> my favorite is that we simply outbred them because of our sex appeal

I think not, Homo Sapiens just starves better, Neanderthal superior athleticism came at a huge calorie cost, so when preys became rarer Neanderthal starved faster than Sapiens.

As does are relatively short height. Shorter folks make it through famines better. The recent resurgences of tall folks is a byproduct of our caloric abundance.

It is understandable why we are eager to find capacities for language and culture in similar species, but the thing that gives homo sapiens the ability to survive is not just language or art, but our ability to organize large numbers of people under trans-familial identities (i.e. advanced political states and culture-defining religion). If they weren't politically (high level behavior control) and religiously (low level behavior control) organized, they weren't organized well enough survive.

What is the evidence for this claim?

I think the fact that we can organize billion souls under the flag of a nation state speaks volumes enough.

Did neanderthals have this capacity? I don't know. But if their psychology did not facilitate large scale collaboration, a violent human tribe killing a bunch of them now and again would explain some part why they disappeared.

I'm not saying a human tribe hunted them - just that a violent human tribe would attack all hominids around them.

And if the Neanderthals did not have this capacity for mass violence, in time these conflicts would dwindle their numbers.

Is there some evidence that neanderthals did not organize themselves in tribes? I think we were just more aggressive and killed them all.

It's not enough to be more aggressive. You have to be more aggressive in larger, more coordinated groups. The greatest warrior in history couldn't fight off an army on his own.

It's very difficult (read:impossible) to get evidence for something like this because there is essentially zero detail on these ancient societies. However, it's a theory that is consistent with anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary biology. Could be totally wrong, but probably not.

Civilizations started around 12ka ago. Neanderthals went extinct around 37ka ago.

This is different thing from having the capability to believe so strongly in things like duty and honor that a single king could rule over thousands.

They had greater cranial capacity than us, but so do elephants and whales. And the animal with the greatest brain-to-body-size ratio is tree shrew, suggesting that size doesn't really matter when it comes to intelligence.

Neither of those animals has the appropriate morphology to build tools or use complex language. How do we know they aren't actually smarter than us?

I think it’s unlikely they would evolve more advanced intelligence than its possible for them to make practical use of in their behaviour.

Now, clearly humans have been able to adapt our intelligence to uses far beyond the behaviours it evolved to support. Our ancestors 50,000 years ago had more or less the same brains we do. Nevertheless their behaviours were highly complex. They broadly did what we do, crating art, manufacturing artefacts from multiple processed materials, ornamentation, social rituals such as burials. We just take those behaviours a lot further.

To argue that whales might have sophisticated intellectual capabilities, you’d need to show what behaviours they exhibit that require them. Otherwise that intelligence would serve no evolutionary purpose and might actually be a survival disadvantage. See the cognitive trade off hypothesis.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Cognitive-Tradeoff-hypothe...

> or use complex language.

That we know of. They might completely have complex language using different mediums (infra sounds, vibrations, movements, smells, etc.).

I believe all animals definitely have some sort of language, and that the complexity of a language depends on its utility in facilitating everyday interactions and activities. What are the most complex activities you've seen elephants get up to?

I never had the chance to meet elephants.

Now, from what I've learned/read about their behaviours, I have no doubt on the depth of their lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Elephant_so...

And I wouldn't call that "some sort of language". That's language. Species-specific. Not "human" language.

Even language that another species can grasp more or less perfectly. You can get that with minimal observation of dogs, cats, even birds. And obviously, animals read us as well.

Now, the complexity of an other species language may be partially out of reach because we do not have the same senses, abilities, history, memories.

So they might even engage in activities we cannot grasp or identify (and reciprocally) but for great patience, observation, study, understanding, and luck.

When I see a videos / images of wolves I don’t perceive that “intelligence” that I perceive from dogs. Not to say wolves are any less intelligent or cognitive, dogs just have had the constraint that they needed to be able to communicate with humans well or they could die.

Kind of makes me think if we ever were to encounter extraterrestrial intelligence we might have trouble identifying them as intelligent, or, have trouble communicating with them, because we have trouble identifying and communicating with the terrestrial intelligence that surrounds us and is abundant.

