You are a fukcing Neanderthal

emo72

for a thread that had dodgy beginnings, this has turned out to be an enthralling thread. after hours has been redeemed :pac:

Ghandee

This thread may have been spotted by a Harvard professor OP!

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/palaeolithic-park-harvard-professor-seeks-adventurous-woman-to-give-birth-to-neanderthal-3361191.html

Any ladies from AH willing to help out?

ScumLord

Wibbs wrote: »

oh and they made the first throwing spears we know of.

I thought they couldn't throw spears effectively? Their shoulders didn't have the range of motion and that's why they were ambush predators and received a lot of physical damage over their lives because of the close proximity they had to their prey during hunts.

Humans on the other hand used the Atlatl that allowed them to maintain distance from their prey. We also had the range of motion in our shoulders that allowed us to throw something.

Rented Mule

Lars1916 wrote: »

Didn't they invent the first weapons and the wheel?

Shhhh ....don't tell the Americans.

Galwayguy35

ScumLord wrote: »

I thought they couldn't throw spears effectively? Their shoulders didn't have the range of motion and that's why they were ambush predators and received a lot of physical damage over their lives because of the close proximity they had to their prey during hunts.

Humans on the other hand used the Atlatl that allowed them to maintain distance from their prey. We also had the range of motion in our shoulders that allowed us to throw something.

I think you are right about this, the Neanderthals went right up to what ever they wanted to kill and stabbed it with their spears instead of throwing them at the animal.

Bearing in mind that many of the animals they hunted were a lot bigger than those around today it's no wonder they needed to be strong and tough.

ScumLord

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

I think you are right about this, the Neanderthals went right up to what ever they wanted to kill and stabbed it with their spears instead of throwing them at the animal.

Bearing in mind that many of the animals they hunted were a lot bigger than those around today it's no wonder they needed to be strong and tough.

It wouldn't be pretty either. I saw a video of African tribes killing an elephant with spears. The spears were like sticking toothpicks in the elephant so it takes a long time to kill the elephant that way. It may not have been a hunt as such, maybe more of a revenge attack by the tribe so Neanderthals could probably have taken down the elephant much quicker.

Wibbs

ScumLord wrote: »

I thought they couldn't throw spears effectively? Their shoulders didn't have the range of motion and that's why they were ambush predators and received a lot of physical damage over their lives because of the close proximity they had to their prey during hunts.

Humans on the other hand used the Atlatl that allowed them to maintain distance from their prey. We also had the range of motion in our shoulders that allowed us to throw something.

I don't buy the shoulder hypothesis myself. They found 400,000 year old wooden spears in a bog in Germany. They were designed for throwing and belonged to Homo heidelbergensis who were ancestral to Neandertals(and us in Africa) and they had the same shoulders so... Maybe the close in hunting came about, not from any physical impediment to throwing, but an environmental one? Neandertals had very big eyes. The biggest of any humans. They also had very large visual centers in the brain, so maybe they were adapting to hunting in low light conditions like deep forest? Spears are pretty useless if thrown in thick brush. Just as likely to hit a tree(and damage the tip) as to hit an animal. Throwing weapons are better in open landscape. Ambush hunting is a better bet in forest. Stab, retreat and wait for the animal to bleed out. I don't think this means they were tied to that environment though. They survived and thrived in very shifting environments for over 200,000 years so they were clearly an adaptable bunch o lads.

Capt'n Midnight

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

They had bigger brains than us

Which proves that the main function of your brain is to warm the blood.

Capt'n Midnight

most of the American natives died out because of diseases carried by the rest of us. And that's only a few tens of thousands of years in the difference.

it's possible something similar happened our ancestors met

Da Shins Kelly

Wibbs wrote: »

I don't buy the shoulder hypothesis myself. They found 400,000 year old wooden spears in a bog in Germany. They were designed for throwing and belonged to Homo heidelbergensis who were ancestral to Neandertals(and us in Africa) and they had the same shoulders so... Maybe the close in hunting came about, not from any physical impediment to throwing, but an environmental one? Neandertals had very big eyes. The biggest of any humans. They also had very large visual centers in the brain, so maybe they were adapting to hunting in low light conditions like deep forest? Spears are pretty useless if thrown in thick brush. Just as likely to hit a tree(and damage the tip) as to hit an animal. Throwing weapons are better in open landscape. Ambush hunting is a better bet in forest. Stab, retreat and wait for the animal to bleed out. I don't think this means they were tied to that environment though. They survived and thrived in very shifting environments for over 200,000 years so they were clearly an adaptable bunch o lads.

So if they were so adaptable and resourceful and intelligent why did they die out? I'm not asking to be awkward, just genuinely curious. I don't know anything about this kind of stuff!

ScumLord

Da Shins Kelly wrote: »

So if they were so adaptable and resourceful and intelligent why did they die out? I'm not asking to be awkward, just genuinely curious. I don't know anything about this kind of stuff!

