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Nessus posted:There seem to be a considerable number of nations and ethnic groups in the current day, despite advances in military technology. Shouldn’t we be down to one, or a handful widely separated, if this is such an incredibly likely outcome of the presence of other groups? There's also insane amounts of conflict that has only somewhat lessened because we now live under the umbrella of total extinction - which we still might trigger. Looking at the geopolitical situation over the last 100 years shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that humans are very good at cooperating across [x] lines.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:56
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two fish posted:There's no more Neanderthals or Denisovans or any of the others, so what did we do to them? The best answer is we don't know, we don't have enough evidence to say yet (and maybe we never will). It's gonna be some combination of intermarriage, higher birth rates, greater susceptibility to disease, climate factors, and violence, but the proportions of which are still an ongoing area of research among experts. The one thing we can say for sure is that they weren't wiped out, they were instead subsumed into modern Homo Sapiens. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 16:58
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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People like to fixate on all the terrible things people do and project those backwards out of pessimism and a very Hobbesian conception of "survival of the fittest", but humans are defined by our social behavior and that, first and foremost, means bonds and communites. To have competition between groups, those groups first have to exist. Certainly you can view that through a cynical lens as being purely about survival if you want, but that's still a projection of meaning onto behavior, and one that certainly doesn't match up with most people's phenomenological experience of social ties. One of my favorite things in the world is the story of the Neanderthal Shanidar 1, which Stefan Milo has an excellent video on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urlnWsUczd4 This person repeatedly suffered grevious, debilitating injuries that likely would have left them unable to take care of themself or contribute to the survival of their group, and yet they survived into old age because they were cared for. They were valued. Maybe they were able to contribute useful knowledge to the group or look after children, maybe not. What's certain is that precious time and resources were invested in their continued survival. Cases like this might be viewed as some kind of "misapplication" of the social bonds that hold us together and keep us alive (assuming that they were in fact unable to contribute to the survival of the group, which is of course not a given), but it's baked into our evolutionary strategy and is key to our wild success as a species. It's just as fundamental to us as our capacity for harm and cruelty, if not more so. If your goal is actually to understand the history of humans and our cousins, then this can't be swept aside.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:59
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two fish posted:There's no more Neanderthals or Denisovans or any of the others, so what did we do to them? Likely nothing in particular. Our species is probably smarter than any of the other humans and was more adaptable, which was a big deal given how much massive environmental change the planet went through in the late Pleistoscene. There may have been indirect causes as well--there's a large scale extinction event at the end of the Pleistoscene which seems to correlate with homo sapiens showing up, which could have denied food to other species. But we don't know and it's likely there is no evidence around that will ever give a definitive answer.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:02
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zoux posted:There's also insane amounts of conflict that has only somewhat lessened because we now live under the umbrella of total extinction - which we still might trigger. Looking at the geopolitical situation over the last 100 years shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that humans are very good at cooperating across [x] lines. The fact that that is POSSIBLE is a testament to cooperative behavior.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:06
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Neanderthals in particular also seem to have always had low population numbers for some reason. And all this isn't to say there was no violence. Premodern societies were absurdly violent compared to us. It's just not thought that homo sapiens was out mass murdering other humans to become the only species or whatever.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:09
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Grand Fromage posted:Neanderthals in particular also seem to have always had low population numbers for some reason.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:13
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One serial killer neanderthal wiped out his entire race, then decided to hibernate for a few thousand years while waiting to get a shiny rock for his cool mask.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:25
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Ancient humans probably thought that the neighbouring community of Neanderthals were just a little weird for reasons they couldn't quite explain. They'd be Shelbyville, basically.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:27
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They probably couldn't take all the shrill counting and had to do something.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:28
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Eldoop posted:I think it's important to remember that these things come out of very particular historical contexts, they're not just random products of human thought. The creation of the idea of race was (at least in part) driven by the need to justify various horrible things that were being done by Europeans in the name of acquiring greater money and power. Certainly people have done plenty of horrible things to each other throughout history, but those are also always inseparable from the social and historical situations they happened in. and, to put a finer point on it, the idea that those horrible things needed to be justified as anything more than "well we're strong, and they're not, its great to be me and sucks to be them".
