It’s as likely that ancient humans outcompeted Neanderthals for resources as killed them off directly.

Watch some some videos if you haven't seen it. It's baffling.

How much depends on the "language" vs training and breeding, I can't say.

What are you referring to? Is there evidence of that being most of the way they interacted?

Check out killer ape theory.

Also look at how violent humans are to their own species.

Species is a construct though, our genes have no idea about species.

Also I think that organisms feel most threatened by same-niche competitors, and least threatened by non-competitors. Similar but just different enough is like the worst case in terms of same-niche competition. Like how geese and ducks will act really adversarial towards each other, and then a beaver can just wander through and no one cares.

species are clades, and our genes know everything there is to know about clades

  > Species is a construct though, our genes have no idea about species.

And yes, binning people into races, cultures, and nationalities is often useful too. Especially when they often self-identify as parts of those groups.

You could also say that atoms are a construct, also molecules and nuclei. Nature has no concept of any of those. But the clumping is repeatable enough at everyday energies so that it's useful to think about it in those terms.

You could say it, but they are real things that interact with the environment. DNA is a real thing that interacts with the environment.

Species, the periodic table, etc. are constructs. They are useful because they help us understand the world.

> Species, the periodic table, etc. are constructs. They are useful because they help us understand the world.

My point exactly.

My impression is that people who bemoan man’s inhumanity to man typically act as if all humans should be interpreted as family members by our instincts and somehow they aren’t due to culture, and I don’t think that line of thinking is supported by biology (because species is a construct).

I’m arguing that the inference is invalid because other humans aren’t their friends, because the human system goes from kin :) to OUTSIDER pretty fast. I’m not aware of evidence that it intensifies beyond OUTSIDER, and if anything I would imagine that it would diminish. If it diminishes, then humans could treat human-like species further away from them better than they treat rival humans, if their niche isn’t threatened by the human-like (but-not-human) species.

So the inference has a hole in it. I’m just pointing out that this man’s inference has a flat.

But really I’m just interested in engaging people on this topic, so I poke holes in the comments of people who seem interested, to get a reaction. Sometimes they knock over my argument and I learn something new.

Yeah, that sounds accurate.

> if anything I would imagine that it would diminish

Not sure what gives you that hope. People didn't really have diverse behaviors towards animals dependant on how human-like animals are.

If they aren’t edible or dangerous we pretty much ignore them, no? Like they might be wiped out as collateral damage post industrialization, but I see that as an emergent side effect that no one cares to prevent, as opposed to a positivistic aspect of human nature.

There's archeological evidence from Europe from around the invention of agriculture of communities hunting and eating people en masse.

> There are indicators, for example, the neanderthals and all other human like great apes have mysteriously disappeared except for us. (Or gotten assimilated, I mean, we have a tiny bit neanderthal DNA)

That's not an indication at all. It's an outcome.

> Also look at how violent humans are to their own species.

Humanity has grown to 8 billion organisms - the evidence seems otherwise.

Or maybe the technical advantage was driven by survival and desire to occupy/expand which eventually resulted in overall development (because you can only hide your advantage for so long) which lifted most of the boats resulting in conditions that make acceptance of others and cooperation easier. I would like to know large-scale examples of acceptance and co-operation when the world was being discovered, conquered, divided and shaped through occupation and wars.

And, large parts of the planet, haven't been invaded and the men killed, women raped, the last hundreds of years, in some places not even the last thousand years. Then, violent traits (reproducing by killing all men in the tribe nearby, raping the women) start fading away. (Not noticeable in a single lifetime though)

So its just guess after guess. Now it seems non subsaharan people have some neanderthal dna, they were more capable than we thought and some theories say they could see in the dark

Interesting, what are you basing that on? (Is it an observation you've made or is there any research paper for example)

But the neanderthals, that was about 40 000 years ago they started disappearing. That's so much time, so any more kind or more brutal traits they might have had, wouldn't matter any more. Evolution is pretty fast, 20-50 generations is fairly much, when it comes to changing the distribution of traits that already exist, from what I've read (both our own species and other). And seen, actually, about humans.

Personally I believe all other great apes were roughly equally violent, just not as intelligent.

Biden, Obama, GW Bush, Clinton, G Bush, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, ... we've only chosen one 'psychopath', assuming I know what you refer to.

Nobody in the world has used them beyond that one pair of events.

It’s interesting how you narrowed it down to the “land of the free” when the gp speaks of a “species”.

The south Levantine mid-Middle Palaeolithic (mid-MP; ~130–80 thousand years ago (ka)) is remarkable for its exceptional evidence of human morphological variability, with contemporaneous fossils of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal-like hominins. ... We suggest that the development of this behavioural uniformity is due to intensified inter-population interactions and admixture between Homo groups ~130–80 ka.

Neanderthals and mastodons never met, as they were on different continents.

And now we make the claim that their Y chromosone is non existent in humans.

Let’s finish the sequencing before being so definitively factual about it.

So if you are Ugg, son of Ugg, son of Ugg, son of Ugg, you have ur-Ugg's Neanderthal Y chromosome, but if you are Ugg, son of Ugg, son of Uggette, daughter of Ugg, you have neither ur-Ugg's Y nor X chromosome (Uggette inherits Ugg's X, which gets crossed over with Maggie's [Ugg's Cro-Magnon missus] X's and passed on to Ugg II, but Ugg II doesn't pass on his X to you, he passed on Magnus's [Uggette's Cro-Magnon mister] Y).

Human behavior is shaped by many factors like genetics, culture, environment, and social structures. No credible geneticist argues that Neanderthal ancestry “explains large portions of variances in human behavior.”

As for your comment that “Biologists know this, you won’t catch them saying it in public though.”, this is a classic conspiracy-style statement. You’re suggesting that experts are hiding the “truth,” which is a tactic often used in pseudoscience and race-related theories.

Lots of good discussion here about should Neanderthal and Homo sapiens be a separate species. Like most nature questions the answer seems to always be "It's complicated."

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/mq5u7n/why...

A neat map here showing how much Neanderthal DNA exists in modern humans. Never goes much above 3%.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/hgdioe/prevalence_...

Citation needed.

Geneticists can, at best, sometimes figure out what any particular gene does, and yet here you are claiming that you can tie broad behavior differences to traces of the Neanderthal genetic code. That's an extraordinary claim, and would require some truly extraordinary evidence.

Behavioral genetics does not have the predictive power that you think it does.

The link has images of some of the tools they found. Do you think we could teach a Neanderthal to code?

If you assume that they're equally productive, sure. Why assume that?

Thru-hikers are often expecting to burn like 6000 calories a day.

Arctic explorers burned up to something like 10,000.

Would Neanderthals burn 30-50,000 calories in the same situation, or is that just "what Neanderthals did all day", as opposed to me, a guy sitting at a desk, burning 2000-2500 when I get my steps in?

A surprisingly touching film about a frozen Neanderthal brought back to life. Have a feeling you'll like it.

People have been people for 200k years. There’s a built in assumption in these sorts of stories that before the pyramids or whatever, everyone was running around like apes. Pounding their chests and each other.

I’d say of course people communicated and helped each other out. There were far fewer of us, and for the most part they lived in a world of great abundance.

So basically from the paper I think they are saying there is morphological variability in the area, but they can see technological consistency (centripetal lavallois, burnt ochre). But I still don't understand why this particular assemblage is evidence for that.

Not that I don't believe them, I'm just grumbling that they haven't explained it properly (at least, not well enough for my Sunday morning brain).