Fun fact: Dogs developed whole extra sets of facial muscles during their domestication: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/06/domestic...

This happened in a remarkably short period of time, and the running theory is that early dogs with more expressiveness were better cared for and received by human societies than similar dogs that were less expressive.

Depends on the situation in which we encounter the aliens. If wolves were building interplanetary spacecraft, we'd have a hard time saying they weren't intelligent.

If they were, we probably wouldn't be there to see it. :D

Where No Wolf Has Gone Before.

I would call it some sort of language, or substitute "sort" with "type" if the word seems too casual for your tastes.

I agree that there may be a lot happening in this world we're unable to perceive, and then your whole argument can be summarized as "anything is possible, we don't really know for sure".

Which I now see is why scientists insist on sticking to things that can be measured, proven and quantified. Anything else is drifting into the territory of religion, superstition and imagination. Humans have been known to worship certain animals as supreme gods after all.

"Which I now see is why scientists insist on sticking to things that can be measured, proven and quantified. Anything else is..."

No. Science is a mean to an end, not an end in itself. And intuition, an open mind, imagination help a lot, without drifting into superstition.

Read some history, you'll find out that a lot of scientific (and engineering) discoveries were triggered by imagination servicing some more rational/rigorous practices.

> So they might even engage in activities we cannot grasp or identify

I don't think that's what they mean when they say imagination: imagining things we can not imagine. And science starts with real imagination, then move on to practical, measurable applications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition will give you the high points.

You are asking me to prove that humans are smarter than elephants? It makes for an interesting philosophical debate, but that is all it really will be. Kind of like me asking you to prove you are smarter than a rock, or that you are really conscious.

Elephants' computational machinery look almost exactly like ours, except much larger. I can measure the thermodynamic properties of any rock's machinery and conclude with certainty it has no familiar intelligence. The only thing elephants have against them is they don't have technological civilization and just sort of bumble around, but so did Socrates. To me it remains an open question.

What makes you so sure of your measurement machinery? An advanced alien race may laugh at your rock measuring equipment the way we laugh at early mans tools.

See what i mean about pointless philosophical arguments?

Elephants and whales have big brains but they don't have as many neurons as you'd think from their brain volume. For most mammals neuron count scales as roughly the 3/4 power of brain volume. For primates and birds it scales linearly.

An interesting aside: elephants and whales do still have more neurons than us - African elephants have about twice as many.

But fascinatingly, those neurons aren't evenly distributed, and in fact humans have far more neurons in the cerebral cortex than elephants. Their extra neuron count is almost all in the cerebellum. Primates are skewed towards the forebrain, but elephants are far more cerebellum-heavy than e.g. rodents, which implies that a lot of their extra brainpower is being 'spent' on operating their larger bodies.

By forebrain neuron count, humans are beaten only by pilot whales - and all of the other close contenders are also cetaceans. No one quite seems to know why pilot whales have twice the neocortical neurons humans do, but it's still the number that tracks best with observed intelligence.

http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/the-paradox-of-the-elep...

One argument I've seen frequently is that humans offset our smaller crania by losing the sloping foreheads of earlier hominids.

Neuron count in the cerebral cortex seems to predict intelligence better than total neuron count (e.g. putting humans ahead of elephants, and chimps ahead of giraffes), with only one odd case (pilot whales) beating humans. So if we lost overall capacity but retained most or all of our cerebral cortex size, the change might be explained.

(Full disclosure: a quick look says most primate brains are right near 26% cerebral cortex, while humans are around 18%. It's possible intermediate hominids were even lower, but without knowing why the difference exists I can hardly assert that.)

I wonder which had the most “brain folds”

You know how they say that insult “smooth brain”

We have more neuron surface area and thats how we pack a punch in intelligence ive heard...

The culture, art part may be overstated? Very limited compared to the pervasive Homo Sapiens evidence. And while Neanderthals imitated Home Sapiens spear points they chipped a whole nodule of flint down to make one point, missing the entire point of flaking multiple points off of a single nodule (from evidence of campsites shared over centuries by both species).

My favourite comes from archeological evidence showing that we traveled further and traded for a larger range of items, whereas they stuck to themselves and smaller area ranges.