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Aug 3, 2023 17:34
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I remember reading (iirc in The Making of the Middle Sea) that modern humans and Neanderthals seem to have shared a fairly static border around the Levant for a very long time -- like, many tens of thousands of years. Then, when humans finally broke through that, we swept through Europe (with the North Africa -> Iberia crossing being notably unutilized) in a much shorter timespan. I think the theory went that we co-adapted with these particular populations of neanderthals in the Levant and they could compete with us, but after that border group things were a lot more lopsided.
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Aug 3, 2023 19:11
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Do we know enough about early human behavior to be able to reconstruct how intermarriage would have gone? Like, would it have been more in the sense of a mixed community of humans and Neanderthals, or more in the sense of singular individuals joining another community? How about hybrids, do we have any remains of them that they were able to sequence DNA from?
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Aug 3, 2023 19:11
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Even with humans in early historic times wasn't it normally the latter? You don't usually get true "mixed" communities, it's either multiple discrete communities in close proximity, or occasional individuals exchanging.
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Aug 3, 2023 19:21
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Homo erectus was around for millions of years and overlapped with all of the other hominids during that time
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Aug 3, 2023 19:22
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SlothfulCobra posted:I have to wonder sometimes at how much regular contact there was between distant Polynesian islands. We definitely know that they sailed and settled very far distances, but I don't see how you could really get that rolling without explorers returning after their long journeys to let people know it's safe and they're not just diving out into the void. There was plenty of inter-island communication. One Cook's first expedition he encountered a trained navigator named Tupaia, who provided a list of every settled island in the area and ended up drawing a map of them as well. This map ended up looking really weird, but as explained on this site, he simply didn't draw it on a cartesian plane. https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/iaa-alc/tupaias-map Polynesia itself is just the furthest section of the Pacific where these island-dwelling people lived. The distances were longest here, but they were settled by inveterate sailors, who had populated the denser archipelagos of Micronesia and Macronesia for thousands of years before expanding to Polynesia. There were places in Polynesia where the population stopped maintaining the ability to navigate long distances, but these were the very large and farflung island chains of New Zealand or Hawaii. Here, the settlers had so many resources that they didn't need to sail back to Polynesia, and so lost contact over time as would-be navigators became agriculturalists.
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Aug 3, 2023 19:25
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Ancient warfare gets very nasty, and there's plenty of incidents that would count as genocides by modern standards, although it can be hard to draw direct parallels. It's not really possible for them to do something like sorting out all the people in their dominion by cultural/ethnic background in order to procedurally exterminate one of the groups, but it was feasible to burn down an entire village or city and then kill or enslave all its denizens. I'm not really sure what happens to the people who successfully flee the destruction, how hard it was for them to find another settlement that would take them or whether they could find an empty spot to try to start anew. It's not hard to imagine them just starving in the wilderness, but some areas can be more forgiving for scavengers with nothing than others.
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Aug 3, 2023 19:37
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SlothfulCobra posted:Ancient warfare gets very nasty, and there's plenty of incidents that would count as genocides by modern standards, although it can be hard to draw direct parallels. It's not really possible for them to do something like sorting out all the people in their dominion by cultural/ethnic background in order to procedurally exterminate one of the groups, but it was feasible to burn down an entire village or city and then kill or enslave all its denizens. Tacitus has a line about what happened to such a displaced group in first-century Germany, the Ampsivarii, who were desperate enough to have settled on land that the Rhine army considered its own. quote:Expelled from their ground, they sought refuge with the Chatti, then with the Cherusci; and, after a long pilgrimage in which they were treated in turn as guests, as beggars, and as enemies, their younger men found death on a foreign soil, and those below fighting age were portioned out as booty. Context in Annals XIII.53-56. No source cited of course, but may have been telling the truth about death on a foreign soil: a palatine auxilia called the Ampsivarii is listed among the army units for Gaul in the Notitia Dignitatum centuries later.
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Aug 3, 2023 20:04
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Iirc modern humans have genetic evidence for admixture with Neanderthals, denisovians, and other currently unidentified or unknown archaic humans
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Aug 3, 2023 20:08
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two fish posted:How about hybrids, do we have any remains of them that they were able to sequence DNA from? Sure--turn off your monitor. I know what you mean, like a 50/50 child. No, they existed but we don't have any. Ancient human remains are hard to find, that would be hitting the jackpot.
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Aug 3, 2023 20:41
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I know that speciation is a tricky thing but wouldn't the fact that early hominids were interbreeding evidence that they were barely separate species, if at all?
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Aug 3, 2023 20:43
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Well they (we) are all humans.
