New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal 505
ThinkComp writes "In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus that has held for decades, recent research suggests that the traditional conception of Neanderthals being "stupider" than Homo sapiens may in fact be misleading. As articles about the research findings state, 'early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.' The data used in the study is available on-line along with a visual description of the process used."
Well, that's just great. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:5, Funny)
Now what am I supposed to call my brother-in-law?
Creationist!
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:4, Funny)
I thought attempting to get marked troll was part of the joke -- like, that mod in an of itself was the answer.
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:5, Funny)
I thought attempting to get marked troll was part of the joke
New scientific research is emerging that trolls are actually descendents of the Neanderthals. They are highly intelligent. And polite. And a productive contributor to any conversation. Who'd a thunk it?
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:5, Funny)
Only at low temperatures though.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:5, Funny)
Uncyclopedia has this to say about Slashdot trolls: [uncyclopedia.org]:
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:5, Funny)
I dont think youre trolling.
You, sir, are absolutely right. A creationist is a really stupid evolved monkey.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. GP is both funny and insightful.
Re:Can someone stop the creationist mods in here? (Score:4, Funny)
The Creationist mods have,to mod critics down. Their invisible superbeings aren't capable of doing things on their own. And as a bonus: every downmod of rational thinking gets them one step closer to Heaven!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe they are. Have faith, and remember you don't get to meta-moderate God.
Re:Can someone stop the creationist mods in here? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they are. Have faith, and remember you don't get to meta-moderate God.
Only because God doesn't post on Slashdot.
Re:Can someone stop the creationist mods in here? (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't get a low ID number and is now too embarrassed?
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:4, Interesting)
Homo Sapiens almost went extinct [slashdot.org] at the same time as the Neanderthals.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Hubbardite". "Scientologist" is trademarked by a cult and actually makes it sound like something scientific might be taking place.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I suggest calling him Homo Erectus...
Stone Tools (Score:5, Funny)
So easy a caveman can do it.
Re:Stone Tools (Score:5, Funny)
I was a young man in the stone age (1970s), you insensitive clod! I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did get all the bugs out.
The "stone age" was a wonderous time to be a young nerd. As there was cheap and easy contraception, no incurable STDs (the CIA had yet to invent AIDS), and women were trying to get parity with men, even a nerd could get laid! In fact, in the stone age women would ask ME (of all people) "wanna fuck, dude?" as easily as they would ask "Hey, you got a joint?" or "man, my radio's broke, can you look at it for me?"
File sharing (via cassettes) was legal. We had wooden computers called "slide rules" because electronic ones were still insanely expensive.
You young fellows don't know what you're missing. Man, I really miss the stone age.
This is refuted by (Score:5, Funny)
i mis-read title... (Score:3, Funny)
as netherlands...
Re:i mis-read title... (Score:5, Funny)
That's stoned, not stupid :)
Re:i mis-read title... (Score:4, Funny)
i mis-read title... as netherlands... (Score:0, Flamebait)
OK, who gave the Dutchman mod points?!
The difference (Score:4, Funny)
The Homo sapiens bought out the Neanderthals tools and buried them, thus ensuring the success of Homo sapien tools.
Re:The difference (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The difference (Score:4, Funny)
"The Homo sapiens bought out the Neanderthals tools and buried them, thus ensuring the success of Homo sapien tools."
No, our ancestors went to the overburdened Neanderthal Patent Office, "proved" prior art, and sued the Neanderthals into extinction.
Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Informative)
We have known for a long time that Neanderthal had a larger brain than modern human and a sophisticated culture, including burial rites. There was no scientific consensus that Neandethal was stupid.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Funny)
There was no scientific consensus that Neandethal was stupid.
... there is no scientific consensus that the average homo sapiens is smart, either.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Funny)
As a park ranger at Yosimite once said, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but the thing you didn't notice was that the park ranger was an impostor - a bear that had eaten the human park ranger. Dumb humans.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:4, Interesting)
Quit being so judgemental. How sentient creatures choose to lead their lives has no bearing with how smart they are. As it happens, members of homo sapiens has been able to lead useful productive lives despite not having too much upstairs [reuters.com], so to speak.
