The return of phrenology, and some confusing, contradictory statements on superiority versus suitability. Interesting nonetheless.
Neanderthals are generally considered to have been a distinct human species (Homo neanderthalensis) that once inhabited a region stretching from Siberia in the east to Iberia in the west, and from Britain in the north to Iraq in the south. They first appear around 450,000 years ago and then die out as our own species starts to settle in Eurasia, after 60,000 years ago. Not everyone agrees that they were separate species.
Discoveries from genetics over the last decade or so reveal that they didn't completely go extinct. Our ancestors (to some defined as the separate species Homo sapiens), mixed with them, so that today, around 2% of the genomes of non-African people alive today is Neanderthal.
You may also have noticed some recent headlines about our Neanderthal heritage and its influence on head shape. In particular, a study found that specific DNA sequences seem to be linked to the globular shape of our skulls. Sequences linked with reduced "globularity" (a measure of roundness) are present in Neanderthals and some living people. The researchers reportedly stressed that the effects of carrying the rare Neanderthal fragments were subtle and could not be detected in a person's head shape when you met them. That was reassuring given the current rise of xenophobia and the bad press that Neanderthals have had... The suggestion in this recent paper is that skull shape may represent rearrangements in the brain that may reflect differences in the way we think and act.
And so we have consistently mistaken survival and extinction with biological superiority or inferiority. That is why we have incessantly sought differences to explain our observations. We are here and they are not and so we must seek differences to explain the data.
Of course, part of the problem is that we are participants trying to explain a story in which we are actors and that will inevitably lead to bias in our favour. Having given the Neanderthals a name, we immediately conditioned ourselves to seeing them as something else.
They were not us. They were hardly human and we were certainly superior to them. After all, we are here to tell the story. It is one of history's ultimate distortions, perhaps the greatest of them all.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46988399
Best theory I've heard about their extinction is that we accidentally wiped them out the same way many groups of humans were accidentally wiped out: human diseases for which they had no immunities.
ReplyDeleteIt fits, too, as usually the groups most devastated by infections when long-isolated distal groups meet one another are those with the most rural/primitive lifestyles and (consequently) lowest population densities/lowest propensity to encounter new diseases in general.
Europeans had dense populations, Amerinds less-dense. Whole tribes of their people were killed by Chicken Pox, Small Pox, etc... In kind, they gave the Europeans an STD, which is bad and still around and still killing some people but is nowhere near as much of a plague for them.
Neanderthals lived in small Clan Units. Humans formed large Tribes and Tribal Nations. Thus, we had worse diseases.
Combine the diseases with other usual intergroup-contact issues such as violent encounters, the displacement of the weaker group to less prosperous lands, etc... and you've got a recipe for their extinction.