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Aug 3, 2023 20:44
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zoux posted:I know that speciation is a tricky thing but wouldn't the fact that early hominids were interbreeding evidence that they were barely separate species, if at all? It's just another example of the fact that "species" is a construct we force on the world to make biology more convenient to study. The different hominins are pretty distinct from one another--if you saw a Neanderthal walking around today you'd know.
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Aug 3, 2023 20:47
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I don’t know if you would immediately notice a Neanderthal with modern clothes and hair etc. maybe the heavy brow H. Erectus definitely
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Aug 3, 2023 20:49
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Grand Fromage posted:if you saw a Neanderthal walking around today you'd know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTkF8tomobA&t=26s
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Aug 3, 2023 20:49
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Same. Also found this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%C8%99tera_cu_Oase#Oase_1 Who had a Neanderthal ancestor 4-6 generations back. That's the closest we've found.
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Aug 3, 2023 20:54
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Eldoop posted:There was plenty of time where multiple hominin species were around and having varying amounts of contact, including many instances of interbreeding between humans and other hominins. Afaik most everyone living today has some amount of Neanderthal ancestry, at least outside of Africa (I think Africans generally also have some, just not as much?). I'm not sure what specific evidence we do or don't have for violence between our species, but presumably contact also went badly sometimes. Yep. And the funniest thing is how opposite this is to what early 20th-century race "science" wanted to believe. The real Neanderthals are the white people.
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Aug 3, 2023 21:15
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Yep. And the funniest thing is how opposite this is to what early 20th-century race "science" wanted to believe. But the real truth is found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HwmO_GZfzI
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Aug 3, 2023 21:31
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Koramei posted:I remember reading (iirc in The Making of the Middle Sea) that modern humans and Neanderthals seem to have shared a fairly static border around the Levant for a very long time -- like, many tens of thousands of years. Then, when humans finally broke through that, we swept through Europe (with the North Africa -> Iberia crossing being notably unutilized) in a much shorter timespan. I think the theory went that we co-adapted with these particular populations of neanderthals in the Levant and they could compete with us, but after that border group things were a lot more lopsided. This might be an unintended implication from a quick summary, but the idea of humans "breaking through" a border that Neanderthals had previously been somehow preventing them from crossing, strikes me as absurd. These aren't state level societies, and neither group would have had the organizational ability to stop the other from trying to cross such a huge border. I could certainly see that pattern of population distribution in response to environmental changes of various sorts on either side though, or even just a networks argument that some humans travelled into Europe, liked what they saw, and it inspired a much larger migration thereafter. e: VVV yeah that makes sense PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 21:38
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There was definitely no implied agency on the part of the "breaking through" in the original passage from the book, although I can see how what I wrote reads that way. The area involved was still relatively vast, not a simple border, and so it would be difficult for any group of modern humans to walk through while competing for food sources with the resident neanderthals, who were much better adapted against modern humans. I'd have to find the passage to remember all the details.
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Aug 3, 2023 21:52
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zoux posted:I know that speciation is a tricky thing but wouldn't the fact that early hominids were interbreeding evidence that they were barely separate species, if at all? A lot of animal species end up being able to interbreed. Scientists have the idea that boundary between species should be that there can't be viable offspring, but they can't really exhaustively test that, and sometimes it happens and debating on whether to de-specify those species is going to be a very technical argument very far away from ground level in the depths of academia. Taxonomy isn't a very exciting field. What's relevant about those extinct relative species is that while they may have had connections with proper humans, they also had traits that we do not observe in the currently existing human species.
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Aug 3, 2023 22:37
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zoux posted:Looking at the geopolitical situation over the last 100 years shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that humans are very good at cooperating across [x] lines. I don’t think that’s true. It’s just that groups cooperating across lines still compete with other groups cooperating across lines. We are extremely good at cooperating but that just doesn’t seem to reduce competition.
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Aug 4, 2023 00:06
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SlothfulCobra posted:A lot of animal species end up being able to interbreed. Scientists have the idea that boundary between species should be that there can't be viable offspring, but they can't really exhaustively test that, and sometimes it happens and debating on whether to de-specify those species is going to be a very technical argument very far away from ground level in the depths of academia. Taxonomy isn't a very exciting field. I like the definition of species Darwin gives in Natural Selection: "In the following pages I mean by species, those collections of individuals, which have commonly been so designated by naturalists."