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We have known for a long time that Neanderthal had a larger brain than modern human and a sophisticated culture, including burial rites. There was no scientific consensus that Neandethal was stupid.
Define "a long time", please. 100 years? 50 years? 30 years? 20 years?
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if they couldn't figure out the skull capacity from the skull cap found in 1829 they certainly could from the skull found in 1909. Those 19th century guys had a habit of thinking that white men were the smartest thing going so they probably thought Neanderthal was pretty dumb, but that was hardly a scientific view.
In 1880 Neanderthal remains were found with cultural items and tools. In 1983 a hyoid bone was found that showed Neanderthal vocal capabilities were probably almost identical to modern humans'. The Neanderthal graves at Shanidar were discovered in 1957. These are the famous ones that include pollen.
There has been a lot of controversy over various aspects of Neanderthal culture since their discovery. There really doesn't seem to have ever been a "scientific consensus" regarding their intelligence.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Interesting)
From your answer, I conclude that the term "pop culture" isn't quite the right term. I'd use "scientists' preconceived ideas". Among such ideas are:
* Dinosaurs were like today's lizards. This was a common belief 2 centuries ago.
* T-Rex was the king of dinosaurs, a terrible hunter. New evidence suggest it was more like the king of scavengers.
* Stomach ulcers could not possibly be caused by a bacteria. The discovery of the H. Pilori set them wrong.
* There couldn't be anything like black holes. And it was Einstein who believed this.
* There are 9 planets orbiting the sun. Turns out Pluto isn't even a planet.
See, precisely the point of science is that new theories can replace old theories (and even beliefs). But calling preconceived ideas "pop culture" is stretching it a bit too much. Unless you want to start a debate about Pirates vs. Ninjas :)
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Funny)
But calling preconceived ideas "pop culture" is stretching it a bit too much. Unless you want to start a debate about Pirates vs. Ninjas :)
But there's scietific conseus that ninjas are cooler than pirates.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Funny)
Incorrect. It's the other way around. It's been shown with Science that pirates are so cool that they actually offset global warming. There are graphs that prove this. Ninjas, conversely, are hot. At least... girl ninjas are. 8)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What do you mean? Of course its a chick...I mean look at her.
Wait a minute...oh...nevermind...
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* There are 9 planets orbiting the sun. Turns out Pluto isn't even a planet.
That's not really a scientific fact though. It's not as if a planet is some universal constant that we happened to discover Pluto doesn't match. Stating so would be as illogical as stating that we recently discovered the Pluto wasn't "awesome anymore". It's just a classification method. Pluto could very well be validly classified a planet if we so wished.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Funny)
I think this is all just part of Geico's back-pedal campaign.
They realize they screwed up and pissed off a bunch of Neanderthals.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Did last time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you're wrong. Brain size does correlate with intelligence, fairly well between species but even a bit within a species: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence [wikipedia.org]
Brain size, given a particular body mass, is a good first approximation of relative intelligence. Yes, disease is a confounder, and brain size is not as good a guide within a species.
However, when species A and B are pretty close in body mass and species B has a bigger brain, you'd better be really careful saying specie
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Interesting)
The intelligence of Neanderthals is not necessarily the driving force of their ability to compete with homosapien. They could have been equally as smart or even smarter on an individual basis. However their collective intelligence, the ability to operate in larger groups, rather than extended family groups, means the while individually they might have been smarter and stronger they ended up being outnumber on the field of conflict.
Also homosapiens were likely to have been more vengeful and fielded a larger group to pursue and Neanderthals after a hunting party skirmishes, which initially the Neanderthals might have won and collected their prize of long pig only to be latter pursued by a far larger group combative homospaiens.
