What do we know about Neanderthal?

That all westerners are partial descendants of them.

Actually europeans and asians are

From my readings. They were a species that coexisted with humans. Eventually they bred with us,and their species went extinct.

They required more protein than us,so they hunted large animals like mastodons. Hunting these bigger animals made for more injuries and deaths. When the ice age hit,it killed off many large plant eaters. So their food sources were reduced. What animals were around were also being hunter by humans. Humans had better tactics,weapons, and it’s speculated that the humans may have killed neanderthals as they were competition.

There are many National Geographic articles on them ,with illustrations of how they looked and may have lived.

I’m 2.8% Neandertal.

23&me says I’m 3.2% I don’t have the best faith in their numbers though

I’m 2.8% Neandertal.

So that’s where the pointy ears come from!

So. So far we’ve got an average of 3%. Are all 3 who revealed their percentage Caucasians?

Are the genes more prevalent in certain races?

Only two of us revealed. I’m roughly 50% German and the rest is mostly
Irish, Welsh and English by where my grandparents and great grand parents are from.

23&me data:
European 99.8%
Northwestern European 91.7%
British & Irish 24.5%
French & German 16.9%
Scandinavian 1.2%
Broadly Northwestern European 49.0%
Southern European 2.0%
Italian 1.1%

Neanderthal genes are more or less isolated to europeans and asians.

Anyone who disputes that Homo sapiens interbred with Homo neanderthalensis need only look at Ron Perlman.

23andme pegged me at ~4% Neanderthal, 90th percentile. Not my proudest stat, lol. And yeah, I’m Caucasian.

I knew a guy in high school that look like a neanderthal. He was a intelligent but he had a sloping forehead and an ape-like rostrum jaw. I always wondered if was closely related to neanderthals. His mother and sister has similar head features.

@Darth_Algar Ron Perlman actually played a very credible Neanderthal in cult movie Quest for Fire.

@MrGrimm888 So their food sources were reduced. What animals were around were also being hunter by humans. Humans had better tactics,weapons, and it’s speculated that the humans may have killed neanderthals as they were competition.

Yes, the most likely explanation for their disapearance is competition with Homo sapiens. Sapiens may also have hunted Neandertal for food.

Interestingly, most of the interbreeding seems to have happened before sapiens forays into Europe and Asia, at a time when the two species met and cohabited in the Levant, nowaday Israel.

I wonder whether the Nephelim of Genesis—giant sons of gods and women—were a remembrance of Neandertal.

That he’s bring sworn in as leader of the free world in 16 days.

That for about 500 generations the Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens coexisted.

That, due to the skeletal construction of the Neanderthal neck and shoulders and large upper body muscle mass, it is doubtful that the Neanderthal could look upwards higher than the horizon, use a sling effectively, throw a stone or spear over-hand effectively, or pull back the thong on a bow far enough and aim it accurately enough for it to be effective at long distances..

That the Neanderthal clan and tribal groups were much larger and complex than we formerly believed.

That their physical limitations and not the mental limitations of the Neanderthal may have been the cause of their demise. It is probable that Homo Sapiens figured out that attacking the powerful Neanderthal from above at distance using stones, spears, bows and arrows was safer and more effective than face-to-face hand-to-hand combat in the competition for food and tribal securty.

@Darth_Algar Or Carly Simon.

Carly Simon
Neanderthal Female

Or this guy

Side Note: I find it interesting that anabolic steroids bring out Neanderthal features in Homo Sapiens.

Most of what I read suggests we simply out bred them and there is no real evidence that we killed them. Of course, we’ll never really know.

^^What do you mean by “out bred” them?

@Darth_Algar That, due to the skeletal construction of the Neanderthal neck and shoulders and large upper body muscle mass, it is doubtful that the Neanderthal could look upwards higher than the horizon, use a sling effectively, throw a stone or spear over-hand effectively, or pull back the thong on a bow far enough and aim it accurately enough for it to be effective at long distances.

I agree that better missiles (not the bow that wasn’t invented yet but the spear-thrower) and agility must have been key to sapiens’ success, given Neandertal’s advantage in body strength. Not sure what the reason for sapiens having the throwers and neandertal not. Anatomy could be overcome. The reason could have been purely about technological advance. Like how Europeans killed Amerindians.

I feel like I remember reading the homo sapiens had more distance weapons. Neanderthals just had spears.

