"Homo sapiens" is Latin for "wise man," but there were many Hominin species who possessed comparative culture, art, and intelligence. Neanderthals actually had larger brains compared to modern humans[0]. There are many theories on why Neanderthals became extinct[1]; my favorite is that we simply outbred them because of our sex appeal. What is Latin for "sexy human?"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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].
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.
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".
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.
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.
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)
If we interbred with them, how are they actually species? It seems more to me you're talking more about racial or breed differences akin to breeds of dogs if two species actually successfuly had viable offspring in the wild.
Such categories are only an approximation of reality to help with classification. There is stuff like ring species [1] for example or species complex [2].
"Darwin's Origin of Species had a good section on this; the book is quite readable."
Yeah, I recall Darwin discussing at length how there's no clear difference between a "species" and a "variety". It's a key point, so it's too bad that many people are still under the impression that "species" has an unambiguous definition.
That depends entirely on what “the same way” means. Lions’ and tigers’ last common ancestor was well over a million years ago. Pathera’s last common ancestor was 6.6mya. European derived dogs probably had a common ancestor within the last thousand years, definitely the last five thousand. Dogs are fully interfertile, Panthera are mostly interfertile, more than horses, zebras and donkeys are, for example. It might be possible to get zebra ancestry into donkeys’ or lions’ gene pools but there’s no might about lions and tigers. It could be done, and similarly divergent Felidae have mostly domestic cat breeds with substantial non housecat ancestry, like Bengals. Tigers’ and lions’ behaviour and morphology are very different but the same could be said for greyhounds and bloodhounds, or Great Danes and Chihuahuas. You can’t really answer the question without specifying how you’re comparing them.
Many of the original work regarding Neaderthals was by 19th-century elite-school scientists with a publication history of eugenics and the confidence that comes from the knowledge of innate superiority of their own kind. Anyone who didn't look like them would be obviously inferior.
They didn't know what we know today -- Neanderthals were light-skinned fair-hared people who had survived for half a million years in the harsh conditions of glacial and inter-glacial Europe and Asia. They had a rich culture of decorative arts and ceremonial burials. They were as capable of vocal speech as we are (same pharyngeal constructs, highly developed Broca's and Wernicke's regions in the brain). They encountered waves of dark-skinned Homo sapiens coming out of Africa and about 10,000 years later vanished from the scene. That there are light-skinned fair-haired Europeans today is evidence that they didn't vanish completely.
The only evidence that H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens are separate species is the word of 19th-century French aristocrats who were concerned about maintaining racial purity.
You're under the assumption that the current taxonomy structure has hard defined rules that nature follows because we humans told it to. Similar genus (homo is the genus) can interbreed even if they differ by species. But from what I understand, not all genus (gensuses? gensi?(I was educated that it's genera from a commentor)) follow that trait. Most can, some can't.
Hell, there's a movement to ditch the current taxonomy structure and pick one of 2 other kinds that seem to follow evolution better than what we have right now.
Wasn't subfamily or tribe originally called race back in the day? I could have sworn when I was in school it was called race. But they changed it at some point without sending me a memo.
I'm sure you'd agree that a wolf and a chihuahua are different species. Yet they can interbreed and the offspring would likely be fertile as well. Species are primarily created when two groups do not interbreed for a sufficiently long period of time resulting in an accumulation of distinct differences. The crazy thing is that time period is not especially long. The time distance from wolf to chihuahua is only about 15,000 years!
Major physical differences (such as wolf) or inability to interbreed or infertile offspring (such as mules) are all just rules of thumb. For instance zebras and horses are clearly distinct species yet they physically appear extremely similar sans their coloring, can interbreed, and there have even been instances of fertile offspring.
They are not different species in any traditional biological sense. Yes, they look different due to radical changes in developmental pathways. But the differences are not actually very extreme genetically. They have almost exactly the same basic biology.
As a peer mentioned, species predates genetics. But even when you go for a genetic solution it's not clear. How would you propose this? For instance various studies using different metrics put humans and chimps at between 95% and 99% identical. It's the counter intuitive thing about genetics. But then to further confuse the picture is that genome-wide variation between humans can differ by as much as 0.5%. So clearly drawing a genetic boundary between species seems it's subject to the exact same difficulties as our previous phenotypical classifications.