So the difference is not in the individual intelligence but in the social collective intelligence, the group that worked together, that shared an extended tribal awareness and, that were willing to sacrifice themselves, their time and effort in support of the future goals of the group proved to be far more successfully as a group. Pretty much the same as it is today. The societies where the individuals are only out to gain as much as they can for themselves regardless of the harm to the group create more unsuccessful society than those a care, share and are willing to work for the collective good. The ratio between the greedy few and the more aware majority define the nature modern societies more so than the individual intelligence of it's members.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps. It could equally well be explained as the Neanderthals being less aggressive. That's not group or individual intelligence.
Considering how close we've come to extinction, the choice between us and them probably came down to us being luckier than they were. They went extinct and we squeaked by.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, we don't know (Score:5, Informative)
Actually we don't know that Homo Sapiens hunted down Neanderthals either.
Warfare only appeared in Homo Sapiens around the time we discovered bows and arrows, about 20,000 years ago, in Africa. It's hard to tell if that was cause or effect or just a spurious correlation, but suddenly we get mass graves of people with arrow heads embedded in their bones and cave paintings of groups of archers shooting at each other.
At any rate:
1. There is no evidence of warfare before that. Neither in Homo Sapiens, nor in Neanderthals.
2. By the time missile weapons arrived in Europe, the Neanderthals were going extinct on their own. The long decline in numbers and area had happened before that.
Vengeful we may be, but killing someone in melee is actually an extremely traumatic thing. Unless you're a sociopath, you're still wired like an animal to not kill members of the same species. Overcoming that is very traumatic. The Romans for example recognized that and rotated the rows of a legion, so the soldiers would get some time to recover in the middle of a fight. Ranged killing seems to actually be easier, and it puts a wall of plausible deniability between you and the victim. Maybe it wasn't your arrow that killed that guy, after all.
From there we learned to manipulate people and use group-think to make them kill each other even in melee. But it took an awfully long time to get there, and the Neanderthals were already extinct by then.
Furthermore, Neanderthals were, if you'll pardon the bad WoW metaphors, all survival-spec hunters. Melee hunters. _Everyone_ hunted with spears, including the women. And they seemed pretty capable to cooperate in a group. Plus, see that thing about using the women too. If someone actually managed to start a war back then between a tribe of Homo Sapiens and one of Neanderthals, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter would have had the upper hand.
Exactly why they went extinct... now that's still a good question.
One theory was that they were strictly carnivore and their prey was going extinct due to both climate change _and_ over-hunting. Another one is that they just couldn't compete with us. The Homo Sapiens were hunters _and_ gatherers, and could survive and continue hunting a species into extinction even past the point where predator-prey balance would normally allow the prey to rebound. The Neanderthals relying only on that prey, would have been royally shafted.
Me, I'm wonder if we didn't kill them sexually, so to speak. Consider the following:
A. See, one way to get a species of, say, insects extinct, is to release lots and lots of sterile males. If enough females of that species mate with those, the population drops very fast.
B. There seem to be _no_ genes we inherited from Neanderthals. Considering that the areas for us and them overlapped for thousands of years, I find it unlikely that _no_ horny male of one species wouldn't find a female of the other species attractive enough, or viceversa. I mean, so they were short and stout lasses with sloped foreheads. A lot of people screw worse looking women nowadays. And conversely going to the pub and getting laid by a neanderthal is still a tradition for some girls ;)
It is very likely that the offspring of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals were either sterile or non-viable. Plenty of closely related species produce sterile offspring when crossed. E.g., lion and tiger, horse and donkey, etc.
C. The sterile case is actually the funniest, because it may not be immediately obvious that it's a dead end. And in a lot of species such hybrids are bigger and stronger (a liger is twice the weight of a tiger, for example), so for a primitive sentient species it may even look like giving your children more chances of survival that way.
D. Both species had a chronic shortage of women, due to a life expectancy disparity. Death in birth or from resulting complications took a heavy toll.