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Aug 4, 2023 00:30
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Grand Fromage posted:Sure--turn off your monitor. We actually have found fossils of people that were pretty clearly hybrids of neanderthal and modern humans! This is probably the most famous example, but there are others too. The thing to remember about Neanderthals/Denisovans, is that they probably didn't actually look or act that different from us. If you took a Neanderthal and put them in a t-shirt and dropped them in Times Square, they wouldn't have looked out of place. The differences are apparent if you're looking at skeletons and know what to look out for, but really aren't that huge. I suspect that interactions between groups of Neanderthals and modern humans went the same ways as interactions between different humans always go: they sometimes fought, they sometimes traded, they sometimes merged wholesale. And we know Neanderthals weren't wiped out, they have more descendants now than ever!
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Aug 4, 2023 03:56
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Yeah I am just not on board with the assumption that homo sapiens would be dramatically more cooperative with each other than they would be with homo neanderthalensis. Like I don't doubt that there were instances of HS killing HN (and vice versa!), but it feels really counterintuitive to me to assume that HS would really go out of their way to make sure they were killing HN all the time in a way totally distinct from killing HS. It doesn't really make sense to me with how intergroup conflict has worked in the historical record, where really organized violence along distinct phenotypical lines requires REALLY strong top-down organization, and it doesn't make sense to me with the available archaeology we have of HN (including, importantly, the genetic evidence that European and Asian HS descendants have significant, obvious HN genes).Grand Fromage posted:Neanderthals in particular also seem to have always had low population numbers for some reason. I'll be honest that this is, to me, the simplest explanation for why we talk about people today being like 1% neanderthal and not like 50% neanderthal. Its not that HN were dumber or HS were out there being really organized killers, its that HN was either more disease susceptible, less nutritionally efficient, or (most likely IMO) reproduced at a slower rate (lengthier gestation, more prone to death in childbirth, lower baseline fertility, who knows) than most HS. I think the fact that HN ranges tended to be narrower, less dense, and less dynamic to me points to them just not growing as fast at the population scale as HS.
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Aug 4, 2023 04:17
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Eldoop posted:If every Roman was just naturally baying for Carthaginian blood, Cato the Elder wouldn't have ended all his speeches with calls for Carthage's destruction because it would've just been a given, rather than a goal that had to be pushed forward constantly. Also there is a clear and important difference there between 'Carthage must be destroyed' and 'All Carthaginians must be destroyed'.
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Aug 4, 2023 15:43
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At what point did they stop being Phoenician and start being Carthaginian? Also, when Carthage gets destroyed, do the diaspora return to being traveling Phoenicians again? When we do we stop caring about Phoenicians at all?
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Aug 4, 2023 15:46
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They probably remain culturally Carthaginian. I remind you that 'Romans' existed for a millennium after the fall of Rome. Carthage is a city but it's a city at the heart of an extended state which shares its identity but with many people living outside of it, just like Rome-the-city rules Italy and other areas. A theoretical Rome-genocides-the-Carthaginians involves a lot more than just sacking the capital.
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Aug 4, 2023 16:11
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When I asked that question I had thought for some reason that Carthage was shorter lived than it was. I figure by 900BCE or so they were very distinct from their Phoenician roots.
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feedmegin posted:They probably remain culturally Carthaginian. I remind you that 'Romans' existed for a millennium after the fall of Rome. Carthage is a city but it's a city at the heart of an extended state which shares its identity but with many people living outside of it, just like Rome-the-city rules Italy and other areas. A theoretical Rome-genocides-the-Carthaginians involves a lot more than just sacking the capital. Can't keep a good location down. From wikipedia... Nearly a century after the fall of Carthage, a new "Roman Carthage" was built on the same site by Julius Caesar between 49 and 44 BC. It soon became the center of the province of Africa, which was a major breadbasket of the Roman Empire and one of its wealthiest provinces. By the first century, Carthago had grown to be the second-largest city in the western Roman Empire, with a peak population of 500,000. Punic language, identity, and culture persisted in Rome for several centuries. Two Roman emperors in the third century, Septimius Severus and his son and successor Caracalla, were of Punic descent. In the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo, himself of Berber heritage, noted that Punic was still spoken in the region by people who identified as Kn'nm, or "Chanani", as the Carthaginians had called themselves. Settlements across North Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily continued to speak and write Punic, as evidenced by inscriptions on temples, tombs, public monuments, and artwork dating well after the Roman conquest. Punic names were still used until at least the fourth century, even by prominent denizens of Roman Africa, and some local officials in formerly Punic territories used the title.
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