Not at all. For instance, it is thought that H. sapiens × H. neanderthalis hybrids, while viable at least some of the time, were almost never fertile. To explain the Neanderthal contribution to the genome of modern humans, only a very low frequency of successful hybridization events is required.
This is a tricky concept. Could it be said over 50,000 years ago that Homo Sapiens' ancestors were the mainline? I wouldn't retroactively call it that because it presumes that it was clear at the time that it would be the definitive dominant subspecies.
I think a better phrasing would be "genetic divergences, some of which were preserved by the cross-merging with the only surviving genetic stream", or something of the sort.
Environment plays a huge role. If a nomadic group was in a jungle-like environment, wouldn’t they more likely develop the traits of the other species well suited for jungle living? Over a long enough timescale.
> If a nomadic group was in a jungle-like environment, wouldn’t they more likely develop the traits of the other species well suited for jungle living?
Yes, and this has already happened. The African jungle has its pygmies; the Southeast Asian peninsula and surrounding islands have their pygmies; and those two groups are totally unrelated.
Epigenetics is indicating that our traditional view of genetics is probably just completely wrong, but going with that traditional view - it's not that an environment changes a species, but randomness. And traits randomly evolved that end up beneficial are preserved in the lineage due to increased survivability. Jungle like environments tend to be extremely favorable for the survival of intelligent species which means natural selection starts to play less of a role.
Well it does play a role, but in different ways. For instance modern humans are continuing to evolve even though natural selection, in terms of man against environment, is now playing very near 0 role. Instead the factor being selected for now is simple fertility. Humanity will tend to evolve along the characteristics of those families have 3, 4 and more children - while those having 2 or fewer children will gradually fade from the gene pool. So natural selection has in some ways become voluntary, which is quite paradoxical.
However in less developed areas, it's still alive in some ways. For instance if an individual in subsahara Africa somehow developed a genetically heritable mutation making him immune to malaria, it's reasonably likely that all subsaharan Africans would, gradually, become immune to malaria. We can only conclude, putting aside epigenetic factors once again, that such mutations are much less common than e.g. those to the shape of a bird's beak.
Not the reason at all. Even if you left the charge of the word "race" behind, no one ever uses that word to describe such a distant variety of humans as the ones described in the article. I've read they compare to neanderthals and denisovans in their relationship with sapiens, and there's surely a reason why they were classed as Hominins (a two million year old tree) and not some narrower class. I'm still trying to get a better clarification, but the theorized extinct groups seem to require a far stronger word than race by any metric. Maybe subspecies would have preserved the idea of separateness while reconciling the interbreeding, but as you said, what you call this group of hominids is not that important anyways, but race gives the wrong idea in biological terms.
And I'm sad so many people just downvoted the comment without clarification. I thought too it was political correctness at first until I looked into the time-frame more closely. It merited a decent reply.
What is the difference between the genes identifies as "extra-species sourced" and those which are a nominal part of homo sapiens DNA? How do we know they don't originate from intra-species mutation, for example?
Genes tend to to accumulate mutations at a constant rate (lots of caveats here, but that's the general idea). If you find that a population has a family of gene variants that are very different from the same ones in another population, then it's a good bet it arrived from external breeding. And the relative differences between the modern descendant genes can tell you when it happened.
Again, I'm sure the real models get really complicated and are no doubt still a little controversial. But that's the basic idea.
I would be very cautious interpreting these results. There are no DNA samples from the putative EH1 and EH2 hominin populations -- these populations are statistical constructs used to explain the data, but not (yet) directly observed.
I do think it's likely that H. sapiens intermixed with other hominins besides Neanderthal and Denisovan, but the models used to infer these results make a lot of assumptions and are at best a drastic simplification of reality.
If you are even vaguely interested in ancient human DNA, human migration, or human evolution I highly recommend Insito.me's[0] podcast, The Insight [1]. Improvements in genomics DNA extraction techniques combined with several key paleontological finds, have resulted in a revolution in human paleontology and anthropology.
> “For example, all present-day populations show about 2% of Neanderthal ancestry which means that Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa, probably around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East.”
I gotta wonder what people are thinking when they write this stuff. I mean, "Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa". Do they imply that those whose ancestors never left Africa are not "modern humans"? I doubt it. So they're just being sloppy.
Humans nowadays are attracted to everything from anime characters to people dressed in furry animal costumes. The set of things we’re attracted to knows no bounds.