So _if_ they were desirable enough (e.g., because Homo Sapiens tribes
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that Homo Sapiens only developed warfare after discovering bows and arrows. Chimpanzees make war, or at least violent tribal conflict, and as far as I know they don't use bows and arrows. We share a lot of DNA with chimps.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
Many long-held beliefs suggesting why the Neanderthals went extinct have been debunked in recent years. Research has already shown that Neanderthals were as good at hunting as Homo sapiens and had no clear disadvantage in their ability to communicate. Now, these latest findings add to the growing evidence that Neanderthals were no less intelligent than our ancestors.
It's evidence against the old, already-discarded concensus. So we can chalk this up to the lay media's love of turning articles into "scientific renegade tales", and inability to comprehend that science is continuously revising itself.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"How can you trust anything science says? It revises itself to be accurate, that's why. An unchanging theory constructed in year X is one that is unlikely to become more correct with the collection of new evidence in the years to come, except by some fluke of blind luck."
Right. But if a theory was correct *to begin with*, it doesn't actually need revising. The more correct and trustworthy a piece of scientific knowledge, the *less* it will change over time. So logically speaking, we should be more skeptical
The study was easy. (Score:4, Funny)
The researchers found that their research was so easy, a homo sapiens could do it.
They went extinct because... (Score:4, Funny)
they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Let this be a warning to you all.
Re:They went extinct because... (Score:5, Funny)
Netcraft confirms it: the Neanderthal is dead!
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they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Ah, that explains why Oog isn't around anymore, breaking heads with his Open Source CD.
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they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Let this be a warning to you all.
Um, don't open source the stuff you use to hurt other people with. Gotcha. So should we open source our election process/government or not? I'm not clear if we'd classify that as weapon/harmful medium to be controlled.
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More importantly, he lacks the "sarcasm" tag at the end of his post when his tone makes him look completely serious.
Yes, the GGGP post left off this tag. Is that a requirement of sarcasm? Should "A Modest Proposal" be modded as "troll"? I say the GGGP should me modded funny. Or offtopic. But troll? Not so sure.
Not Aggressive enough (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty simple. They weren't aggressive enough and we wiped them out through brute force like we do everything else that's different.
Big shock.
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While this hypothesis makes some sense, there should be at least some archeological record of mixed Cromagnon and Neantherthal remains, along with some weapons to prove it, no?
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While this hypothesis makes some sense, there should be at least some archeological record of mixed Cromagnon and Neantherthal remains, along with some weapons to prove it, no?
Theoretically, but since both Neanderthal and Cromagnon had burial rituals and the battles would have probably been small-scale village vs village, it may require a lot of luck to actually find a site where the bodies were left where they died.
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so. I think we just outfucked them and out ate them. Fucking and eating are the secret to a species survival, not warfare.
There was a song back in the stone age (late 1960s:)
I'm a Neanderthal man
You're a Neanderthal girl
Let's make Neanderthal love
In this Neandrethal world
Obviously the Neanderthals neither ate enough or fucked enough. I have two children, a lady friend of mine has thirteen still alive (one drowned). She beats me at the extinction/evolution game thirteen to two, despite the fact that she's dumb as a box of rocks and I'm a nerd. Having sex beats being smart any day when it comes to passing your genes, which is what species survival is about.
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because Europe has a long history of peace and tranquility.
Africa currently lives in perfect communion with one another.
Russia is a paragon of pacifism.
And Asians are known for their brotherly love.
No brutal kidnappings and murder in Mexico.
And no death squads in South America.
Face it, humans are fundamentally flawed.
At least Antarctica is peaceful (but shrinking).
Re: (Score:2)
is this a trick question? Is there any that are less violent than homosapien? It is somewhat eletest to think that you are the most violent when we as species are not even close. We have the luxary of the ability to have pacifists among us. Some other species, every single member, has to be extremely violent just to survive.