Technology can make all the difference. It’s been a proven advantage in countless wars,and battles.

That he invented the smiley.

It would be interesting if they were still a separate species today. Working and living along side of us. I wonder how that world would be.

There could be parallel universes like that, or where they killed us off….

@olivier5 New archeological evidence indicates that the bow and arrow existed 65,000 years ago. The Neanderthal didn’t die off until aproximately 40,000 years ago.

The atlatl requires an over-arm throw movement which most forensice anthropologists believe the Neanderthal was incapable of accomplishing with any strength or accuracy because of their shoulder structure and the fact that they were muscle bound.

The Neanderthal survive by trapping animals using teamwork and probably fire. They more than likely surrounded there prey by using large hunting parties, then when they were close enough, they would use weaponry appropriate for their unique ergodynamics and there powerful strength to bring it down.

@MrGrimm888 Cavemen among us was the premise of that TV show a while back that was spun off from the characters from the insurance commercial.

I read somewhere that a study of Neanderthal tools showed very little change over a long period of time, which contrasts with the gradual refinement seen in tools by Homo Sapiens.

^^Edit Last Post: forensic, their, their, their. Bloody hell, I’m going senile.

@Espiritus_Corvus exactly that, we were more successful in competing for resources, had more children and their numbers simply dwindled. It’s like when any invasive species out competes native ones.

I think it was one of the “walking with cavemen” series that did a spot on neanderthal tools
They showed the many steps it took to make a simple axe and it was crazy how complex it was. They knew how but were unable to really replicate what the neanderthals did.Their tools were essentially “perfect” for their intended job. In a way that explains why their tools remained unchanged for so long.

Found it

It would be interesting if they were still a separate species today. Working and living along side of us. I wonder how that world would be.

We do badly enough as a single species.

Could be an explanation of what happened to the neanderthals.

@Espiritus_Corvus going senile…
Their, they’re, there…It’s allriot, ole man!

The dyslexic people of Holland are, unsurprisingly, direct descendants.

@MrGrimm888 It would be interesting if they were still a separate species today. Working and living along side of us. I wonder how that world would be.

Such a Lord of the Ring world once existed. They’ve even found its hobbit.

@Espiritus_Corvus New archeological evidence indicates that the bow and arrow existed 65,000 years ago. The Neanderthal didn’t die off until aproximately 40,000 years ago.

A tribe may have invented the bow 60k.yr ago in South Africa, but that doesn’t mean the guys invading Europe and Asia only a few k.yr later necessarily knewn of this new invention half a world away.

@olivier5 You’re right, it doesn’t mean that. But it had 25,000 years to get there. The distance between Capetown and Vienna is a 12,430km. A healthy adult can cover that waliking with full packs in 1.14 years at an average of 30km/day in optimum conditions. Accounting for the tectonic pace of human migration, The possibility that a revolutionary technology could cover the same distance in, say, 10,000 years isn’t unreasonable, in my opinion.

The prolific English author, historian, biology teacher, political commentator, journalist, science and science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, usually was able to access library archives and museum basements better than most less privileged people in order to mine factual fodder for his stories.

In 1921, he wrote a short story about the Neanderthal called the Grisly Folk. The story describes the extent the sciences knew about the species at the time. It is interesting to compare what we know today with what we knew 96 years ago. It’s only 13 pages long.

The Grisly Folk (1921) by H. G. Wells, free from Project Gutenberg.

I’ll read that. The French equivalent would be J.-H. Rosny aîné‘s Guerre du feu, the 1911 book which the Quest for Fire movie is based on.

Wikisource

@Espiritus_Corvus

Or Magnus Carlsen.

If I recall correctly, it’s believed that Neanderthals actually had larger brains than we do, but their vocal apparatus never developed to the level that ours did. It’s thought that that limited their ability to develop complex language and thus to convey complex ideas. That may partially explain why we thrived while they died out.

That’s one speculation anyway.

Neanderthals split from humans between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. They are our closest extinct human relative and they used sophisticated tools, controlled fire, lived in shelters and wore clothing. They also made symbolic or ornamental objects and there is evidence they buried their dead.

Over just a few thousand years after modern humans moved into Europe, Neanderthal numbers dwindled to the point of extinction. All traces of Neanderthals disappeared by about 40,000 years ago. The most recently dated Neanderthal fossils come from Western Europe, which was likely where the last population of this early human species existed.