When the cold hit they ran out of options and resources quicker, they simply didn't have the required knowledge of how to survive.

I understand that "we" are descended from one group and "they" are another lineage, but it sounds so weird to me, and oddly personal, to use "we" so much in this context. It happened a long time ago firstly, so none of us can claim to be involved. And as far as I know, the Neanderthals didn't die out due to being bad people, so there is no need to shove it in their faces, metaphorically speaking, that "we" are that much better. One species surviving and another not might as well be a lucky coincidence.

> my favorite is that we simply outbred them because of our sex appeal.

Then why didn't the smart and strong Neanderthal males mate with the sexy Sapiens females?

Maybe they did exactly that and that's why we ended up with a lot of neanderthal DNA. If modern humans are any indication, a horny neanderthal would have attempted mating with just about anything loosely compatible with their urges. Just refer to your favorite porn sites for an overview of all the different things modern people find interesting. Bluntly put, if it had a hole, mr. Neanderthal would probably have been interested in exploring its potential for mating.

That is exactly what they did - all the Neanderthal genes in the current populations has come down via Neanderthal males and sapien female matings. Personally I blame Tinder, but it could have something to do with Haldane's Rule [0].

0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane%27s_rule

Can you provide a citation for your first point? I don't see how Haldane's Rule would support that, but maybe I am missing something.

I am at home tapping away on my iPad so i don't have access to my papers, but it is known there are no Neanderthal genes on the X chromosome. This is what is expected with Haldane's rule where one cross between species is fertile and the other infertile.

I think you've got that backwards. If there were no Neanderthal genes on the x chromosome, then only men would have Neanderthal genes.

cool thanks

If a human male and a neanderthal female mated and produced female offspring, who then also reproduced, etc., how could you later tell that it was a human female and a neanderthal male? As far as I can understand, all we can speculate about is the sex of the offspring who reproduced, not the original pairings, correct?

Theoretically mitochondrial DNA (which is maternal-only) could do the trick.

In practice I don't think we have the sort of baseline sample it would take to work out which mitochondrial genes are neanderthal-derived. I suppose it might be possible to rebuild that list by looking at high-admixture populations and seeing where their mitochondrial DNA differs, then use that aggregate to compare an individual's mDNA to their DNA and see if it's is "more Neanderthal" (i.e. female line) or "more Sapiens" (i.e. male line)?

But realistically, I'm betting the answer is "admixture happened a bunch of times in a row, with different hominid groups in different places, even if there was a gender skew it's a mess that's impossible to discern".

> Theoretically mitochondrial DNA (which is maternal-only) could do the trick.

That is, sperm have just one mitochondrion, and they almost always dump it as part of fertilization.

But not always, so there is nonzero male contribution of mitochondrial genes.

I answered this in a post just above yours. You look at the X chromosome.

is this from analyzing dna outside of europe? if this information only came from analyzing european dna then during the bronze age all males in europe were effectively eliminated. this would imply that the eurasian steppe men who replaced them were the source for the neanderthal dna. this implies that the prior to this event europe was populated with people with no neanderthal dna.

I don't understand what you are trying to ask? The level of Neanderthal genes in east Asia is higher than in Europe.

I guess that's in the mitochondrial dna then?

All the mitochondrial lineages trace out of Africa in relatively recent times. This is more to do with genetic incompatibility between closely related species.

I think thats what actually happened. We only have DNA from either male or female Neanderthals, forgot which one though. As far as I know if the neanderthals were a certain gender then the hybrid would be infertile.

As far as I know, more of their brain was dedicated to vision in comparison to ours.

That is weird that it would be how sexy we are and not how sexual we are.

I think we just killed them all, considering that racism is omnipresent, as well as human cruelty.

Brain size correlates to intelligence, but not aware of any causation that makes this worthwhile comparing. Any new literature worth reading?

To clarify: Referring to peer reviewed papers on inter-species, rather than intra-species of course.

"Lorem Homines" is Google's take.

So what your saying is the movie "Idiocracy" already happened??

(Plot- the smartest people stop reproducing, only lower rings of society have kids. An average guy wakes up hundreds of years in the future and is a genius)