Here is an exciting example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM [youtube.com]
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:5, Informative)
I can only think of a couple of other species that are as warlike as homo sapiens, and that's bacteria or virii. Many animals are territorial and will kill their own. But we have taken it to an entirely new level.
Humans - The Most Peaceful Creatures (Score:5, Interesting)
No, we really are not that violent, and we are getting more peaceful as time drags on. As a human, the chances of dying in war are very small. In fact, your chances of dying a violent death have been rapidly plummeting as time has moved on. Even our most horrific industrial wars kill vastly fewer people as a percentage of the population than simple day to day tribal conflict.
If you want to compare us against animals, we really don't rate that high. Society wide genocide is pretty common for insects. Other primates are at least as aggressive as us and suffer far more violent deaths. Many animals suffer pretty grievous loses to violent conflict over mating.
The only thing humans have going for them when it comes to the mass slaughter is that we have absolutely blasted our internal social limits on empathy. As a human, you are hard wired to live in a society no big than roughly 400 people. That is the limit of how many faces you can keep track of at a time, a pretty well documented limit of purely egalitarian human societies. Egalitarian tribal societies that get that big inevitably split. Through various methods of division of labor and hierarchies we have slowly been bumping up the size of a viable society. We are now to the point where a few hundred million is a perfectly reasonable size for a society.
France is a great example. This is a society of 60 million people. In general, they feel that they share a common bond and they feel empathy for each other. In general, they trust each other more than they trust others, and they think of each others needs over outsiders. True, one Frenchmen doesnâ(TM)t have as tight of a bond as his fellow country men as two men in a 100 unit tribal society, but it is close enough where they are a clearly distinct society. Just a couple of weeks ago 10 Frenchmen were killed in war (in Afghanistan). That is 0.000016% of the population. Despite this, it was a big deal in France. People acted like their social order had just taken not worthy losses and reacted accordingly.
Hell, take a step back and look at something more âoehorrificâ. 9/11 killed roughly 3000 people. That is 0.001% of the US population. That is 1 in every 100,000 people in the US died. We are talking about a miniscule number of people as compared to the society as a whole, yet despite this, Americans took the losses psychologically like family members had died.
My point is this; our murdering of fellow man has not increased. It has actually dropped, and dropped by a substantial amount. Further, compared to nearly all other species, as a human you are vastly less likely to suffer a violent death. The only thing that makes humans unique, is our empathy. Human empathy has grown and increased to the point where we care about millions and millions of people, rather than three or four around us. In our growing empathy, our old brains hardwired for societies less than 400 people have not kept up. As a result we think that the loss of 1 person in a tribe of 400 is less of a tragedy than the loss of 3000 people in a society of 300 million.
To put it more succinctly, your old monkey brain is fooling you. Humans are remarkably peaceful creature who get more peaceful with time, your old monkey brain just canâ(TM)t grasp that.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, spiders chow down on their own young, and ants wage massive war on one another. Sharks rip apart everything in sight, including each other, when there's lots of blood around. Apes and bears are notoriously territorial, like humans, so I wouldn't say that or being violent are particularly unique to humanity.
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:5, Insightful)
There are quite a few. We're just smart enough to build weapons, and we have the hands for it. Spiders, tasmanian devils, and blue jays aren't really capable of mining metal and forging weapons. Chimps sometimes organize to kill other chimps (and sometimes other neighboring apes).
Why do so many people think that nature is peaceful?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do so many people think that nature is peaceful?
Because we usually pacify it before taking a stroll and all the scary predators run away from us.
I can see why that could lead to a false impression.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For most people, "nature" means that beautiful park where they had that nice picnic last week. A more accurate example of nature is 5 hyenas ripping a lion apart. Probably not a good place for a picnic.
Debunk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
Re:Debunk? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
Furthermore, it's been a very long time since there was any scientific consensus about the "stupid Neanderthal" anyway. As another poster said, popular culture != science. The American Museum of Natural History has a now decades-old depiction of a Neanderthal in a suit & tie as part of an exhibit debunking the old popular-science depiction of Neanderthals as unsavoury brutes.