Since we have documented cases of e.g. orangutans being used in prostitution, debating whether different hominids would attempt sex with each other isn't necessary. Yes, they would, it it's somehow physically possible.
They've done reconstructions of neanderthals based on forensic understanding of muscles over bone, etc. They look like people. If you're attracted to Homo Sapiens you're probably attracted to Homo Neanderthalensis.
A recent discovery is of an individual 1/8 Neanderthal. That means some Homo Sapien mated with their parent (1/4 Neanderthal), their grandparent (1/2 Neanderthal) and their great-grandparent (100% Neanderthal). So yes, they didn't seem to be stigmatized.
Or the grandparent (1/2) and parent (1/4) just happened to be female (which is likely, see also: Haldane's rule) in which case they probably had little problem getting laid (side effects include pregnancy which if not treated can lead to children) no matter how stigmatized they were assuming modern humans behavior is any indication.
Having a kid is no guarantee they (and presumably their kid) weren't the lowest status person in the tribe (i.e. stigmatized) on account of who their parents were. That said, it's entirely possible the people in question were too concerned with month to month and year to year survival to care about that kind of thing.
The two named species from the research are Homosapiensdenisova and Homosapiensneanderthalensis. We're Homosapienssapiens, because we ate the wise-wise fruit.
(The other two are nameless data ghosts at this point, due to lack of corresponding archeological records, but presumably Homosapienswhateveris and Homosapienssomeotheris.)
It's kind of open to debate whether those should be independent species, or their own species, but basically we're all Homosapiens of one sort or another unless you want to get into a long unresolvable highly technical argument about it, which revolves around what precise definition of "species" is useful in some arbitrary context.
This theory was one of the most interesting ideas in Sapiens, take a look at a model of what other great apes look like, if so many types of dog can interbreed why wouldn't these great apes?
Yes and no, there's a very blurry line as to when a creature can be called one species and has evolved to another. It's sort of like, you can't state the exact day when a creature has started their "adult" stage of life (including humans). We have arbitrary days, like 18 years old. But from a biological stand point, it's blurry when a person is an "adult".
So how much DNA of a species, in another, means it's "that" species. Or is it brand new and different? I mean, technically, we're more related to fungi than we are plants, by quite a bit. But it's easy to differentiate humans from fungi. Still, we're related, relatively speaking compared to plants. Does that make us fungi? Obviously that's bat shit absurd. But just because a lot of homo sapiens have 1%-3% neanderthal in them, that doesn't make them neanderthal. I don't think neanderthals should be taken off the extinction list. The same, we share 85%-92% of dna with mice (this number fluctuates depending on sources). Does that make us mice?
Hi everyone, just letting you all know, it's no surprise that modern homo sapiens ancestors bumped uglies with other species in the genus of homo back in the day. The enlightening part of this article is there are some unknown species in homo that we have genetic evidence of, but no fossil record. The thing you should be fascinated by, there were many contemporary relatives to homo sapiens that could have been as much or somewhat as intelligent. But they all disappeared and we are all that's left. We either killed them all or snoo-snooed them out of existence because homo sapiens seemed to have spawned faster and had more offspring in comparison.
So, please stop relating this to dogs fucking or being surprised that different species can tango under moonlight. Please stop.
Yes, different species, of different genders, of the same genus can warm up at night and spawn little hellions 7-9ish months later.
There's plenty of evidence that these other homo species were sophisticated, like the neanderthal. As much, if not more, that ancient homo sapiens (at the time).
Does that make a new species? Maybe. Current taxonomy guidelines are not perfect. There are other taxonomy systems out there that would spell this out, just not considered the universal standard we all know today. The problem is, how do you draw sharp lines in a blurry distinction without just creating a new "species" for every sexual adventurous encounter that results in a screaming child.
At the end, this article was cool and we should all be excited over this.
Yes that's the interesting part. But disagree that 'there's plenty of evidence'. The fact is, there's no evidence whatsoever - that's what 'unknown species' means.
Not sure why this is down-voted. It's spot on albeit devoid of the usual literary bubble wrap used when discussing this kind of thing in polite company.
That there exist other similar species that we don't (yet) have a fossil record of is the interesting part here.
Question is would the Neanderthals have also shared traits with other hominids? I find that religion and politics kind of muddies the science with human evolution
I am not an expert. But it seems less likely since the Neanderthals existed for a shorter timespan over shorter distances then modern humans, so they must have encountered fewer hominin along their way.
