Before anyone jaunts too far down the road of literal survivorship bias, I'd like to point out that it'd be incredibly premature—or perhaps way too late—to speculate much on the social side of things.
Elsewhere I've seen some people making hay about exactly whose-males were with whose-females, and want to point out that it's normal for genes to cause asymmetries.
In particular, consider the modern problem of RH incompatibility [0], where one pairing is more likely to end up with a child than an identical but gender-bent one.
Boy it so tempting to come up with "just so" stories to explain this. And so frustrating that we will probably never be able to determine the answer. but still cool.
Presumably this hypothesis is meant to explain why there is this observed asymmetry in the type of Neanderthal DNA we find in modern human populations that contain them, which is entirely autosomal. With none in the mitochondrial form, which is exclusively passed down along the female line, and also none in the Y-chromosome form, which is exclusively passed down along the male line.
Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”, an alternative mechanism that could explain why we only see Neanderthal autosomal DNA in modern humans could be that only the female offspring of male-Neanderthal and female-sapiens pairings were reproductively fertile. This is more commonly the case in interspecies hybrids, see Haldane’s rule.
> Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”
I get that it's survivor bias and all, but modern racial preference also paints a clear picture, I don't understand why we are so against this hypothesis that male homo sapiens did not particularly like the female neanderthal (I can clearly see why as any modern male would).
We found neanderthal fossils with sapiens DNA (afir it was something like 7% so not sterile hybrids, but a few generations after the hybridisation).
I don't think we have ANY evidence for non viability of male sapiens + female neanderthal non-viability, we just don't like the fact that this viability proves the asymetri.
Perhaps because modern psyche loves to picture males as sexual brutes and women as these higher wonderful rosy elves and this "shocking" neanderthal(i.e. "beastly") preference goes strongly against this meme?
Why would it be so inconcievable that the male part of homo sapiens drove the sexual selection for the more "refined" features of the species and the preference for intelligence of women was not intrinsic but partially "forced" -- i.e. warbrides and all -- so it would make perfect sense that some homo sapiens women would be attracted to the physical strength cues of male neanderthals, just like... gasp... modern women are?
Because these hybrids would contain mtDNA from their human female line. Neanderthal mtDNA could only be passed down by Neanderthal females.
And because none of those are found in any modern human populations, we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals. Though whether hybridized descendants from male-sapiens female-Neanderthal pairings never existed, or they did exist for some time then eventually went extinct, we cannot currently say with certainty.
Strictly speaking we don't know that. It may always turn up an extremely rare Y or mtdna variant which was thought to be extinct. Ötzi's mt like was thought to be extinct (Wikipedia page even still says so) but very recently a North African man took a full mtdna test and it turned out he had the same. That could happen with neanderthal variants too for all we know.
> we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals.
that looks worded wrong, strictly speaking. if there's a male neanderthal ancestor, then he very likely has a neanderthal mom or grandma or ... great^N grandma for some N.
We don't know that. I cannot imagine we have a perfectly accurate mapping of all mDNA neanderthals had. All current mDNA could actually have been neanderthal at one point in history.
How would we know otherwise? With absolute accuracy?
We certainly don't have access to thousands upon thousands of samples. Do we?
If we all seem to have neanderthal DNA in us, then we're all the progeny of someone which, to a degree, preferred certain "cross-pollination" behaviours.
Certainly, there would have been no revulsion. And potentially, there would have been preference. So if so, well.. why wouldn't that preference continue in the line?
One reason for that might be the size of the baby homo sapiens scull/head upon birth. Bigger brain might have meant female Neanderthals couldn’t give birth to Homo Sapiens babies. Just a theory.
I always wondered if Neanderthals disappeared or if they melted in the general human population since it was quite possible their numbers were much smaller than Homo Sapiens.
We don't know that, and we don't know that neanderthal males were more prone to rape than homo sapiens males. And it's weird to even apply the 21st century concept of rape to prehistoric societies.