I recently read one of the more interesting ideas about how Neanderthals' brains differs from ours; this idea is due to Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind as described in Britain BC by Francis Pryor. Basically, his idea from interpreting Neanderthal art and tools is that they were no less intelligent but more "domain specific" than we are; they could excel at specialized tasks but fail to seize upon those very important cross-disciplinary insights involving multiple disparate fields of endeavour, which provide the basis for all our inventions.
In Britain BC, Pryor paints a picture of Neanderthals as a bunch of obsessive and overspecialized collectors. In reading about these somewhat Aspergian-sounding traits, I remember thinking that these guys would probably have made great coders! (Though maybe not project managers.)
Debunking is part of the normal scientific process (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Debunk? (Score:4, Informative)
[citation needed]
the great global swindle the 'documentary' has been debunked repeatedly, hell channel4 even got a bitchslap from OFCOM (equivilent of fcc). And its not like scientists are rich powerful men that can manipulate the media like the neocons
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
While scientists may not be "rich powerful men who can manipulate the media", many of the public voices for global warming al
It's so easy... (Score:2)
Since when did Geico start sponsoring science research?
D
Collectively stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
We tend to try to compare individual intelligence but this is probably meaningless. The real reason for our species' success is not that we're individually brilliant, but that we are very good at dividing up large problems to solve collectively. This works thanks to our social instincts: respect for authority, sense of fairness, competitiveness, group belonging, etc. etc. The whole gamut, the reason why we read and post to Slashdot, because we're a social species and bloody good at it.
Neanderthals, larger, individually smarter, were presumably generalists that could do more by themselves but could not compete as well a group of modern humans, when it came to hunting and perhaps fighting.
Of course I'm defining "intelligence" very much in the sense of "how humanity thinks and solves problems". It's easy to claim superiority when one is the species writing history.
We aren't getting smarter. Not really. (Score:4, Insightful)
While there have been great advances, really we've been dealing with the same level of intelligence throughout history.
What has changed us is the quality of life.
When you don't have to slay a beast, drag water 4 miles and fend off hordes of enemies, robbers and the plague you can get 'more' done.
I'm sure in history there were many brilliant people. Some 4000 years ago with the documents we have people still had the same ideas, the same drama.
The Steven Hawking of 1000 years ago would starve or be stuck in a mud shack thinking about how to eat and if his family would leave him in the jungle. That doesn't happen in the developed countries.
After visiting the slums of Rwanda I often asked myself what these people would do if they had access to clean water. The answer - the same thing the Romans, the Greek, the Europeans, the French and the Americans. Build, expand and innovate.
D~y
Re:We aren't getting smarter. Not really. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask yourself - why do we have clean water and they don't ? According to you there is no reason, as we all have the same innate intelligence. In the real world somebody has to organise the people to guarantee the clean water supply. And that's what's missing in places like Rwanda. They are too busy fighting amongst themselves to provide the basic necessities of life properly. So for them to progress to western levels they actually have to progress - it doesn't happen naturally by mere right of existence, or the existence of "intelligence".
And exporting better technology to these places might provide a short term boost, but is worthless if no-one is learning the basics to create their own technologies. Somebody has to be able to fix this technology or they are forever dependent on the west. At some stage thinking has to turn into doing.
I can imagine the scene in any western country if the government were to suddenly cease to exist. Things would just stop getting done. Sure the people with the knowledge would still exist, but the guy who fixes the water main isn't going to get paid for turning up every day. Pick your utility - the same situation applies. We would be back in the dark ages within 20 or 30 years, maybe excepting small pockets of rich people who could keep their lifestyle going. So like I said, back to the dark ages. And people still don't seem to realise that if you forget the mistakes of the past you get to repeat them.