@Espiritus_Corvus I think the neolithic revolution spread into Europe at a speed of about 1 mile per year. So yes it’s possible but until someone finds similar arrow heads in European Aurignacian, it remains a hypothesis.

On the invention of the bow.

Inventions don’t have to spread necessarily. Like minded thinking has been evident in many cases of technology.

Take pyramids for example. The design was used by multiple civilizations that had no communication. The building style is simple. Use a large base to support slightly smaller levels and so on,to safely make a large/tall structure. This technology was not passed from civilization to civilization (in some cases.) The Mayans and Egyptians both made use of the design and obviously had never interacted .

Same as with boats, and paddles , and ways to make fire etc.

There is an island off the coast of India that has been inhabited by a aggressive tribe of people who appear to be living on stone age technology. Every time someone has attempted to contact them,the natives attack them. One man was hit with a 4ft long arrow. The Indian government finally realized the futility of attempting to talk to them, so they set up a 3 mile forbidden zone around the island. Little if anything is known about them. The large island has a beach but is otherwise covered by thick jungle, so not even satellite images can reveal any details of their lives. Nobody knows how they got the bow technology, or when. Or whatever other technologies they have for that matter. They just know that approaching them isn’t an option.

@MrGrimm888 civilizations that had no communication…

I would add that we know of

^Yeah…... It was HIGHLY unlikely.

When my ex first got her smart phone, about 6 years ago, I came up with an idea to make an app that could be used to tune instruments. Turned out, the app was already invented…

I’ve never spoken to , or known the app’s inventor.

When people have a similar knowledge of how things work, they come up with similar ideas… Just seems to be the way it is….

The human race likes to believe they are on a constant move forward. The truth is, we make constant changes, but not all of them are improvements. Also, as we move through time, we leave things behind. Some of what we cast off is no longer needed, but sometimes people get so motivated by change, and belief in progress, we drop valuable things.
Maybe there was communication of a sort we just don’t know about now.

I want to thank you guys for all your links above. I learned a lot yesterday. I became interested again in Neanderthals a few months ago for the first time since mandatory readings in high school. This has been a pleasurable thread.

The bow was likely invented several times.

The Irish didn’t have the bow until the Vikings brought it in the 9th century, so some time between the Neanderthal inventing it and the migration of mainland Europeans to Ireland from modern-day Basque, it was lost to them.

^I found that hard to believe, so I poked around a little bit on the web.
This author says that the Irish had the bow and arrow during the bronze age, but seem to have stopped using it until the Vikings reintroduced it. I still find it surprising, since it remained in use in Britain during that time. Also, this author says that Irish used a norse loan-word for the bow, but this other author they had their own word for it.

Jeez-o-Pete, I’m rabbit-holing early today.

^If that second link isn’t working, try www.libraryireland.com/ and click on

Social History > A Smaller Social History of Ireland (1906) [under Books] > Chapter III: Warfare, Section: Arms, Offensive and Defensive

Zizzou – the British and Irish were not on friendly terms before the Viking age… Or indeed long after.

^Didn’t say they were. The Irish were not on friendly terms with the Vikings, either, but that didn’t stop the Irish from relearning archery from the Vikings. Irish raiders attacking Britain before the Viking invasions would presumably have been shot at. The Irish must have at least known of the existence of bows and arrows before the Vikings came, which raises the question of why archery was lost for so long.

One need only to study early Irish warfare.

The Vikings came in the eighth century, got fought off, came back 100 years later, and ultimately settled and became Irish. The Irish didn’t start trading and accepting the bow until after the permanent settlements were established.

The Irish were proud warriors, who fought headlong into battle. Yes, they had chariots, but they were more used for transportation TO battle rather than something to fight from. They may have viewed ranged weapons as cowardly.

The british isles are filled with viking haplogroups. Basically the melting pot of europe.

@Seek

Indeed. The, shall we say, collective psychology of a group often plays just as large a role in how they fight as the technology available to them does.

^Absolutely @Darth_Algar .

Thank you for all the interesting material.

@Seek The bow was likely invented several times.

Yes. In Europe the first known arrow heads (microliths) are from 35,000 years ago and the first preserved bows (of an already well-developed design) date from 9000 bc, in Denmark.