If anything it is more likely that the deninsovans aquired genes from the decedents of the groups of Homo Erectus that migrated throughout south east asia and quite probably remained in small quantities in remote areas (like Homo Floresiensis did) when the denisovans arrived.
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Edit: Then it is the question of: Say that the Denisovans acquired genes from other hominin through interbreeding, would these genes then be passed on to us when our homo sapien ancestors interbreed with the Denisovans? That is a question I have no confidence in answering and should probably be deferred to geneticist or a genetic statistician.
yes, I am hoping specific gene contributions from specific archaic humans will eventually be used to determine the ethnicity or race of a person.
this will lead to better health outcomes as it's well known that drugs do not affect people of different races/gender the same.
the push back from doing this probably comes from groups that are trying to hide past genocidal events.
Suppose we found enough DNA to recreate these hominins.
Would they be citizens or zoo animals? Either way, what if they want to interbreed? Do we determine this based on looks? What if the attraction is unidirectional?
They would be citizens. They would grow up like normal children. They would speak any human language. They could achieve anything any other human could in their lives. The differences would be subtle. They would appear like unusual humans to us, a racial group that we had never encountered. We would certainly see more commonalities with other modern humans than differences. All their traits would be present to some extent among living modern humans, but they would show us a unique and intense combination of those traits.
No, they're not. The only 'evidence' for this is cranial size. Neanderthals had larger brain sizes than modern humans. Now let's look at all the other evidence. Neanderthals existed longer than the entire existence of humans. And in that time they never managed to get out of the stone age. Stone age sounds nicer than it is. Beat two rocks together, sharp stuff falls off, use it => you're in the stone age.
Contrary to pop media, there is also literally no clear evidence they even engaged in the most basic of symbolic behavior such as self adornment or even primitive art. [1] Now mostly disregarded efforts to show such were highly optimistic. This included things like bird bones being laid near a corpse = self adornment, or scratches on a cave floor = art. Even in what they did do - hunt, despite engaging in hunting for hundreds of thousands of years there are extremely high rates of traumatic injury among neanderthal corpses which suggests they never even managed to refine their hunting ability.
And the brain size : intelligence correlation is just so broken in so many ways. If you go based on raw size sperm whales should be, by far, the most intelligent species there is. If you go based on the ratio of brain matter to mass, ants should be, again by far, the most intelligent species there is. Suffice to say you're probably not too worried about being put in zoos by sperm whales or ants.
The earliest homo sapien skeletons were found in Morocco and are dated almost 300,000 years old. So our species was around for hundreds of thousands of years and we didn’t do much more than the Neanderthals. So Neanderthals not demonstrating culture doesn’t mean much, since our own species also went a long time without demonstrating culture. Indeed, it is an interesting question , what were we using these enormous brains for?
Looking for the monoliths? Jokes aside, probably not much. Biological classifications don't imply sameness. You don't get anatomically modern humans until 30,000-50,000 years ago. Even that doesn't tell you much about cognitive ability. Think about something like the Flynn Effect [1]. In the past century real IQ scores rose by more than a standard deviation throughout most of the world. That means a person of perfectly mean intelligence today would be more intelligent, so far as IQ can measure, than 84% of people from a century ago. And over thousands of years? Of course now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed in most developed nations with us becoming literally less intelligent, again so far as IQ can measure.
The point is that even in a time frame of a single century you're looking at very radical changes in intellectual ability between populations that would appear, on the surface, to be practically 100% identical. When you start talking about tens of thousands of years ago, it's impossible to do even begin to intelligently speculate based on anything other than achievement. And what did we achieve? As you mention, not much. And so the only justifiable explanation is that we probably didn't have that much going on upstairs until relatively recently.
I think the most interesting question is a direct spin off of yours. What triggered the intellectual spike? Was it in any way related to whatever caused the more contemporary spikes in intelligence? Why are IQs now decreasing and can global intellect fade away as rapidly as it emerged? Probably the most depressing possible solution to the Fermi paradox!
"You don't get anatomically modern humans until 30,000-50,000 years ago."
And this is wild speculation without any basis:
"And so the only justifiable explanation is that we probably didn't have that much going on upstairs until relatively recently."