All in all, intelligence is not the driving factor in "civilisation", cooperation is. And that cooperation usually has to be enforced, hence government. Your standard of living depends on the quality of the government, not how bright each individual is. Bad government uses guns to get its own way, so doesn't need a happy healthy population. Good government knows that it costs less to keep people happy than to fight them, and they can enjoy the benefits of that cooperation too.
Its not that they were dumber (Score:5, Funny)
is our childrens learning? (Score:2)
are our childrens stupider to neanderthals?
Whew! (Score:2, Interesting)
I still think white people are basically a cross between homo sapiens and neanderthals. Like, somewhere along the way, super strong neanderthal dudes came in, grabbed the homo sapiens women, and thus, white people were born. I think there's no other possible explanation for our horrific sense of fashion and penchant for shiny metal objects. I'm just about to tell my wife, that, I can't help my need for a quad motherboard and a 400 hp sportscar... I'm just genetically doomed because of my neanderthal gene
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you haven't seen the gangsta rap crowd walking around with their pants half way down their asses and 50 pounds of bling around their necks.
Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF? We've known for this for at least thirty years now; that the earliest modern humans had tool kits that did not vary in any great way from Neandertals. In fact, it's one of the great puzzles of evolution that modern human behavior did not arise until a long time after modern humans (anatomically, at least) had evolved. For chrissakes, just look at the Levant where modern humans and Neandertals shared the same territories for thousands of years, with little to tell them apart other than their skeletons.
Perhaps the brain continued evolving (Score:3, Interesting)
In human fossils we see the skull and hence can deduce the size of the brain , but we've no idea the structure the brain itself had in peoples from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Its perfectly possible that they may have looked the same as us on the outside but mentally weren't quite there because our brains continued evolving (which doesn't necessarily mean getting bigger) after our bodies had stopped.
Scientists retracted their statements after... (Score:3, Funny)
They reposted their original findings that Neanderthals are dumb.
So... the Neanderthals were Betamax? (Score:2, Funny)
I mean, I know we succeeded and everything, but doesn't it suck a little bit to be VHS?
Language made the difference (Score:5, Informative)
The conclusions of this study are not exactly news. It's been known for some time that early homo sapiens tools were no more advanced than Neanderthal tools. But at some point, there was an explosion of creativity and inventiveness in modern man that the Neanderthals could not equal, probably due to home sapiens having superior language skills and capabilities, and the ability to share and communicate ideas in ways the Neanderthals could not. Modern man then evolved superior cultures and technologies that surpassed the Neanderthals.
One on one, raised without the benefit of language and culture, a modern man would probably be no brighter, and in fact considerably physically weaker, than a Neanderthal. But collectively, Neanderthals were no match for modern men with their more advanced languages, societies, and weapons.
Re:Language made the difference (Score:4, Informative)
Actually my understanding is that it is a less strict dietary requirements that allowed humans to survive while the neanderthals died off during an ice age. The idea is that humans would eat anything (omnivores) - greens, roots, fish, insects, meat, eggs, whatever and that the neanderthals were quite strict carnivores. When the source of food becomes scarce, those who are more diverse eaters will have an advantage.
Re:Language made the difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, well then the real question, is what is REALLY so adventageous about higher motor skills, communication, etc.?
I should think the advantages of these things in out-competing and out-reproducing other species of primates would be apparent, but it is a valid question. A lot of evolutionary biologists and psychologists spend a lot of time theorizing about how particular behaviors would have construed an evolutionary advantage. Just as a good place to start, I would recommend The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. There are probably other texts that focus on the issue more specifically, but those happen to ones I've read that came to mind.
And why were they adventageous for primates and not adventageous for dinosaurs or hermit crabs?
You are still thinking of this in the wrong way -- your question assumes that because a trait like complex language is advantageous, it should have arisen in hermit crabs. That is just a rephrased way of thinking that evolution is driven by necessity, that somehow because the trait is good, every species ought to have "decided" to evolve it or something. Again, the traits arise by chance, and will be kept if they happen to be helpful. In dinosaurs and hermit crabs, they just didn't happen to arise.