@Espiritus_Corvus I read the Grizly Folk. It’s gripping, although we know now more than Wells did of course. Eg that there was an initial period circa 60,000–50,000 yr ago when the two species met in the Levant, during which male neanderthals were mating (raping?) female sapiens somewhat frequently. (no evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans.[wiki] This suggests that we don’t have female neanderthal ancestors, only or mainly males ones)

Then there was a second period (c. 50–40,000 yr ago) during which interbreeding seems to stop, and sapiens starts to invade Europe.

The archeological record looks like an arm race, paleolithic style. 50,000 years ago, a marked increase in the diversity of artifacts, is noticeable in north Africa, including projectile points, engraving tools, knife blades, and drilling and piercing tools. These new tools appear rapidely, and are strongly associated in the archeological record with Homo sapiens. These thechnologies likely gave Homo sapiens a strong competitive edge against heavy Mousterian weapons of Neanderthal. E.g., the combination of spearthrowers and lighter missiles gave our ancestors a weapon system that was lighter, easier to carry, easier to produce in large quantities, and with a similar or better range and precision than javelins, the arm of choice of Neanderthal.

The latter’s response was the “chatelperronian”, a technology to produce many blades from a core, one after the other, including some rather small. As if they suddenly needed many more small missiles. Chatelperronian is dated c. 45–40,000 yr ago. It’s the last technology attributed to neanderthal.

Interestingly, on some sites the sapiens and neandertalian technologies (Aurignacian/Châtelperronian) are “inter-stratified”: one layer x, one layer y, one layer x, one layer y etc.

Ok so poor spelling aside (is it neardertHal or neandertal anyway?), if the above chronology is correct, something happened circa 50,000 years ago that tipped the balance of power in our favor and spelled the doom of neanderthal. Where does this “marked increase in the diversity of artifacts noticeable in north Africa” comes from? How does prehistory accelerate?

This shift is called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. It corresponds to the divide between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic.

It happens after a period of seeming technological stagnation for Homo sapiens, who appeared circa -190,000 in Africa. That may be an artifact, an illusion, because of a lack of digs and fossiles from much of Africa… Maybe the African sapiens were progressively honing their technologies, unbeknown to us.

Whatever the case, there was also a severe demographic bottleneck 20,000 yr before the upper paleolithic “revolution”. The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, reducing the total human population to c. 15,000 individuals. The theory is based on geological evidence for sudden climate change, volcanic winter like. There’s also genetic evidence of such a demographic bottleneck. All present-day humans trace their male line to a single male (Y-chromosomal Adam) dated at 60,000 to 90,000 years ago.

By -50,000, the climate improved in North Africa. The Mousterian Pluvial was an extended wet and rainy period in the climate history of North Africa. It began around 50,000 years ago, lasted 20,000 years, ending around 30,000 ago (i.e. the precise period during which Homo sapiens gets out of Africa and into Europe).

What is now the Sahara desert supported typical African wildlife of grassland and woodland environments: herbivores from gazelle to giraffe to ostrich, predators from lion to jackal, hippopotamus and crocodile. These conditions would have logically resulted in a significant population increase among Homo sapiens in Northern Africa. That can help explain why sapiens could beat back neanderthal after 50,000: strength in numbers. But it does NOT explain the seeming technological revolution that occured 50,000 yr ago.

The development of more sophisticated tools circa -50,000, for the first time constructed out of more than one material (e.g. bone or antler) and sortable into different categories of functions, is often taken as proof for the presence of behavioral modernity and fully developed language, assumed to be necessary for the teaching of the processes of manufacture to offsprings.

In other words, according to this theory, some fruit of knowledge was eaten by our African ancestors some 50,000 years ago, the fruit of symbolic language, ergo fuller self-consciousness, learning faster, etc.

And that would be why we ended up getting out of our African eden to beat the s..t out of our European cousins.

^^The word in it’s original German is Neandertal, after the place where they first found the original skelatal remains in the Neandertal Valley in Germany. So, it’s no surprise that the French would use the original spelling as they live right next door. It was Anglicized to Neanderthal for reasons which are unclear to me. Possibly that is how it was spelled on English maps denoting the Neandertal Valley.

The real story of the Garden of Eden is this: Home Sapiens and Neanderthal man lived quite happily and peacefully together until one day they came across an apple tree with a single fruit dangling from a branch. They couldn’t agree on who should get the apple so they fought and Homo Sapiens triumphed..

^^LOL. Makes more sense than the Biblical story. It is often said that the Sicilian Mafia originated over an argument of chickens or sheep or something like that.