These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing.
Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is kind of messy.
There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle."
In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't have fossils, but something has to be our ancestors. So if we are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien ancestors sapiens.
Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died out. But... there were people everywhere.
Humans existed over a vast range. From south Africa to Northern Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it's confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different species.
Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic diversity we have today. In some sense, we are the inbred ones.
https://www.sifrun.com/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-ea...
Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon
https://medium.com/luminasticity/predicting-the-worst-and-st...
It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history.
What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.
We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.
Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.
Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?
Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).
It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.
I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.
IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…
Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.
That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.
True! possibly 3-5000 years apart.
> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived.
You're right. They certainly didn't teach religious extremists how to cultivate maize or mix crops to increase density of output to prevent the invaders from starving. The Natives were stupid savages who were saved by white people who taught them how to be civilized. The Natives would have relied on rocks and arrows until some other superior species wiped them out naturally if not for Europeans.
The only reason that a culture develops certain tech is because they didn't have another tech that came before it. No other conditions influence that. Else they'd have had gun powder!
They did. Natives didn't have agriculture:
> It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
The unfortunate thing is that those dumb Natives didn't learn to grow things. Something that had been observed for thousands of years.
It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained.
So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once they reach a threshold, as implied by the article.
It’s a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going “extinct”. And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the process, but it works.
On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become pervasive.
The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic diversity as a shield against new diseases.
And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.
Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.
But you are certainly right that the cross-overs are incomparably worse. And diversity becomes species extinction protection at that level.
Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.
Fossil evidence exists pointing towards large eagles scooping up 3-5 year olds. It’s been a long time since we had to think of our toddlers safety the same way we think of a lap dogs.
I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very small population.
Although one of the references goes to a now dead "reptilian agenda" website which might have been even more interesting:)
Seems as though it could have been an enclave of neanderthals who eventually integrated with humans.
The last time I looked in to this, the consensus was that it was most likely a version of otherwise-extinct ancient Celtic.
Now that doesn’t mean that the Basques don’t have a potentially outsized Neanderthal genetic influence, but the odds of their language being so ancient as to pre-exist modern humans entirely is unlikely.
We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.
This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me.