>somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years, longer than modern humans have been on Earth.
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"
> Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis.
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".
It's wild to think how long very human-like beings and modern humans existed before the technological revolution really took off. Hundreds of thousands of years of existing on the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of hides, and fire. Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow. Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.
I think it is also interesting to realize that we have had a huge population boom since the last 50 years or so, thus currently, the entire world population alive makes up roughly 8% of the entire population of the world since the existence of Homo Sapiens. In summary, if you were to be randomly born as a human, you would most likely be born in the latter centuries, rather than the early ones, since the sheer amount being born recently than many years ago is so much more.
Yeah when you read it in Dune "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing". sounds super cool and badass and like totally brilliant strategy but in real life not so much.
Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon
> Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.
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.
> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough
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.
There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK.
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.
1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire.
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.
Well, we have plenty of plagues to go around in Eurasia. There's plenty of diseases we barely notice, because pretty much everyone has enough immunity to mostly shrug it off.
That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer.
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 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.
Around the same time, 460 men in 6 ships destroyed 30000 men in 400 ships taking over Ormuz. Portugal and Spain were just incredibly OP during that time period. And the people in Ormuz were more advanced than the natives in US. And they still got absolutely destroyed.
The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared.
IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.
Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.
They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the bronze age or so.
American agriculture was very advanced for the time and the crops and ideas developed transformed food and agriculture throughout the rest of the world. What was lacking were beasts of burden and metallurgy and resistance to smallpox.
There’s some more recent scholarship than Guns, Germs, and Steel. See Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 [1]. The truth is maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand.
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.
Llamas were used for some logistics, but they're not the most sturdy, modern Llamas can carry around ~40kg but I'm unsure if it would've been higher or lower with the breeds they used back then. Either way, better than nothing, but definitely no horse.
It's just objectively true that the Native Americans were far behind Europe in military technology and many other technologies in 1492. The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.
> The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.
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.
Commenter upthread said they "did not invent it quickly enough", as you quoted, which is not the same thing as "did not invent it". They just meant that the Native Americans invented it later than the Europeans did, such that the natives had less time to develop advanced (military) technology.
He wasn't claiming that the Native Americans didn't have agriculture, he was claiming that Native Americans didn't develop large-scale agriculture as early in history as Eurasians did, and as a result had less time to develop the kinds of technologies that are enabled by having large-scale agriculture.
> Harmful mutations can accumulate through inbreeding. Yet somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 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.
In captive breeding, it's a brutal way to "improve stock" but in wild populations this is pretty normal for large mammals. It also generally happens more slowly... so isn't that different from every other ambient process that selects some genes and culls others.
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?
I wouldn't single out the concern new diseases if the population is small. Most diseases co-evolve intra-population. The lethal ones are the ones that suffer a mutation and are suddenly able to be passed to a different 'species'. So, if they already survived on a 'knife's edge', immune variety is of comparatively low concern (but still existential) on the list of things that can end your species (climate change, competition, demographics - 2-3 infertile females in a group of 20, say bye bye to tribe).
Isolated populations are all going to be creating isolated variants of any disease doing well enough to stick around.
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.
> The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.
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.
350,000 years of just chilling, picking berries, you die in identical technological and cultural environment as when you were born. Now we got to be around when God is made in a data center
You forgot the enlightened ~200 years when we tried to kill God, to finally be in control of our destiny.
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.
Nature's finest achievement. A hyper-efficient "mind" built on a pyre of fossil fuels and rare minerals so it can help us burn the rest faster. Surely the Neanderthals stand envious that millions will be able to confide their unemployment woes to ChatGPT after GPS-navigating to the Dollar General in the nearest bleak strip mall in search of affordable goods.
Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.
Parasites are my main go-to when I meet someone complaining about the modern world. In the history of multicellular organisms on earth, only (some) humans—and only in the last ~100 years—have had the luxury of not being completely infested with parasites.
Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.
This was / is likely a factor in the "kernel of truth" with the whole "deworming tablets cure covid-19" thing, the chances of survival of people in certain areas infected with the virus increased if they were administered deworming medication because they also had a parasitic infection.
The fact that low-grade parasite-infections dampen autoimmune diseases isn't that big of a win. Presumably our immune system is as aggressive as it is in part due to the parasite-load our ancestors were exposed to.
I know even with humans pre-modern populations were drastically smaller, but it's still just astounding to me how small of a population size it seems like Neanderthals had.
I didn’t see it mentioned in the article, but I think it’s hard to fully appreciate how at risk they were to predators and that they were certainly not the top of the food chain yet. Humans and similar aren’t naturally adept for survival in the wilderness. We developed coping mechanisms but it took some time. Had to extinct a few big cats, bears, wolfs, etc along the way.
Were they really not at the top of the food chain before modern humans came along? It's hard for me to imagine big cats and wolf packs being higher in the food chain than beings that had their own social groups, language, fire, and spears and that are known to have effectively hunted big game.
They/we also are weak and helpless for large portion of early life. Can’t reproduce unless they survive a dozen or so years. And even then pregnancy and child birth are also huge risks to life. This probably really stunted our ability to grow large populations.
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.
I feel like it's more to say that, "getting eaten was a legitimate concern" they weren't really the single top of the food chain because there were other animals that would reasonably consider them prey. Cave lions were massive and definitely targeted neanderthals.
Why was this the case? I thought they were at least as intelligent as modern humans and had more muscle mass, used rudimentary tools and had control over fire. They lived in a climate without a lot of dangerous animals or a lot of disease and disease vectors at least compared to the jungles of Africa.
I spent a year of high school in the Basque Country, and it always stuck out to me that a common feature of the Basques, especially the beefy ones, was incredibly caveman-like.
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.
My Dad wrote an article about this 25 years ago or so: https://aoi.com.au/LB/LB705/ (How the Neanderthals became the Basques). He would really get a kick out of people reading it (he's 90 now). His website goes back to 96' and it shows.
Greetings to your father from a European with O- blood, fair freckled skin, and a receded chin! I've always been fascinated with Neanderthals. Happy to see science slowly realising these were not some stupid brutes...
This is a much-discussed topic. All we know of the Basque language is that it is pre-Indo-European.
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.
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.
If it has any relation to Celtic languages, then it's Indo-European by definition.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
[1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056
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.
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...
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.
Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8162934/
Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.
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.
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.
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.
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.