However, if one happens to be a race science type, there’s a lot of profit that can be made telling suggestive “just so” stories about which homo sapiens genetic lines are allegedly tainted with a larger proportion of neanderthal genes, or however that’s supposed to work.
Fantasizing about prehistory to justify contemporary racism is a very old pastime. It doesn’t aspire to logical consistency:
> From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.
Amor Fati. The idea that we would carry ontological guilt for prehistoric sex acts that happened further up our family tree is just... masochistic. Not to mention that our ancestors would be both perpetrator and victim?
I understand the instinct to virtue signal but no good can come from this.
Before anyone jaunts too far down the road of literal survivorship bias, I'd like to point out that it'd be incredibly premature—or perhaps way too late—to speculate much on the social side of things.
Elsewhere I've seen some people making hay about exactly whose-males were with whose-females, and want to point out that it's normal for genes to cause asymmetries.
In particular, consider the modern problem of RH incompatibility [0], where one pairing is more likely to end up with a child than an identical but gender-bent one.
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21053-rh-fact...
or even as simple as mitochondria...
Boy it so tempting to come up with "just so" stories to explain this. And so frustrating that we will probably never be able to determine the answer. but still cool.
Presumably this hypothesis is meant to explain why there is this observed asymmetry in the type of Neanderthal DNA we find in modern human populations that contain them, which is entirely autosomal. With none in the mitochondrial form, which is exclusively passed down along the female line, and also none in the Y-chromosome form, which is exclusively passed down along the male line.
Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”, an alternative mechanism that could explain why we only see Neanderthal autosomal DNA in modern humans could be that only the female offspring of male-Neanderthal and female-sapiens pairings were reproductively fertile. This is more commonly the case in interspecies hybrids, see Haldane’s rule.
Y chromosome is passed as is (baring few mutations) and same is true for mtdna.
Autosomal region is what acquires most ancestral dna as it's the one which recombines.
> Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”
I get that it's survivor bias and all, but modern racial preference also paints a clear picture, I don't understand why we are so against this hypothesis that male homo sapiens did not particularly like the female neanderthal (I can clearly see why as any modern male would).
We found neanderthal fossils with sapiens DNA (afir it was something like 7% so not sterile hybrids, but a few generations after the hybridisation). I don't think we have ANY evidence for non viability of male sapiens + female neanderthal non-viability, we just don't like the fact that this viability proves the asymetri.
Perhaps because modern psyche loves to picture males as sexual brutes and women as these higher wonderful rosy elves and this "shocking" neanderthal(i.e. "beastly") preference goes strongly against this meme?
Why would it be so inconcievable that the male part of homo sapiens drove the sexual selection for the more "refined" features of the species and the preference for intelligence of women was not intrinsic but partially "forced" -- i.e. warbrides and all -- so it would make perfect sense that some homo sapiens women would be attracted to the physical strength cues of male neanderthals, just like... gasp... modern women are?
why no mitochondrial then?
Because these hybrids would contain mtDNA from their human female line. Neanderthal mtDNA could only be passed down by Neanderthal females.
And because none of those are found in any modern human populations, we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals. Though whether hybridized descendants from male-sapiens female-Neanderthal pairings never existed, or they did exist for some time then eventually went extinct, we cannot currently say with certainty.
Strictly speaking we don't know that. It may always turn up an extremely rare Y or mtdna variant which was thought to be extinct. Ötzi's mt like was thought to be extinct (Wikipedia page even still says so) but very recently a North African man took a full mtdna test and it turned out he had the same. That could happen with neanderthal variants too for all we know.
> we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals.
that looks worded wrong, strictly speaking. if there's a male neanderthal ancestor, then he very likely has a neanderthal mom or grandma or ... great^N grandma for some N.
Ok yes, you're right. Guess I meant to say: no humans today are descended from someone between a male sapenis-female Neanderthals hybrid.