You might just as well ask why humans didn't evolve a chitinous exoskeleton, or an abdomen shaped to inhabit the empty shell of a sea snail. Those things, after all, must be advantageous, or they would not have evolved in hermit crabs, right? It is the differences in which random mutations happen to come along and prove advantageous in different populations that makes those populations grow into different species.
Furthermore, of the random traits that arise, the advantages or disadvantages of any of them will be affected by which traits that species already has -- a gene that causes your saliva to dissolve clam shells is great if you are a starfish. If the same trait arose in a clam, however, it would likely not be passed on.
The point is that just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it will automatically evolve. Evolution doesn't say anything like that. It simply says that random mutations occur, and those that happen to make the mutant more likely to reproduce will be passed on to its decedents.
Ouch! (Score:3, Insightful)
...possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus...
Or a major contribution?
Zerg (Score:3, Funny)
FTA:
Mr Eren believes the most likely explanation is that Homo sapiens were simply able to breed more quickly.
"It's not that we were better than them," he said. "It's just that there were more of us."
Damn we're lame. We zerg-rushed them before they could advance in their tech tree and now they're extinct. :(
Re:Developing stone tools... (Score:5, Interesting)
I see an error on thier logic.
Re:Developing stone tools... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not really analogous at all. Sticks may very well be the optimum way of getting insects out of nests. But in the case of more advanced tool kits, there are certainly better kinds of tools for hunting and dismembering. The difference between the Paleolithic and Neolithic tool kits is substantial. The later stone tool kits used by modern humans included barbed fish hooks, spearheads and the like, innovations that simply did not exist among bipedal hominids. More importantly, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that a tool kit might hang around during the Paleolithic with little or no change, the Neolithic saw radical innovations at a relatively fast pace.
Re:Developing stone tools... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with this theory is that prior to around 70k years ago (in some locales, possibly earlier), there's little evidence of any fundamental differences in social behavior. Of course, for bother Neandertals and moderns, we only have their remains, some tools, a few burials and the like to judge by, but when we compare these to sites that we know positively are from modern humans (both anatomically and behaviorally), the differences are clear. Prior to the great leap forward in whatever it was that made modern humans human in the way we are, there just didn't seem to be the same capacity for innovation, symbolic thinking, preplanning and culture. Neandertals and anatomically modern humans before this key evolutionary step showed only the rudiments of those key behaviors we find in every extant human population, whether Khoisan or Swedish, Australian Aborigine or Japanese Anu.
I suspect that the major innovation was some neural rewiring that was responsible for the rise of fully modern languages. I have little doubt that proto-languages had been around for a good chunk of Homo's history (maybe even earlier, and there's a good deal of evidence that other Hominidae like chimps and gorillas possess some proto-linguistic abilities), a fully evolved language is another entirely.
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, nothing in science is ever entirely conclusive -- everything is tentative.
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
what do non-athiests consider neanderthals?
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the end result of a Politically Correct(tm) education, folks. Years of considering the strong and the weak as somehow magically "equal", and we arrive at this as the pinnacle (as in, highest point before we plunge off the evolutionary cliff) of Western culture.
I have to admit, though, that idea does logically derive from the false premise that we all have some innate equality and value. Still doesn't make it true,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the notion of a superior human species touched by God. You kind of prove my point.
Hmmmmm. I sometimes wonder how some people would react to a stronger species if it actually came along. That's nothing like what was being implied as the strong and weak argument was at the heart of it (just what is it that made us s
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No. It's the same old meaningless bullshit claptrap that people masquerade on Slashdot as 'scientific discussion'. But, whatever. Yer, we know it's a case of strong versus the weak. However, the scientific discussion about our superior place on the planet revolves around just what it was that enabled us to be superior and be stronger, and on this evidence, it wasn't our outright intelligence.