It wouldn't be at all surprising if humans turned up and killed them off tribe by tribe, while Neanderthals are strong, strength usually comes at the cost of speed, maybe humans could just run rings around them on a battlefield?

Maybe humans brought new diseases with them. Humans love of congregating into as large a group as they can means disease is rife in all human colonies.

Maybe they just got gradually pushed off their or assimilated into human groups. It is very unusual for them to just disappear especially considering the environment they came out of.

Over all it's probably just comes down to the human being that little bit better at hunting, a little bit better in a fight and probably a better breeder.

Yitzhak Rabin

I would imagine like scumlord said, it was something unremarkable that set us out from them.

Perhaps we had on average 3 surviving offspring whilst they only had on average two. Maybe we only needed 2000 calories a day and they needed 4000 leading to they're decline in lean times. Perhaps our diet was more varied and they relies heavily on meat, and in times when meat was scarce we adapted better than they could.

Id imagine it was a death of a thousand paper cuts rather than one blow that lead to their demise.

Fighting Irish

Strawberry Fields wrote: »

survival of the fittest. they are extinct.

lol i'd say they were a lot fitter than the majority of humans we see today

Wibbs

Better breeder IMH. We just had more kids. They and previous humans were rare in the landscape, didn't cause much of an effect in the ecosystem etc. We come along and have slightly more kids, we need less food than them so maybe more kids survive the lean times. It wouldn't have to be by much and their extinction didn't happen overnight when we show up. It took 56-60,000 years since we first met in the Middle East. In Europe we were together for 10,000 years.

Thems big time scales. Put it this way it's longer than we've been farming. So a few extra kids generation by generation builds up. This causes other things too. Greater population means you're bumping into more people out there and exchanging ideas/competing with them. I would suspect Neandertals were part of that too. However when it was just them living as isolated groups a Neandertal DaVincis ideas would likely die with him or her, in the new world order of more people those ideas have a greater chance of transmission and preservation.

After a while you'd have fewer and fewer "pure" Neandertals, but likely loads of Neandertal/Sapiens mixes on both sides. Late neandertals and early Sapiens sometimes show what look like features of each other. Like the Portuguese kid they found, modern human after the other lads died out, but with Neandertal features. The last pure and isolated Neandertal probably died out 20 odd 1000 years ago, but I'd put money the rest of his kind were just assimilated into the new humans and are part of what makes us today. Ditto for the Denisovians. A bunch in the east that are as distant from us as Neandertals were and theyre as distant again from them. Interestingly all we have is a finger bone and that's the headline, for me it's interesting that these new subspecies of humans were found with a polished bracelet, they were wearing jewelry, once thought the preserve of us.

ScumLord

Fighting Irish wrote: »

lol i'd say they were a lot fitter than the majority of humans we see today

It's not really fair to compare them to modern humans instead of the humans that would have been around at the time.

Modern humans are soft, the further back in time we go the harder humans get though, to the point they may have been vicious ****ers back when Neanderthals were around.

IamtheWalrus

If evolution is true why aren't there no humans that eat nothing but bananaz?

Smiles35

IamtheWalrus wrote: »

If evolution is true why aren't there no humans that eat nothing but bananaz?

Why where the first bananas brown if creation is true?

PopePalpatine

IamtheWalrus wrote: »

If evolution is true why aren't there no humans that eat nothing but bananaz?

Please tell me you're a Poe.

Galwayguy35

So if new species of humans evolve every so ofton throughout history to replace the previous lot, then maybe in time we will also be replaced.

ScumLord

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

So if new species of humans evolve every so ofton throughout history to replace the previous lot, then maybe in time we will also be replaced.

The problem with that is humans travel too much. We're constantly mixing the races these days, unless something goes horribly wrong there won't be any opportunity for a group of humans to live in isolation long enough to start turning into anything different from the rest of the species.

Maybe when we move into space we'll see groups of humans in isolation for long enough periods of time that would allow them to evolve in different directions. But even that seems unlikely. Humans will find a way to intermingle.

RobbieTheRobber

Ghandee wrote: »

This thread may have been spotted by a Harvard professor OP!

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/palaeolithic-park-harvard-professor-seeks-adventurous-woman-to-give-birth-to-neanderthal-3361191.html

Any ladies from AH willing to help out?

In todays news from the Harvard professor


"And Harvard University geneticist George M. Church, the scientist at the center of the viral vortex, says it was: Way too outlandish, and entirely untrue."

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/01/harvard_professor_blasts_web_rumor

Galwayguy35

ScumLord wrote: »

The problem with that is humans travel too much. We're constantly mixing the races these days, unless something goes horribly wrong there won't be any opportunity for a group of humans to live in isolation long enough to start turning into anything different from the rest of the species.

Maybe when we move into space we'll see groups of humans in isolation for long enough periods of time that would allow them to evolve in different directions. But even that seems unlikely. Humans will find a way to intermingle.

Fair enough, but looking at it a different way doesn't every species die out eventually apart from insects.