We don't know that. I cannot imagine we have a perfectly accurate mapping of all mDNA neanderthals had. All current mDNA could actually have been neanderthal at one point in history.
How would we know otherwise? With absolute accuracy?
We certainly don't have access to thousands upon thousands of samples. Do we?
(I genuinely wonder this now)
One thing, this jives in some fashion.
If we all seem to have neanderthal DNA in us, then we're all the progeny of someone which, to a degree, preferred certain "cross-pollination" behaviours.
Certainly, there would have been no revulsion. And potentially, there would have been preference. So if so, well.. why wouldn't that preference continue in the line?
> Certainly, there would have been no revulsion
Farmers have sex with goats.
I think you underestimate the places a lonely guy is willing to put his dick in.
Manatees were the choice for sailors
One reason for that might be the size of the baby homo sapiens scull/head upon birth. Bigger brain might have meant female Neanderthals couldn’t give birth to Homo Sapiens babies. Just a theory.
Neanderthals had larger cranial capacity than modern humans.
Possibly not at birth?
[dead]
You do realize that Neanderthals had significantly bigger brain sizes than Homo sapiens?
In those days, there were γίγαντες and also after.
evidently, i'm not the only one who has watched Ancient Aliens (though with the fam for historical mysteries blended with hilarity)
I always wondered if Neanderthals disappeared or if they melted in the general human population since it was quite possible their numbers were much smaller than Homo Sapiens.
Is there any non-paywalled link for this?
Any browser with reader mode should also work. Worked for me on Brave, both mobile and desktop.
https://archive.is/9mQKV
For future reference: head on over to archive.is or .ph and you, too, can get around the paywall.
here's an iOS shortcut that automates the process: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/81c670b532e340e38a35cc62e3e...
I recommend the "Pass paywalls clean" plug-in
[flagged]
We don't know that, and we don't know that neanderthal males were more prone to rape than homo sapiens males. And it's weird to even apply the 21st century concept of rape to prehistoric societies.
I have to agree, theres a bizarre and worrying internet-brained hysterical element to that original comment which betrays a totally absent education.
the casual title is because of the scientific and prehistoric nature of the subject
However, if one happens to be a race science type, there’s a lot of profit that can be made telling suggestive “just so” stories about which homo sapiens genetic lines are allegedly tainted with a larger proportion of neanderthal genes, or however that’s supposed to work.
It would be an afrocentric trope because it’s Europeans that have the most neanderthal genes.
Wrong, East Asians have.
And South Asians have nearly same as Europeans.
And because Europeans have the most Neanderthal genes, it's all "Neanderthals are smarter than we thought!" and not "are Europeans the missing link?"
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324091455/
Fantasizing about prehistory to justify contemporary racism is a very old pastime. It doesn’t aspire to logical consistency:
> From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.
> neanderthal males were raping homo sapiens females.
I guess you'd rather not even be here?
Or that during the migration men died or were captured and killed.
>neanderthal males were raping homo sapiens females. Neanderthals had much higher muscle mass and were much stronger than homo sapiens.
It's quite possible that at that point in time nobody was asking for permission and most sex would have been what we qualify today as rape.
Amor Fati. The idea that we would carry ontological guilt for prehistoric sex acts that happened further up our family tree is just... masochistic. Not to mention that our ancestors would be both perpetrator and victim?
I understand the instinct to virtue signal but no good can come from this.
> the differential is because neanderthal males were raping homo sapiens females
They were simply more attractive to homo sapiens females because of more chest hair, muscles, and better defined jawline.
Well, ya. Of course it was rape. And in retaliation we genocided them, hence the lack of Y and mRNA.
> and mRNA
This might be seen as a bit of a nitpick but I believe you mean mtDNA (mitochondrial).
>And in retaliation we genocided them
This is far from being the only or even main explanation to their extinction.
The Neanderthal populations were extremely inbred, so I'd guess that was a bigger factor to their decline.