These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing.
Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is kind of messy.
There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle."
In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't have fossils, but something has to be our ancestors. So if we are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien ancestors sapiens.
Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died out. But... there were people everywhere.
Humans existed over a vast range. From south Africa to Northern Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it's confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different species.
Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic diversity we have today. In some sense, we are the inbred ones.
Also... population estimates are pretty dicey. We don't really know. Could have been booms and busts. Could have been ideal habitats with higher populations.
We still have a fairly poor grasp of human "natural history"
Heidelbergensis is the last common anscestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and us.
We were all around for just as long, 400kya+, and before that, it was Homo Erectus.
All of them, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens were walking around at the same time. There's plenty of fossil records we've uncovered that show that to be true.
It was only in the last 100k years or so that we remained and the other variants "died out".
https://www.sifrun.com/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-ea...
You would never feel like you have time to just, be. Instead you're focused on getting your next meal, and finding a place to sleep.
It only took a few ice-ages to force us to get smart about how we organize and then here we are.
Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers, but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to disease after the agricultural revolution.
Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent and food.
> Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.
Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.
> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.
Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.
We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!
It’s neat what we do to each other…
Don't forget, there are pockets of our species living at this level to this very day (uncontacted tribes)!
Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.
Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon
https://medium.com/luminasticity/predicting-the-worst-and-st...
It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history.
What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.
We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.
Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.
Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?
Disease we can't explain that spread a few decades after European ships full of plagues arrived.
I mean, yeah, sure.
I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.
It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues.
Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.
IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…
In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.
Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).
It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.
Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168 men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds etc.
The scale of this is absolutely insane.
To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night–vision–equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.
They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.
Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.
That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.
What they mostly lacked were antibodies against the numerous diseases brought by the Europeans. Measles, Mumps, Cholera, Tuberculosis, and so on.
If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.
They did. Natives didn't have agriculture:
> It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
The unfortunate thing is that those dumb Natives didn't learn to grow things. Something that had been observed for thousands of years.
It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained.
So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once they reach a threshold, as implied by the article.
It’s a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going “extinct”. And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the process, but it works.
On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become pervasive.
The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic diversity as a shield against new diseases.
Fwiw... something similar also occurs with outbreeding/hybridization. Novel gene combinations can be maladaptive, just like double recessives.
These are all pretty normal population dynamics.
There are billions of us now... but that's not normal for a large animal, especially predators. How many leopards, or bears, or elephants are there at any given time?
These tend to be sparse, structured populations.
And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.
Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.
But you are certainly right that the cross-overs are incomparably worse. And diversity becomes species extinction protection at that level.
For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0])
> Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.
Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out. Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza. Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an inter-connected population, requiring a critical community size in the hundreds of thousands.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/2011/202...
Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.
Then some idiots decided it's time to create an artificial one in their image. Enjoy your golden idol, pray it doesn't decide to turn you into biofuel.
Fossil evidence exists pointing towards large eagles scooping up 3-5 year olds. It’s been a long time since we had to think of our toddlers safety the same way we think of a lap dogs.
Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.
The epic was written around 2000 BCE which was well over >> 10k years after agriculture and more than 4 times that much after neanderthals died out.
It's possible but much more likely that they refer to something more contemporary. There are always "wild men" around no matter who you ask.
In my country, there is an area with archaeological sites of Neanderthal villages and their mammoth hunting grounds. In one area, there are thousands of mammoth bones. Imagine having only wooden spears and ordinary stones at your disposal. Maybe flint spears, maybe not. In this area, flint is too rare and is mainly used for cutting, because the nearest flint deposit is 400 km away.
LMAO did he never saw a dog or a cat in is live ? They don't speak but can still use sounds to communicate
Was it a knifes edge at times? Sure. Was it abundant at times? Also true.
I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very small population.
Although one of the references goes to a now dead "reptilian agenda" website which might have been even more interesting:)
Seems as though it could have been an enclave of neanderthals who eventually integrated with humans.
The last time I looked in to this, the consensus was that it was most likely a version of otherwise-extinct ancient Celtic.
Now that doesn’t mean that the Basques don’t have a potentially outsized Neanderthal genetic influence, but the odds of their language being so ancient as to pre-exist modern humans entirely is unlikely.
We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.
This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me.
This article talks about the Basque language from before contact with the Romans, 5-1 centuries BCE. It also references a "pre-proto-basque" language, that would have been the one before the Celtic invasion of Iberia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtiberians).
The rabbit hole kind of ends there, as not much linguistic artifacts or history remain from BC unfortunately. But one can imagine the Basque society would live in relative isolation for a long time before that.