Maybe the human race will eventually die out as well.

Wibbs

ScumLord wrote: »

It's not really fair to compare them to modern humans instead of the humans that would have been around at the time.

Modern humans are soft, the further back in time we go the harder humans get though, to the point they may have been vicious ****ers back when Neanderthals were around.

+1. OK we werent as robust as Neandertals, but we were a lot more robust on average than people today. Bigger thicker skulls, bigger teeth, bone densities of olympic athletes etc. We become more gracile as we get to the present day.

ScumLord wrote: »

The problem with that is humans travel too much. We're constantly mixing the races these days, unless something goes horribly wrong there won't be any opportunity for a group of humans to live in isolation long enough to start turning into anything different from the rest of the species.

Maybe when we move into space we'll see groups of humans in isolation for long enough periods of time that would allow them to evolve in different directions. But even that seems unlikely. Humans will find a way to intermingle.

Maybe. We have a huge population and it's getting bigger and big populations increase the chances of mutations. Yes we travel more, but overall the vast majority of people tend to marry and reproduce locally "with one of their own". So I reckon it's at least possible you might get a subspecies event occurring. I would argue we're already a loose group of near subspecies of each other anyway. Closely related yes and obviously we're all human, but some populations have distinct differences and not just on the surface. Put it another way if we hadn't bought into the racist ballsology, or if aliens landed I'd put money we/they would classify us into distinct populations.

Examples? Take folks like the Maasai in Kenya. They've been herders for a couple of thousand years. They can metabolise lactose in milk(like most Europeans who also became herders), whereas surrounding populations who remained hunter gatherers until recently can't. It only took a couple of thousand years for that mutation to become distinct in their population yet they were surrounded by other groups and no doubt some hanky panky went on between the groups. There are a number of differences like that all over the world. There are populations in the high Andes where pregnant women build much thicker and bigger arteries and veins in the placenta because of adaptation to the altitude and again research and history suggests they had people moving back and forth. In medicine researchers have found some populations are more prone to some diseases. EG African Americans are at a much higher risk of type 2 diabetes and respond differently to various medications and have different risks and responses to their cousins in West Africa who didn't get stolen from their lands. indeed the slave trade seems to have been a major adaptation pressure and it only lasted a couple of centuries. There was a great documentary recently by the African American runner chap whose name sadly escapes(used to run in gold runners IIRC). He was looking at what seemed to be an advantage for people from a slavery background beyond cultural stuff in track and field and other disciplines. researchers in the US and the Carribbean reckon there may be something to it.

So yea I could well imagine you could get a group somewhere that builds up a suite of these changes where they might become more of a sub species than the rest of us.

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

Fair enough, but looking at it a different way doesn't every species die out eventually apart from insects.

Maybe the human race will eventually die out as well.

Well insects die out to GG. Thank fook or we'd have dragonflies with 3 foot wingspans still knocking around. :eek::D We could well die out. Well we will. If we never leave the earth sooner or later an extinction level event will happen and the earth itself has "only" about 400 million years of habitable living left in her.

I suspect what may happen is that we'll "build" our own replacements. Our greatest trick as a species has been our ability to augment, even cheat blind evolution. Now we've found our way into the actual library of evolution with genetics etc. OK we're still stumbling about in the dark with a flashlight and we haven't read most of the books, but there will come the day... When that day comes we may build a new human from the genes up, maybe even the atoms up. An improved human, linked to every other new human on the planet and beyond. A near immortal gestalt of humanity spreading out and accelerating all the time. Or we could end back as cavemen, tiny bands of us left on some future grassland worshiping the decayed remains of our cities.

Smiles35

RobbieTheRobber wrote: »

In todays news from the Harvard professor


"And Harvard University geneticist George M. Church, the scientist at the center of the viral vortex, says it was: Way too outlandish, and entirely untrue."

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/01/harvard_professor_blasts_web_rumor

I'm not really surprised. It's like deep history month over in U.S.A. With all the shame of history.

Fighting Irish

ScumLord wrote: »

It's not really fair to compare them to modern humans instead of the humans that would have been around at the time.

Modern humans are soft, the further back in time we go the harder humans get though, to the point they may have been vicious ****ers back when Neanderthals were around.

That's fair enough but what i said still holds true to the post i quoted

RyanMcGrath

I feel a little stupid for contributing to a thread about a statement thats pretty self explanitory but isn't something offensive if it PERSONALLY offends someone??? I mean i don't think when you say "you ****ing Neandertal" could remotely have the same effect as "you ****ing n###er" but more along the same offensive effect as using it to describe someones lack of intelligence. Like calling someone fat "you ****ing whale", you are not insulting whales because whales do not take offence... because they are whales, as Neandertals do not take offence... because they are extinct.

Capt'n Midnight

IamtheWalrus wrote: »

If evolution is true why aren't there no humans that eat nothing but bananaz?

why aren't there humans who only eat potatoes anymore ?