time to evolve, relatively. One bad luck event, like a volcanic eruption, and it's another 3 million years before they come back. That's assuming, of course, that the bad luck event happens before they get sufficiently advanced tech to negate such events. Think about it, if humans manage to survive another few hundred years, the species may never go extinct.
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quote:There's no compelling reason to suggest humans are more adaptable except for the simple fact that we survived, and the Neanderthals did not.
Do you really mean more adaptable or do you mean better suited by chance to the post-Ice Age environment?
The idea of well-muscled people with high voices made me think of steroid users, for some reason.
That's very interesting. Doesn't sustained steroid use result in significant changes to body structure (including skeletal structure)?
I wonder if it's possible for a population of a species to widely adopt the ingestion of a substance that would then affect the way they developed to the point where they might seem like a different species based on skeletal remains.
Probably we have more than skeletal appearance to distinguish archaeological remains of different species with today's technology.
quote:Originally posted by steven: This reminds me, in a general sense, of an article from Discover that I read. It mentioned that, in a general sense, "desert" cultures have slowly been crowding out "woodland" cultures, for thousands of years. Think about the "desert" culture of Christianity, and how it dominated Western Europe, and largely replaced the woodland culture there. Similarly, how Islam has dominated Indonesia and the Phillipines. I think there may be something there. Of course, it could also be that I'm crazy.
You assume a fact not in evidence, namely that Christianity is definitive of "desert" culture. The assumption is too broad to support when you consider that Christianity as it exists today is probably even more reflective of the "woodland" cultures that adopted it, than of the originators of the name. Modern Christianity is more heavily affected by classical (pre-christian) philosophy and neo-classical philosophy than by the tradition that created it. Just because Europeans became Christian in large numbers does not mean that their culture was "replaced" by Christianity.
Christianity has also been a powerful political force, and the forced conversion of entire populations surely did as much to change it as a religion, as it did to change the world, and probably much much more.
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posted
I wasn't implying that there hasn't been any sycretism. I think you missed, though, that the Greek classical tradition is kind of a desert culture itself. Greece is quite arid, and has a very similar climate to much of the middle east.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
Mmm. Greece is arid now, yes. Was it arid 2000 years ago, before the goats had done their work? And for that matter, a similar question applies to the Middle East. They called it the Fertile Crescent for a long time, you know.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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As far as Greece 2000-3000 years ago, I couldn't say. The Middle East has been arid for a long time. IIRC, they called it the Fertile Crescent for several reasons, including the right type of growing season, the right types of local wild grains, and smart irrigation techniques. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" gives a pretty decent basic outline of the main reasons that area was such a hotbed for grain agriculture, etc. It's not that fertile anymore, though, because irrigation eventually, over thousands of years, over-salts the soil, until it won't grow anything. The only way around it is to have sufficient rainfall to wash the salt into deeper soil layers, or into rivers. That area hasn't and doesn't have nearly enough rainfall to do so. The only other options would be to distill the local river water and use that to wash the mineral salts out, or to genetically modify the plants you want to grow. The tech isn't quite there to do the first option cheaply, and the tech isn't there to do the second option at all, although I think it will be very soon, probably in the next 10-20 years.
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