Economic development is complex, it depends on a lot more than IQ. As a point of comparison, we could ask why did the Industrial Revolution only happened 200 years ago? If, as you suggest, homo sapiens have had high IQ for 50,000 years, then why didn't we have the Industrial Revolution much sooner?
But more so, you seem to imply, in response to the original article, that the mixing of homo species helped us develop a certain kind of IQ. But according to that theory, the most advanced people on Earth should be the aborigines of Australia, as they were the first group to mix with all the different homo species, as sapiens moved from Africa to Australia. But in fact, the aborigines of Australia were quite content with their lives, and felt no need to build civilizations, even though they certainly have high IQ, and they have the mix of genes you'd expect of humans outside of Africa.
About this:
"What triggered the intellectual spike?"
There was no spike in IQ. You have no reason to believe that. The development of culture and civilization have nothing to do with IQ. Large parts of the world remained completely primitive until recent centuries, even though those regions were full of high IQ homo sapiens.
I can't tell if you are trying to build a racial theory of history, but if you are, that idea has been debunked many times. All I can do is recommend that you read some of that debunking.
The period I'm referencing with 30,000-50,000 years ago is known as the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. This is where a very large number of things happened nearly simultaneously. Homo sapien began to interbreed with various other species, and they took on the anatomical form we mostly have today. In specimens prior to this period you generally find substantial anatomical differences such as thicker bones, larger canines, etc.
But most importantly of all this is where you find the first clear evidence of intelligence which rapidly expand outward: art, ceremonial burials, clear evidence of fishing, and much more. Some time after that you start to see the beginning of modern civilization with bladed weapons, pottery, agriculture, and so on. This is also one of the most likely time periods for the development of language, though that is something that is hotly debated.
I'm going to dodge the second part of your post for the sake of trying to keep the conversation on the up and up. If you have some clear message you'd like to convey, I'd be happy to get into that. It's a fun topic. However, please do drop the ad hominem.
Why was my previous response downvoted? What part of it was illegitimate? I tried to summarize some of the different types of arguments that I've heard online, on this particular topic. All of this is true, these are examples from actual conversations that I've had online:
"There are some other types of argument, similar to yours, that I've run into online. Some people insist that humans were genetically engineered by aliens. That argument is based on no evidence, though it does have the nice property that is not raced based. Some other people make a religious and/or spiritual argument, arguing that there is a universal consciousness and that it spread across the world 50,000 years ago. That has all the problems of any religious argument -- it could be true, but there is no evidence and no way to prove it."
There is nothing ad hominem about trying to clarify what sort of argument someone is making. So I am curious why that previous comment was downvoted?
Evidence points to the Neanderthals being an advanced group of peoples, interesting for me is their glue https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/news/a2...
Stone tools are not easy to make, it requires great skill and many could be classified as works of art. It could be said that modern Europeans/Asians are off shoots of Neanderthals
> In 2004, Rohde, Olson and Chang showed through simulations that the Identical Ancestors Point for all humans is surprisingly recent, on the order of 5,000-15,000 years ago.
How can different populations of modern humans have interbred with different hominin species around 50k years ago when ALL of today's humans had the EXACT SAME SET OF ANCESTORS as recently as 15k years ago?
> How can different populations of modern humans have interbred with different hominin species around 50k years ago when ALL of today's humans had the EXACT SAME SET OF ANCESTORS as recently as 15k years ago?
Differences in past populations, including the interbreeding at issue, can be inferred from modern genes for reasons actually laid out in your own link, in the paragraph after the one you quoted:
All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors from this point back, all the way to the very first single-celled organism. However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes.
This actually makes sense, thank you for actually reading the Wikipedia page rather than just searching for a quote :)
It doesn't really contradict this article, but there were a number of articles a couple of years ago about how Europeans had Neanderthal DNA that other ethnicities didn't share. In reality all modern humans are descended from the exact same Neanderthals, but Europeans still retain more of their genes.
15k years isn't so short a period. Suppose a generation every 20 years or so. 50 per millennium. 750 generations in 15k years. If one person per generation settles 120 km further east than he/she was born (and odds are there would be more than just one) then 750 generations would be long enough to circle the planet twice.
Genes travel slowly, but in many directions at once. And there may be some advantage to the offspring of two people genetically "far" from each other, reinforcing via evolution whatever instinct lead to them travel.
15k years is more than enough time for all of us to share an ancestry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Anatomy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction