"Proves" and "refutes" are both pretty vague words in a historical context. In my experience when historians say "I will prove this to you" they typically mean "not only is it a good story, but unusually I have at least 1 piece of actual evidence". So in the loose world of history where nobody has any idea, maybe the idea is refuted.
Realistically, probably both posts are wrong but we'll never know about which aspects. 10,000 years is a long time, there should have been multiple occurrences of the impossible. History is huge, and we only have tattered records for 1 in ~3,000 years events.
The article linked by the parent is very clear about when things are unknown or suspected but unproven (from real but inconclusive archaeological evidence). In contrast, it shows that the book in question is completely speculative (not based on any archaeological evidence whatsoever) while presenting itself as unequivocally correct.
There is no need to beat around the bush. The linked article fully refutes the original one.
The book is a work of history. Of course it is completely speculative. The point of historical books is to convince people to read them, typically they have a fairly thick dose of spice and storytelling. Thucydides wasn't trying to bore people.
The first "evidence that they may have had the technology to make sewn garments" link [0] looks like some dude ran a model. Now it is certainly possible to claim that as conclusive evidence. But probably only in a debate between historians, I wouldn't bank on it.
50,000 years ago is a long time. There is not a lot of confidence about how things happened, and reality defies mixing generalisation and truth.
Do you mean to construct a defense of the "cannibal rapist Neandertal orcs" idea on the post-factualist basis that, well, there's no actually knowing anything, so we may as well pick whatever just-so story we like?
That's a pretty weak defense, is why I'm asking. Almost anything else would be more convincing. So maybe it's worth asking whether you've got anything else to offer.
> there's no actually knowing anything, so we may as well pick whatever just-so story we like?
What do you think is going on here? There isn't enough evidence to create an accurate truth, we've got no way of deciding if an accurate truth has been uncovered and it doesn't matter at all anyway. The process by which "truth" is found has a heavy bias towards good storytelling and typically strong political overtones.
Do you feel HN is upvoting the story because anyone feels that accurately depicting the neanderthal lifestyle will have profound bearing on the course of the modern world? I doubt even the historians think that. Maybe something will come of it, but realistically everyone is in this for the fun of imagining what might have happened, and the joy of arguing about it confidently from flimsy evidence.
Well, to go by your prior comments, you're confusing "pick whatever just-so story you like" with how history is done. Feel free to continue, of course; I've more or less given up arguing with post-truthers in general, and certainly see no point in doing so here.
I'm not wholly without hostages to fortune, or at least people I love who don't know by default to mistrust everything they hear from the goddamned Internet. I worry about them first, friends after, and randos in HN comment threads with whatever's left over, which is nothing to speak of at the moment. I'm tired. So it goes.
I understand. But I notice that the people spreading ignorance are not giving up or tiring (because, I hypothesize, they have initiative and belief that they will succeed). They've radically changed the world, which means the world can be changed. Our ideas are stronger and better.
Anyway, I'm not trying to compel you, I'm just trying to include some important points in the discussion.
"Now he that by the arguments here adduced shall frame a judgment of the things past and not believe rather that they were such as the poets have sung or prose-writers have composed, more delightfully to the ear than conformably to the truth, as being things not to be disproved and by length of time turned for the most part into the nature of fables without credit, but shall think them here searched out by the most evident signs that can be, and sufficiently too, considering their antiquity: he, I say, shall not err....
"To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable. "
Nonsense, look at the actual archaeological record from the time. Yes, anything could have been but then the person making those claims has to provide proper evidence for it, not the other way around.
> when historians say "I will prove this to you" they typically mean "not only is it a good story, but unusually I have at least 1 piece of actual evidence". So in the loose world of history where nobody has any idea, maybe the idea is refuted.
Wow, that describes Internet posts (and HN comments), but it's utterly unlike the serious histories I've read, which are filled with primary evidence and incredible amounts of research, with the historians traveling around the world digging up new evidence in archives and museums.
If you want far better histories than what you've encountered, I suggest looking up the topic you are interested in on a college syllabus. The Open Syllabus Project[0], which collects millions of college syllabi and offers statistics too (most assigned, etc.) is a great resource. Or better, ask a reference librarian in the topic at a research library (e.g., a university) - I find they will often help people with recommendations if you are polite and show that you've made an effort to learn what you can without them.
If 10,000 years is too long to ever know what really happened, then we can dismiss the idea that stories from less than 10,000 years ago accurately reflect the reality of more than 40,000 years ago.
Yeah, I remember when this 'theory" came around the first time. It was silly even in passing, and supporters weren't even playing up the idea that the entirety of humanity had migrated to the Levant in order to be nearly wiped out by Neanderthals. Especially when there's a much more plausible alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
When someone gets introduced as a "heterodox thinker", there's always something badly thought-out coming.
Thanks for this, I didn't see the comment in the article.
The minute I saw "horizontal slit eyes" I was pretty much done. There's literally no way to know if that was true, for that to be a claim in a proposed theory rightly discredits that theory. I can see them being hairy. But deducing from having larger eyes that they'd be nocturnal and therefore have horizontal slit eyes...
And then there's the issue of the flat face. I'm no anthropologist but I understand the structure of the face and I have seen a few pictures of Neanderthal skulls, they absolutely had a protruding hooded nose just like us, no doubt about it.
Looking at a skeleton, they obviously are very similar to us in form. All this stuff about them being vastly different looking monstrous human relatives is just fantasy.
The suggestion that Neanderthal had a tapetum lucidum is also weird as that is a feature that has been lost in almost all extant primates, including nocturnal ones, except the bush baby.
I was wrong, some lemurs also have tapeta but, oddly, tarsiers don’t, in spite of having many more adaptations to low light.
What’s weird is that the advocate of the orc theory just throws in details without even considering whether they’re plausible. A full hair coat? Easy, we already have hair, and most of our “relatives” have full coats. Larger teeth? Sure. A gain of function that’s been lost to an entire phylum, including the apes he references? Unlikely.
"There's literally no way to know if that was true" - we don't know now, but hypothetically in the future, wouldn't it be plausible to determine such traits from their DNA? We have a full DNA sequence, and wherever (and whenever, in the future) we know what impact particular genes had on some traits in primates, we can check how the neanderthals had it.
Heck, it would not get attempted due to ethical issues, but technically it might be even plausible to clone a neanderthal using a human surrogate mother, there has been some work in cross-species cloning.
The facial description did sound like quite a stretch. If anything, a more human face would be even more terrifying. These creatures are often described as very close to human but with savagely exaggerated features. An ape with a snout is more understandable than a monstrous face with large, staring eyes, huge mouth and deformed nose. Look at any traditional depiction of human like monsters and those are the features you’ll see.
It makes for a good story to be sure, but probably little else. Much like the popular myth of the noble savage influencing academics of the time, contemporary popular disdain for the people and cultures of the past colors many contemporary academics.
Another weird thing, So we have found evidence of the feathers of dinosaurs, but not the fur of something from 40k years ago? that seems rather unlikely. In this case, the absence of evidence for fur is evidence of its absence, much like the absence of worked neanderthal clothing is. A better simpler explanation would be, they had decent subdermal isolation and brown fat. While most people today think humans cant work outside on a typical winter day in northern europe without clothes, they are just wrong. Go to any country with a snowy winter and ask the first person you meet if they have that one friend or acquaintance who goes about in shorts and tshirt during winter, who seems just absurdly resistant to cold in general. They will give you a name. Luck, ample food and cold growing up, and you too could be walking barefoot through the snow with me, feel the refreshing -5 C wind on your chest when snowboarding in a tshirt, and alway be told you everytime you leave somewhere that you arent wearing enough jackets, pants, scarfs, gloves, and hats.
Besides its unnecessary for the story being told. Humans lived next to chimps and gorillas for millenia and they are furry, cannibalistic, violent tribal monsters. Fitting the story of orcs and goblins even better. But even that is unnecessary, people just like making shit up, but people are also terrible at actually doing that. So almost everything looks like a human or animal or combination.
> So we have found evidence of the feathers of dinosaurs, but not the fur of something from 40k years ago? that seems rather unlikely
Does it? Dinosaurs existed for hundreds of millions years, that's a lot of time for things to be preserved. Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years, that's not nearly as much.
Sure, fur/feathers is less likely to be preserved for 65 million years (+ however far into the mesozioic you go) than 40 thousand years (+ however far back into the history of neanderthals you go), but by how many orders of magnitude? Is it enough to make up for the many orders of magnitude difference in the number of times it could be preserved?
I think it's interesting how much traction the question of whether Neanderthals had body is getting in this discussion. I haven't read into it too deeply, so I'm not confident to say which side is correct, but the fact that nearly all mammals, and every extant primate species save one have thick body hair, regardless of what climate they live in, means it wouldn't surprise me to find out that Neanderthals also did. It also wouldn't surprise me to find out they walked around with crude animal skin drapings (like Wikipedia claims) or that they had expertly tailored leather suits as described in that linked article. What surprises me is that so many people really, really want it to have been one way or the other. Here's a theory: Their range was so vast, and the time they spent on earth was so long, that some of them were bald and made clothes, and some of them were hairy from head to toe (like some modern people) and walked around naked. Probably some of them were mean and some were nice, and sometimes they traded with Homo Sapiens, and sometimes they dined on them.
For what it's worth, my dad was an anthropologist and he liked to point out that their women probably had beards.
In addition, dinosaur feathers that have been discovered have been in fossils where it's obviously still part of the animal, or preserved in amber where feathers were unexpected and it raised questions.
Who's been looking for neanderthal fur at any scale? It could be hiding in plain sight. AFAIK, geologists and archeologists don't try to run DNA tests on every bit of biological matter they come across. Humans are known tool users and clothing (and fur) wearers. If someone found fur near a hominid and it wasn't on their head, would anyone be jumping to this conclusion?
I don't believe we have any ancient hominid integument at all, just a few strands of hair here and there. Soft tissues are extremely rare survivals (and we have very few examples of any ancient mammalian soft tissue), so it's not terribly surprising given the already scant hominid remains.
That we have a little bit of dinosaur skin impressions is down to said animals being around for a long, long time, and over much more territory.
The absence of evidence is certainly not evidence of absence here; there's simply no evidence one way or the other. Excavators are getting much better at recognizing non-skeletal remains, though, so perhaps we'll see something come up in the future.
Soft tissues and hair need not survive for its imprint to survive on the surrounding clay. I think its strange we dont have more neanderthal finds than we do, but suspect part of the reason is most aren't distinguishable from cro magnon. If an intact adult skull is found, sure. But if the fragmented remains of a neanderthal child were found in a bog, could we tell the difference?
The fur thing just isn't compelling. Hominims lost their fur prior to developing tools in order to develop sweat glands all over their body, allowing them to expel heat better than their prey (and so hunt by literally chasing an animal until it got hyperthermia). Neanderthals may have been hairier to help in colder climates, but it's pretty remiss of the article to not mention that losing fur was one of the key developments in hominim evolution.
Meaning fur was lost before we split from neanderthals, so they would have had to lose their sweat pores and regrown that hair? Seems like a large mutation to take place.
Maybe not as much as you'd think. As an example, the EDAR Gene (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/2/21/sweat-gene-iden...) affects, among other things, hair thickness and sweat gland density. It's isn't a small effect, and yet it's a single gene change in an otherwise highly conserved gene pathway.
Give chimps/gorillas/humans enough territory and they're peaceful, make them compete with others of the same species for limited resources and they'll turn violent.
I don't need much more than basic evolutionary theory to support that.
Maybe you’re right about gorillas, but chimps are much more closely related to us, and they’re hyperviolent at times, engaging in (essentially) genocide, just like us humans.
I always personally thought descriptions of Grendel were very much that of a silverback gorilla. Fangs, Fur, Loping gait, strength. Its a pretty good image.
There is a similar idea about Conan and there is a bit of ambiguity in the collected stories of the oc. There are ancient kingdoms and fallen empires of creatures that are described like apes or furless apes, notably gorillas and similar creatures here and there. The inhabitants of these, if they are sane, sometimes call themselves, and are sometimes called either man, or superior to man or degenerate from man. Basically everything from lovecraftian space elves to goblins. Conan himself is quite often described in way that is ambiguous, but certainly includes both things like thick maned, long armed, barrel-chested, and even gorilla like. In particular by some of the people of the kingdoms he visits. Described as black maned, hairy, sometimes to the point of fur, and in his latter years, as with it falling like a coat of silver over his back. Overall its a silly idea. Leaving the racism aside, I think the author intended Armenian or persian. Black haired, golden tanned skin, sometimes with pale golden irises, certainly not white or nordic as often depicted much like some other middle eastern mythical characters of note. A simpler explanation is bad writing and gorillas commonly thought of as the epitome of strong men at the time of the early novels. The stories are mostly set in southern hyperborea i.e. middle africa also lends itself to this. I wonder if this may be why Grendel is like that as well. A popular english translation of Beowulf was made by Tolkien (who grew up in africa) written in the same era as the early Conan? A popular translation makes Grendel more akin to a nordic troll, which is more similar to a bear, weakly supported by aglæca ambiguity which sometimes seems to confuse grendel and beowulf which would make more if the name beowulf even if literally translated to bear, still meant bear hunter/killer or strong as a bear. I'd lean towards tolkien, but it shows how cultural context flavors translation. There is just not much description either, and even without the inevitable translation errors in visual descriptions of things that dont exist, ambiguity caused by bad writing is nothing new.
I had friends who were shorts all the time, but almost everybody will wear thick clothing in winter, and walking barefoot in the snow will cause frostbite and/or is extremely painful (yes I did that, just to see what happens. I was young once. It may have been one of the most painful things I ever did). Humans can survive in the cold because we are smart enough to cover up, not because some of us are so hardcore that we break the laws of physics.
Why do we have to posit non-human monsters as explanations for these myths? After all, there were (and still are) real monsters out there that would kill, rape, kidnap and torture people - people from other communities. Strange danger was serious business back in the day, why could that not evolve into all kinds of boogeymen?
Think this applies to a lot of searching for accuracy in mythology. It's a bit like the attempts to connect rather abstract and ahistorical flood myths with specific post Ice Age deluges. Maybe the Epic of Gilgamesh was a >10,000 year old oral tradition describing the end of the Ice Age... or maybe it was just that massive flood was about the most tangible way for humans building civilisations on flood plains to imagine the gods destroying everything.
This is in line with my (admittedly not well researched) theory of why 'many primitive cultures built pyramids': a square-based pyramid is the most stable structure that you can build to be really high. Columns, arches and metalworking are the things that allowed us to come up with something else, right?
This is what I thought when was evoked cannibalism: what if those were the traces of sapiens festing of neanderthalis (and not neanderthalis eating neanderthalis, as seems to be supposed in the text)?
I agree, lots of possibilities there, making the "widespread cannibalism" theory indeed pretty weak overall: It's quite possible that neanderthals only reverted to cannibalism in times of severe famines - which are not that unlikely to happen regularly over these huge time span. And I think that would still hold for modern humans (I think some air plane crash survivors did that).
Or maybe there was some cult/religion/tradition that demanded that specific enemies (or relatives) shall be eaten to harvest their "power". Again, some of our contemporary, modern humans still did that until quite recent (IIRC there was something with brains on HN recently, and how those who ate them [primarily that societies women] contracted brain diseases from their dead).
As far as I understand Neanderthal genes in Humans don't actually exist in the Y chromosome.
That means that only female Neanderthals transmitted their genes down the Sapiens gene tree. This could mean all sort of things.
Maybe Neanderthal Males with Female Humans didn't generate viable off-spring. Maybe Our selection process favored non-Neanderthal genes and it was phased out of the Y chromosome gene pool? Maybe as you said Sapiens have a much darker past?
>only female Neanderthals transmitted their genes down the Sapiens gene tree
That would be right if the only genes a man passes to his children are on the Y chromosome, but a man passes 23 chromosomes to every one of his children. (One of those 23 will be either an X or a Y.)
Given how human babies are already at the maximum size a human female can deliver, I suspect you may be on to something. Other species don't have such traumatic births, but human babies barely fit through the birth canal. Neanderthal babies were probably much larger. In particular, their skulls. If a Neanderthal male impregnated a human female, I wouldn't be surprised if it killed her. Conversely, a Neanderthal female probably had an easier time delivering a hybrid baby.
My thoughts too. Something/someone ate these corpses using tools. Also, is there some proof that it is a usual thing? Because modern humans in particular circumstances can do cannibalism too. So it seems that there are a lot of extrapolations there.
Another point seemed to me a bit far fetched: that due to anatomy Neanderthals could not speak. But there are birds that imitate pretty well human speech.
One interpretation of the origin of such monsters, from Beowulf:
That bloodshed, for that Cain slew Abel, the Eternal Lord avenged: no joy had he of that violent deed, but God drove him for that crime far from mankind. Of him all evil broods were born, ogres and goblins and haunting shapes of hell, and the giants too, that long time warred with God - for that he gave them their reward.
The original Old English text refers to the monsters as eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, swylce gigantas, and other translations seem to disagree on their meaning; however, orcneas meant evil spirits, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and to Tolkien (who was a leading scholar of Old English in his day job).[0]
(I assume you are not saying that "people from other communities" are actually monsters, but referring to historical ignorance.)
[0] If you can access the OED, see the entry for orc.
I'm saying that people historically sometimes act like monsters when they meet people from other communities. Enslavement. Pillaging. Murder. Rape. Salting the fields. Etc. etc. etc.
I think this tendency may be related to theory of mind. A monster isn't just a danger, it is something that we have attributed with intent, desire and emotions. Those emotions just happen to be malicious. That trait helps us to conceptualise the threat, but often goes into to over-drive. And that ability is not dependent on threat, it is just intrinsic to humanity. Children in safe and happy homes still make up monsters.
Supplement the list provided in the article by more modern boogeymen such as Negroes, Jews, Arabs, etc. and you have a nice explanation of recent history. I realize this may be deeply offensive to some of the readership here and emphasize that I don't look at the world in these terms. However, recent history is full of people that actually do demonize these groups of people; no matter how irrational that is.
Nothing has changed here except our ability to find meaningless differences among groups of people with enough of a qualifier to split the world into "us" and "them". It's a natural reflex that transcends genetics, race, and other ways to qualify people as us and them. There have been plenty of experiments to suggest that this us and them reasoning does not really have to involve anything meaningful or substantial. E.g. the Stanford Prison Experiment is a great example where giving some people a uniform is enough to trigger the effect.
IMHO Neanderthals did not actually disappear and the different subspecies of humanity simply merged to create a more fit offspring. Apparently humans carry enough neanderthal DNA to suggest that inter (sub)species breeding was a thing. Is that "us" or "them" or does that even mean anything? What do we call the humans without this DNA? Pure breads or ancestors? Is that better, worse, or just different? Is that even a thing? I.e. didn't those humans just die out?
We like to dramatize things into epic battles, fights, etc. But life a few thousand years ago was brutal and very much survival of the fittest biased. Apparently, humans with some neanderthal DNA were somewhat fitter and survived into modernity. No need to get judgemental about that.
We should be careful not to chastise people from the past from the viewpoint of our comfy and safe lives. It's easy to sneer at our ability to divide people into 'us' versus 'them' over meaningless differences, when it's not you worrying about a night raid where you get scalped and your wife raped.
Meh. The vast majority of people subscribed to some religion or another and all the major religions say don't do rape or murder. I think it's reasonable to point out the moral failings of the past relative to their own morality.
Seems perfectly reasonable to say "these people did bad things". If you want to then go a step further and say "they did bad things because reasons" that's fine, but the bad things were still done and pretending that providing some context justifies it is just as flawed an analysis as saying it doesn't. The world is nuanced AF.
We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to. I mean, even today there are still cultures around where literally kidnapping a teenage girl and keeping her hostage is the virtuous traditional way of getting married.
What I was trying to allude to is that it's easy to sit on our high horses and bash people from bygone times about how stupid they were for dividing people into 'we' and 'them' over minuscule differences, when they were mostly just faced with a simple choice - 'we' dead, or 'them' dead.
> We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to.
Human beings have consistent morality, in many ways, across space and time. As the GP pointed out, look at all the religions and cultural rules against the same things and encouraging the same things, such as not harming others and respecting your parents. There are differences also, but the extreme relativism is plainly false.
We really can not know this. We can only infer from cultures and religions in the relatively short timespan covered by written history. And even then, morality has changed significantly through time. A simple example - would you think that someone telling a story about someone else beating his wife to a pulp is something to laugh about?
I think the only moral that may have been something close to universal throughout times would've been something like: "Don't kill a member of in-group without a good reason if you're not the head honcho."
Everything else? We have literally no idea.
EDIT: Really, watch the video, it actually applies to the discussion really well. It's basically an argument about morals.
> We really can not know this. We can only infer from cultures and religions in the relatively short timespan covered by written history.
That written history covers an enormous amount of ground, with records going back 6,000 years and in diverse cultures, from Sanskrit in what is now India to cuneiform to China for thousands of years, etc., and those records including older materials. Anthropologists have been studying different cultures for a long time and have plenty of evidence of what is consistent across them. Much is known about how morality develops in children. Etc.
Every human being understands it. You don't walk into a room in a strange culture and wonder, 'maybe these people think it's funny to poison each other' or 'maybe they are pure anarchists' or 'maybe they eat all their children'.
We can't have perfect knowledge of this question or anything, but to confuse that with no knowledge is absurd. For example,
> We have literally no idea.
Why is it important to you (and others) to try to push a transparent falsehood that empowers evil behavior?
Yes. 6000 years, that's 3% of the time we have been around as species. It's not important for me to push anything, let alone something that would empower evil behavior. It's just that I really, really can not see how the idea that pretty much all human societies have similar morals revolving around 'be a good person' goes together with the following facts:
1. Tens of thousands of people are part of societies where initiation into the society entails killing someone. (Various gangs).
2. Hundreds of millions of people are living in societies where honor killings is a thing.
3. Depending on how you count, there have been more than twenty genocides in the last century. That's during 0.05% of the time Homo Sapiens have been around.
4. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people are living in societies where a blogger can get lynched for a blasphemous post.
5. There have actually been societies in recent times ending up literally poisoning each other.
6. Just some 5 years ago around 10 million people lived in a society where people were thrown off roofs for being gay.
The list is obviously non-exhaustive. And all of the above is basically going on now, I'm not even getting into what we know went on a few centuries from now. Burning innocent women on pyres for imagined slights, anyone?
Like... Do all these people know/knew they are evil according to our 'common' and 'universal' core morals? I bet they feel pretty good about themselves when lynching the blasphemer. It's just that I refuse to accept that our core morals are similar.
You got me quite interested in your worldview, can we please continue this discussion a bit? I hope it doesn't take too much of your time!
So, you're saying that you have the same set of core morals as a guy returning family honor by beheading his daughter[1] at night over her plans to run off with her boyfriend?
I think outright religious bans on murdering, raping or enslaving people outside of your community are fairly recent developments. Even the old testament is fairly ambiguous on this.
I think it's much more complex than that. The Old Testament both insists you must treat strangers well, but also describes slaves and conquering Jericho. 'Thou shalt not kill', etc. however, are blanket statements.
We need more evidence and research; the Bible is long and we can find a statement here or there that supports almost anything. But as I said, while there are variations, much is the same.
I'll even speculate that it's predictable - I doubt I could walk into 99% of human communities in the history of the world and not have a reasonable sense of the morals (social customs might be tricky though!).
I don’t necessarily think there is a contradiction, “thou shall not kill” should be be translated as “thou shall not murder” in the context of the old testament.
The word for “kill” used in the commandment was not used in any passages of the bible related to warfare. There is even a clarification that this does not apply to killing other people in warfare or unarmed combat*
While the literal meaning of the 10 commandments has changed relatively little (mainly due to mistranslation or the shifting definitions of words) almost all of them mean would mean very different things to modern christian pacifist, a with burning 16th century calvinist, a 2nd century christian or a 6th century bc. jew.
I mean even regarding killing, while it’s easy for us, living in the modern world, to interpret it as a general ban on killing, a society which did not kill people under any circumstances would likely have been inconceivable in ancient times, it simply could not have existed since it would had been conquered and it’s members enslaved or exterminated by neighboring tribes.
That's true, but generally you don't see a community systematically slaughter, enslave and torture people they consider part of their community. Prison comes close, but note that usually prisoners are seen as outcasts.
I feel like either I am very confused about something, or the author is:
> the population of humans dropped to as few as 50 individuals. Something terrible happened to the human race.
> When did this population bottleneck occur? A number of teams have analyzed mutation rates to find out. The mutation rate in our Y chromosomes suggests the bottleneck occurred 37,000 to 49,000 years ago.
Is the author really suggesting that the human population was down to 50 individuals 50,000 years ago?
How on earth does this square with human migration? Humans were already spreading near Australia 50,000 years ago, let alone Europe and Asia.
Is he suggesting that all the fossils throughout Eurasia and near Oceania were deposited by earlier humans, then nearly every human on the planet died at the same time, and then the survivors all re-spread to those areas, without leaving any archeological evidence of this?
I've heard it used as an explanation for our species level sense of camaraderie and cooperation. A near extinction event may have been one of the best things to ever happen to us. (I don't entirely agree, but it's an interesting thought)
So even if we accept everything being said of the Neanderthals, this is left completely undefended:
> Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous? Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.
Is the author really suggesting that these stories are the product of an unbroken chain of 50,000 years of oral tradition? If not, what do events from 50,000 years ago have to do with myths from 2000-6000 years ago?
Are you suggesting that there isn't an unbroken chain of oral tradition? That for some generations in the middle every child didn't talk to their parents or other members of the older generation?
It's a game of broken telephone no doubt, but I don't see how that chain could not exist.
I think the salient point is that it's likely, given our imaginations, that we would've concocted stories about monstrous humanoids regardless of whether they actually existed alongside us. It shouldn't be surprising.
The stories we tell are never cut from whole cloth, they are a constant mixing and blending of ancient tradition with contemporary experience. I don’t doubt that any folklore which has reached us from the distant past has been remade a thousand times but the heart of the story has likely survived. The fear of it is so intense it has been bred into us. The thump of something heavy in the night, the bristling silence of a stealthy, lurking beast. The glimpse of a dark fearsome shape. The looming threat of a powerful limb tearing you from your bed. The feeling that this presence is not simply some hungry and fearful animal but a malevolent intelligence that seeks to do you harm. You feel it deep within you, the fear not of tooth and claw but an inhumanly powerful hand grabbing you from behind.
Australian oral history has made well-tested geographical depictions that go back 10,000 years, so it's not inconceivable that myths and stories could have influences 50,0000 years ago.
What we fear is probably a combination of nature and nurture. Our fear of orc-looking people could be a combination of 50K years of oral tradition AND us evolving to be scared of people who look like orcs.
> and carried off and raped our women. (How did you think the Neanderthal DNA got into our genome?)
I don't know if Neandertals were rapist, but given the behavior of Sapiens, it wouldn't be completely surprising if it was in fact the opposite: Sapiens abducting Neandertal females and raping them…
Obviously it is both. Rape in nature is extremely common (as defined by female trying to escape, but male pinning it down). There is no reason that both neanderthal and homo-sapient males wouldn't have engaged in this behavior...as it is only cultural taboos, norms, and theory of mind that prevent its occurrence.
One data point: a Homo Sapiens settlement with a child burial who was 1/8 Neanderthal. May have been born in the settlement? That original mother may have been of the settlement. Anyway three generations of mixed heritage, and still worth burying with reverence.
Size and weight being the same doesn't mean they weren't far strong than homo sapiens. We are quite a bit bigger and heavier than chimps, but chimps are about twice as strong as a typical human.
> We are quite a bit bigger and heavier than chimps, but chimps are about twice as strong as a typical human.
How is strength measured here? Because that sounds strange for two species that close genetically speaking to have such a big difference on how muscles work. I would expect 1kg of chimp muscle to have roughly the same strength as one 1kg of human muscle, and having a muscle/whole body mass ratio in the same ballpark. But our muscles are localized fairly differently, with much more muscles in our lower body so depending how you measure, you could get really different results.
Also, the typical industrial-world-human is pretty weak compared to what the average humans can be under the right conditions so it may bias the measure too.
We are also far more closely related to Neanderthals than to chimps. Also it’s not like there’s any correlation between % Neanderthal DNA and physical strength.
The probable explanation is that they were extremely human in nearly all respects.
I'm not sure about the descriptions of Neanderthals presented in this article, but the idea that old tales of orcs and elves originated many millennia ago as descriptions of other human species or other primates isn't that far-fetched.
> the idea that old tales of orcs and elves originated many millennia ago as descriptions of other human species or other primates isn't that far-fetched.
Given that we know that thoughout recorded history people have made stories like that up about the community of the same human species over the next hill, it may be not-too-farfetched, but it is also a wildly unnecessary conjecture.
The other way around is more plausible to me: the way we reconstructed dinosaurs was influenced by the corpus of representations we developed with dragons.
Oh, I never thought of that, but it could explain why the idea of dinosaur with feather sounds weird even though biologically it wouldn't be surprising at all.
Chinese dragons may be a better depiction of what could be the source of the myth. A Chinese dragon is like a flying snake, although I'm not sure they ascribe fire-breathing to it. But if you combine a flying snake and fire-breathing then there was an ancient device that looked very much like such a creature.
Some ancient armies used long cloth bags as flags or banners, to impress the enemies or maybe to signal the position of themselves for the allies to see. They filled the bags with hot air and the bags rose to the sky as contemporary balloons.
Imagine how it looked from the enemy side: an army is approaching and long snake-like things are flying about the mass of people. And you can glimpse some fire at the end that is close to the ground. Could it be a creature that breaths fire? And occasionally these things detached and flew up to the sky. Perfect dragons.
Well, there's been a number of very large bird and reptile species that humanity has been in contact with since the dawn of man. Many of our forefathers were rather small compared to modern humans, and a gigantic serpent or amphibian would probably be outright terrifying for small early humans armed with rocks and spears.
I'm not sure about genetic memory, but human oral tradition is very old, and while I haven't heard about any evidence suggesting it predates modern humans, I wouldn't be surprised if there are stories that turns out to be as old as human language is.
If you're in a pre-civilized, just-barely-scraping-by survival mode, you'd probably conclude: (1) this thing was a monster, and if it lived here I'm not safe. (2) This thing must have been killed by something worse, and if it's around I'm really not safe.
It’s a very good possibility that the reason we think dragons lived in caves was because there are so many cave bear skeletal remains in caves throughout Europe.
Imagine finding a 12 foot long skeleton in a cave, or just a skull of an impossibly large animal, of course it’s a dragon!
Pretty much all our mythology and fairy tales, including the Tolkien's world, Harry Potter and many movies are based on what I'd call the "occult records". Those records were made partially public at least two centuries before Tolkien was born, so it can't be a coincidence that so many elements of his world match 1:1 with those records. Whether those records are true is a separate question.
Using occult chronology, Tolkien's world corresponds to the Atlantis period (the same Atlantis described by Plato). Tolkien took most of the interesting bits from different epochs and compressed them into one short story. The tall people (2x taller than us) in his story are the atlanteans, Saruman and Gendalf must be Narad and Asuramaya and orcs are creatures made by the evil faction during the late Atlantis when the civilization was on decline. The records say, though, that the bad guys won at the end and the atmosphere during that final chapter was shown in the Prometheus movie. All movies and books, though, present a rosy version of orcs and other evil stuff from the records - an accurate picture would be unthinkable even in the book format.
You're looking for far-fetched explanations where his academic track record, most notably on Beowulf, provides a completely natural meta-mythological basis for his works.
Tolkien, in addition to being the great fantasy writer of the 20th century, he was also an Oxford professor and the century's great scholar of Old English. And in his domain were the myths of northern and central Europe.
He needed no popular book of the occult; he had read all the original myths in their original ancient languages. There is plenty of scholarly work describing his sources, and he wrote his own essay on it, though it's more conceptual than about primary sources: On Fairy-stories.
There's definitely a lot of more modern developments as well, but there's also stories like Jack and the Beanstalk, that can be traced back thousands of years and which has themes similar to those described in the article.
Humans have historically had much to fear from furry things with large teeth, so don't need to resort to questionable theories.
The word "Orc" itself used to refer to Norse invaders, who did much of the same stuff "real" orcs do and unfortunately more (which is also directly related to what is now called xenophobia, or intolerance to foreigners and their culture).
So a strange-looking humanoid with traits of a predatory animal is a natural monster.
After clicking some of the links in this article I went to what looked very much like wikipedia, so much so i went on a typical half hour wikipedia-dive, but wasn't actually wikipeida (I have a big monitor and the links I clicked all directed to subsections of articles so I didn't see the info-galactic logo at the top).
Really puts this article in a whole new (bad) light.
I am glad InfoGalactic exists and try to tell other about it. It grows tiring, the character assassinations of right-wing biographies on wikipedia, for example controversies are presented in the opening paragraphs instead of being a sub-section. For example from the opening paragraph of Vox Day:
>>Theodore Robert Beale (born August 21, 1968), also known as Vox Day, is an American far-right activist,[2] writer, musician, publisher, and video game designer. He has been described as a white supremacist,[3] a misogynist,[4] and part of the alt-right.[5][6][7]
Now I would say InfoGalactic is politically neutral, I have not seen them applying bias against left-wing individuals. But even if they were right-wing that would be fine, even good. Mainstream morals/culture have been captured and manufactured in the image of a modern international leftism. And as someone on the right, it would be nice to see right-wing intellectualism go on the offensive for once and reclaim a sphere of influence.
Cheers, I hope you enjoyed your InfoGalactic-dive, seems you liked it fine until Wiki told you not to.
Okay. I never heard of this guy before, but for someone who has written "The answer for those who support Western civilization, regardless of sex, color, or religion, is to embrace white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule", these are exactly the adjectives that shuld be in the opening paragraph of an encyclopaedia article about him. He is politically active and very extreme, which is noteworthy information.
“Right wing character assassinations” ha! That wiki description is light on him. Due some diligence and visit his blog linked on the wiki page. 15 minutes should tell you plenty enough, from his own words, about the type of vile person that started InfoGalactic. It’s far more biased than wiki, and is meant to spread literal far right propaganda. It is not a reasonable devil’s advocate other-side take.
Examples: hates Jews, black people, basically any nonwhite. Wants America to deport everyone immigrated post-1960 and to reinstate a Christian theocracy, even though he lives in Italy. Wanted Trump to overturn election and become dictator to bring in this theocracy.
A nice fairytale. And like all fairytales it doesn't need to be falsifiable to be worth telling.
>> If early Greek, Roman, Norse, and Chinese mythologies are anything to go by, the legends spun by early humans centre around an heroic human (almost always a man) who is pitted against an ugly, evil cruel monster with superhuman strength…
As a PoGO (Person of Greek Origin) my impression of our ancients' myths and legends is somewhat different. Yes, there was the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy, but neither Titans nor Giants could be mistaken for "orcs" or "ogres"; the former were nightmare beasts with tentacles and the latter simply had a hundred hands. But most of our mythology is about the sexual lives of the gods, particularly Zeus' transformations to various animals that allowed him to sneak into maidens' beds (no accounting for taste) or the deeds of great heroes like Hercules, who however typically fight chimeric monsters (like the chimera itself, or the sphinx, or the harpies etc) or actual beasts (like the Erymanthian Boar or the Stymphalian Birds) rather than big burly monster men.
Where ancient Greek heroes fight beast-men, those are literally beast-men. The Minotaur is the child of a woman and a bull. The centaurs, who are not evil monsters, are a cross between man and horse. The sirens are depicted as birds with human heads. The Sphinx has a lion's body and a woman's head (there was clearly something going on with bestiality in ancient times). The cyclops Polyphemus and the giant Antaeus, slain by Heracles, are porbably the only examples of "orcs" that could be plausibly identified in Greek mythology. And even those are not very orc-like. Why would memories of Neanderthals be recorded in myths and legends as one-eyed giants?
Now the tale of Antaeus is an interesting one: Heracles wrestles him and keeps winning but everytime Antaeus bounces back. At length Heracles realises that Antaeus is drawing power from the Earth. He grabs him by the waist and crushes him preventing him from touching the ground, and so he wins. There is a clear symbolism there, of victory over an enemy that draws his strength from the land. But what does it mean? Who was this enemy? It doesn't have to be another species: a more ancient tribe that pre-dated the tale will do fine. It's an interesting question but we will never know the answer. As with the Neanderthals, that should not be license to imagine whatver we fancy, though.
> Europeans defeated indigenous peoples throughout history, by superior technology and numbers.
Oh boi, not this horrible and flawed argument again. People have learned nothing from recent research into the impact of diseases in that history? Popular books like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and "1491" give you a view into these matters and provide one with references for their sources for research.
This idea of "Europe won because it is good at tech" really needs to die. The best weapon Europe had when fighting indigenous people in the Americas was actually various kinds of pox.
Why not both? The Conquistadors had guns and steel armour and swords, versus the Mesoamericans' copper, bronze and obsidian weapons plus bows & atlatls. Technologically, the Spanish had the advantage, and won militarily. In addition, the indigenous population was ravaged by disease brought by the colonisers.
Having better weapons is not an argument to ethnic superiority. It comes down to geography and history. The myth that needs to die is that the Mesoamerican civilisations were inferior because they didn't use wheeled transport; that's a Eurocentric idea based on the idea of the wheel as "fundamental" technology, even though they help on Europe's mostly-flat land and not Mesoamerica's mountainous and heavily forested territory.
That's interesting what you say about the wheel because the narrative I've heard is instead about gunpowder: the Conquistadores had gunpowder weapons that frightened the Aztecs and dispersed their armies without a fight, even though they had numbers on their side. I've also heard the same thing about horses: the Aztecs were afraid of horses and so broke and run at the sight of the Spaniards on horses.
These are not very well supported by first-hand accounts, for example in my favourite history book of all times, The Conquest of Mexico, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo (one of Hernan Cortes' men), there are many descriptions of battles between the Conquistadores and the Aztecs and the Aztecs don't run away - the gunpowder and the horses make a great impression on them but they stay their ground and fight. Except, in Bernal Diaz's telling anyway, they are used to fighting ritualistic battles, where the point was to capture some of the enemy's men, to later offer up as sacrifices to their gods. So the Aztecs are playing for points, in a sense, whereas the Spaniards are fighting dirty and going for the throat. Obviously, the Spaniards have the tactical advatage and it's not because of their weapons and armour, or their steeds.
Another detail almost always overlooked is that the Spaniards were allied to local Mexicans that were enemy to the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, particularly the people of Tlascalla. So in many of the battles with the Aztecs, the few hundred Conquistadores Cortes has with him are joined by thousands of Tlascallan warriors. This information is almost always left out of the narrative of the overwhelming technological superiority of the Conquistadores that allowed them to win despite being fewer in number. In truth, the forces of the Conquistadores joined by the Tlascallans and other enemies of the Aztecs were comparable in size with those of the Aztecs.
Finally, when the Aztecs decide enough is enough and start fighting for real, the Conquistadores run for their lives. This is the tale of La Noche Triste, The Sad Night, when the Conquistadores try to escape Tenochtitlan under cover of darkness with all the gold they've looted from Moctezuma's vaults, after he was killed (by his own subjects, according to Bernal Diaz, but, well... he would say so, wouldn't he?). They are chased through the streets of the city by the Aztecs who are in open revolt and catch and kill them one-by-one. Most drown in the waters around the city, many weighed down by the loot they cling to, stubbornly. Just a few barely escape with their skins and some of the gold. It's a sad night indeed- and it really puts the kibosh on the Conquistadores' crushing superiority, technological or other.
I think La Noche Triste speaks to the superiority of infantry with melee weapons to cavalry with muskets in close quarters urban fighting. Tenochtitlan was an absolute maze, and the Aztec defenders knew it well because it was their home.
I do agree that the alliance with Tlaxcala is underplayed in the pop culture understanding of the conquest.
I don't remember this very well and my copy of Bernal Diaz's memoir is half a continent away, but I think that most of Cortes men were not "cavalry" as such. Some had horses but most were on foot. Also, I seem to remember the Aztecs that attacked them in Tenochtitlan were basically a mob at that point, armed with makeshift weapons. It goes without saying that they had the advantage of knowing their own city better than the enemy, but the general point is that they didn't fear the guns and horses of the Spaniards as much as is commonly believed.
Yeah, this hews pretty close to what I've heard; that the conquistadores acted mostly as a "catalyst to rebellion" for an enormous native population that hated the Aztecs, but felt powerless to overthrow them.
When these strange foreigners showed up and offered an alliance, their mysterious/inscrutable prowess (technology, foreign backing of unknown power, clear ability to ship in men and arms) helped give the rebels the confidence to give it a go.
But if the huge population of 'primitives' does not die out massively from disease, soon they are adopting the techniques and material of the 'advanced', no? Even if they can't readily adapt to mining, metalworking and smithing, they sure can steal and plunder weapons and horses and gradually become more and more competitive
Not to mention that guerilla warfare is effective like few other things
Primitives isn't the right word for the Mesoamericans. They were a socially advanced society; their circumstances just didn't lead them to develop the large scale military hardware and techniques that Europe did.
I would assume they did loot guns and horses from their defeated adversaries, yes. The only scenario in which that makes you more and more competitive is when you acquire comparable numbers of said resources, and can use them as effectively as an army that has been trained in their use. I don't think either is the case, but this is just me hypothesising because I only know the high level details of the conquest.
This comment is worded in such a way that I initially disbelieved it. After all, two of the three items in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" are technologies. I remember the book spending a lot of time on diseases, but also remember a lengthy description of Cortes' conquest of the Aztec's who had far superior numbers.
Apparently I remembered incorrectly, and the parent comment is correct. Here's a quote from the book:
> The importance of lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans' conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the batlefield from European guns and swords. Those germs undermined Indian resistance by killing most Indians and their leaders and by sapping the survivors' morale. For instance, in 1519 Cortes landed on the coast of Mexico with 600 Spaniards, to conquer the fiercely militaristic Aztec Empire with a population of many millions. That Cortes reached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, escaped with the loss of "only" two-thirds of his force, and managed to fight his way back to the coast demonstrates both Spanish military advantages and the initial naivete of the Aztecs. But when Cortes's next onslaught came, the Aztecs were no longer naive and fought street by street with the utmost tenacity. What gave the Spaniards a decisive advantage was smallpox, which reached Mexico in 1520 with one infected slave arriving from Spanish Cuba. The resulting epidemic proceeded to kill nearly half of the Aztecs, including Emperor Cuitlahuac. Aztec survivors were demoralized by the mysterious illness that killed Indians and spared Spaniards, as if advertising the Spaniards' invincibility. By 1618, Mexico's initial population of about 20 million had plummeted to about 1.6 million.
True, but from what I understand the Europeans would probably have won anyway. In 1500 AD, indigenous Americans had about the same level of technological development that Europeans had had in 1500 BC, so I suspect that unfortunately even had diseases not played a role, it probably would just have been a matter of time before the Europeans managed to bring over enough people to overrun the Americas. It would have taken longer but I doubt that the indigenous Americans would have been able to adopt European technology fast enough and on a large enough scale to beat the Europeans back.
Now on the other hand, if Europe had suffered something like 50%+ death from American diseases while indigenous Americans suffered much lower death tolls from European disease - in other words, the reverse of what actually happened - then I figure that all bets would have been off. In that timeline maybe the indigenous Americans would have had enough room to maneuver that they would have been able to adopt European technologies in time to defend their lands.
>Now on the other hand, if Europe had suffered something like 50%+ death from American diseases while indigenous Americans suffered much lower death tolls from European disease - in other words, the reverse of what actually happened - then I figure that all bets would have been off.
The Black Plague killed off 50% of the population in quite a few countries and it didn't result in any invasion. I'm not sure the rationale stands without a technological imbalance as a basis.
Because it also hit the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Where would the invader come from? They were also dying of it too. In China alone there were about 40% dead according to recent estimates. The Black Plague was not restricted to Europe, it came to Europe and it wrecked nations everywhere. You can't have people invading, if these potential invaders are dealing with the same plague.
Poland ! I was alluding to the fact that the Plague wasn't uniform and that if demographic depression were an incentive to invade by itself, places that were unaffected (like Poland) would have expanded.
Instead Poland repeated the exact same pattern that had been pioneered in Gaul, then picked up by the Germans : expend East, where the Plague didn't have much effect, into non-Christian land and implement literate administration, centralized religion and feudalism.
The fact is the Black Plague didn't pose an existential threat in Western Europe, and it seems even else in other urban regions. I remember a historian, perhaps Le Goff or Leroy-Ladurie, remarking that the most astonishing thing about the Plague is that it changed nothing. The archives looked the same before and after. Just business as usual. In that sense the Thirty Years War was far more destructive.
All that to say that disease, as large as it gets, in itself isn't enough to sink well established institutions. And it's not a good enough argument to strip the Spanish of any credit in the conquest of the Americas.
You might enjoy reading 1491 and learning more about the cultures of the Americas. There is way more there than "tech from 1500 BC", and I don't feel like just quoting from the book because I want people to go read it.
It is important to realise that there are recent estimates that mention 9 out of 10 people all over the Americas dying of diseases. Remember that diseases travel faster than European invaders, so by the time they arrive at those locations the population is already in kind of chaos and traumatised.
There were a lot of people living in the Americas. A lot. The first chronicles mention large cities and populations, other chroniclers passing the same regions some years later see nothing. In certain areas, such as the Amazon, where people built things out of wood, almost nothing remains.
It is also important to remember than in many cultures, part of the healing process for a disease involved family and loved ones doing wakes and staying close to the afflicted. This causes a havoc as contagious diseases such as pox spread and claimed whole families, and then the next family, and so on. Pox was not common, nor was flu.
Many variations of pox are associated with use beasts of burden, most of the indigenous cultures didn't use them. So no resistance to cowpox, smallpox, etc
> I doubt that the indigenous Americans would have been able to adopt European technology fast enough to succeed in beating the Europeans back.
Please, read that book. You'll see the indigenous population of North America adapting quite fast to European technology to the point of managing sailboats. Also, sidenote the Spanish first met the Inca not on land but on the sea, they bumped into one of their large sailboats. Europeans adopting indigenous technologies in South America because theirs didn't work. This happened everywhere. Everyone was adapting.
Many of us learned different stuff in school and uni, mostly because it takes a very long time for research to trickle into school curriculum, and also because of the bias of those telling the stories who century after century create a narrative that favours them.
There a lot of recent research that throws away a lot of what was taught to me in school. Unfortunately, the usual reaction from people is that "this is not what I was taught, so it must be wrong!" and then proceed to repeat fairy tales about technology superiority which is a positivist way of seeing things that is very flawed.
"Beating Europeans back" is not the only possible outcome. It is not about beating people back to the other side of the Atlantic. If so many native people had not died of diseases, the Americas would look much different today.
>Remember that diseases travel faster than European invaders, so by the time they arrive at those locations the population is already in kind of chaos and traumatised.
What I got from that book was even more surprising. It's that by the time the Europeans got there the devastation had gone. The chaos and trauma one night expect from a horrific war had gone, like Europe 50 years on from WW2, this was over 150 (I think) later, so now instead was jungle, small villages, tiny populations. The scars back then were not visible to the Europeans, as disease hit these people a couple or more generations ago.
I think that the native Americans would have managed to learn how to use European technology just fine, but I think that it would have been hard for them to build the necessary infrastructure to mass-produce it in time. Maybe if they had managed to ally with one group of Europeans long enough to hold the others off and give them the needed time, it would have worked.
I doubt that, because of the disease factor. From what I remember of my high school history classes, the English and French were fairly closely matched in strength and fought each other for control of North America. The French did try to ally with the Huron confederacy, while the English traded with the natives but didn't get into serious negotiations until later. Their Alliance didn't help the Franco-Huron faction much, and though it wasn't mentioned I imagine that one factor would have been that pox can spread to one's allies more easily than people one is wary of.
Now, had Europeans had a germ theory of disease by then, maybe that dynamic could have turned out different...
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a good book, really enjoyable read. But speaking to historian friends of mine has given me the impression that it's not highly regarded in those circles.
Unfortunately I can't give any criticisms beyond that because it has been a long time since I had those discussions and the details just don't come to mind, so I guess really what I'm saying is though it's a popular and enjoyable read, perhaps take the narrative it gives with a pinch of salt, perhaps dig into the current historical perspective and see where it differs?
One of the remaining gems within my reddit horizons is the /r/AskHistorians subreddit, which maintains an FAQ that (amongst many other things) contains a plethora of academic responses to GGS. I have included below a link to the top and presumably most comprehensive response [1] for those who are interested.
A serious question. Why didn't the opposite happen? Why wouldn't the arriving Europeans drop like flies after encountering foreign pathogens thus killing off the entire conquest?
Well there was/is syphilis which is theorized to originate in the Americas and killed millions when it broke out in Europe. Apparently was more also infectious in the beginning and only turned into an STD later-on.
But Eurasia had a far larger landmass and population so there was a larger chance for nasty diseases to develop.
Most very dangerous transmittable diseases (like covid, TB, small pox), all moved from animals to human. Virus' in general evolve to not be particularly deadly, they can't spread if they kill the host. So the ones that do kill you, basically jump from one species to ours, and turn out to be very deadly. Bovine TB isn't a huge deal for cows, in the same way a cold isn't for us, but it'll really mess a person up.
Eurasia had much better options for domesticating a wide variety animals, so in general people lived in closer proximity to lots of animals, and generally unhygienic to boot. Which all lead to more diseases spreading over.
The America's only had a few domesticated species that deadly viruses could hop from.
It's really a function of the amount of species that can be domesticated, the Americas has only few of them. Domesticated species end up living in close proximity to humans and create a perfect environment for disease.
There were diseases in the Americas, they were deadly too. One thing to consider is how they spread and if they are contagious between humans. Malaria is horrible, but you don't catch it from other people, pox on the other hand will spread between humans. This is just one example. Being mostly exposed to nasty diseases that are not contagious will lead a culture to have different behaviour when dealing with the sick. These practices will often involve taking close care of the sick. Such practices will prove horrible for dealing with highly lethal contagious diseases from Europe.
(Not an expert, I just happen to have read a fair bit about the topic, grain of salt highly recommended)
Cities. Very deadly pandemics generally come from diseases that jump from another species to humans.
It is not advantageous for a virus to have a very high lethality, for any parasite there is no advantage in killing large numbers of your host. It's the diseases that are kind of new to the host that can be more lethal.
This jump of a disease from one species to another happens more easily when there is a lot of close contact between them. Large cities where humans lived with animals, and in not-very sanitary conditions, were a perfect ground for this.
In America cities appear to be less dense, and animal husbandry was way less extended (AFAIK, llamas and alpacas are the only animals domesticated in America).
"Guns, germs snd Steel" book makes an argument that European population evolved higher levels of immunity to the pathogens because of population density, especially in the cities.
Population density and wars for land and resources, book argues, also propelled the development of warfare tech ("guns and steel")
The book mentions population density but quickly discards population density as the primary factor. Instead it focuses on domesticated animals. Eurasians had many domesticated animals and often lived in close quarters with them. The New World had an extreme paucity of domesticable animals and therefore much less exposure to disease vectors and therefore no major disease capable of wiping out populations. (pg 212-213)
Yes, that is key! The lack of beasts of burden and domesticated animals in the Americas. People often overlook this when talking about "how could a whole continent be wiped out by pox"
I read that it was because Europeans lived in wider settlement so they were more exposed to serious pathogens and had the opportunity to develop immunity. When they met society that lived in scarce group, they exposed them too quickly, which resulted in mass deaths.
Maybe a smaller pool of diseases: nasty ones like pox, black death and cholera were from Europe and nearby parts of Africa and Asia. Accumulated "wealth" in the immune system.
I mean the theory in TFA is talking about Neantherdals evolving in Ice Age Europe but somehow that's related to the human genetic bottleneck that had to have had occurred in Africa to apply to all humans unless there's new origin of emergence and migration I didn't know about. The whole theory is bathed in a casual Eurocentrism, we don't even get a reference to a non-European creature of fantasy fitting these traits, we're just sorta assuming this is the case that they're all actually approximate.
Whatever was constitutive for human beings in the period of our dwindling numbers happened in Africa
Acknowledging the weight of passive factors (disease) shouldn't be at the cost of disqualifying the role of active ones like technology (military, political, administrative, trades).
The Spanish had plenty of military engagements in the early colonization of the Americas that were easily solved purely because of their overwhelming technological advantages.
That is the biased narrative that we have been told for centuries, and it doesn't match recent research. Diseases happened first, they travel faster. The population affected devolves into chaos as disease often kills 9 in 10 and leave them without ruling and without those with specialised knowledge. Basically society is broken, the traumatised survivors are the ones that face the Europeans.
> military, political, administrative, trades
The civilisations of the Americas were trading with each other. Many of them had highly structured political and administrative centers. Just research the Inka for example, they had an administrative structure that in many ways is better than their European counterparts, a good example is how they eliminated hunger in the Empire. They had mechanisms in place to prevent the population dying of starvation, they were able to feed their whole Empire, that is not easy and requires a ton of accounting and planning.
Do not dismiss the civilisations of the Americas, and think that there is a ladder of evolution in which Europe is somehow higher. These civilisations were very advanced, and had they been able to survive in their own path, who knows where we'd be.
As for military, just check how fast the Spanish conquistadors changed from their equipment and garments to the native ones because they were better suited for work in the tropical climate, and how bitter were the confrontations with the pockets of resistance.
Disease is the key factor. Recent figures such as 90% dying from diseases is a devastating blow to any civilisation, there is no recovering from that.
The civilizations in the Americas were certainly large and complex, but in almost all areas of technology they were thousands of years behind Europeans. It's a real stretch to label them "advanced".
I agree with the majority of what you're saying, but like so many wars throughout history, surely superior weaponry played a huge role in the conquests? Particularly here where the difference is so large. Not the only role, certainly, and maybe not the biggest (compared to disease), but a very sizable one still. I struggle to imagine Spanish success had the weapons been reversed.
By "superior weaponry" playing a role in the conquest, are you referring to Russia's successful conquest of Afghanistan in the 1980, or to the United State's successful conquest of Afghanistan in the 2000's?
This seems to me to be a very disingenuous comparison and you're not responding to my question. Are you seriously arguing that superior weaponry doesn't help in a war? I think it's reasonably clear that the situation of the Aztecs differs to the conquest of Afghanistan not only by many hundreds of years.
I am not making the statement that all winning a war takes is superior weaponry, as your strawman would suggest. It doesn't take any one factor. Many factors add up. I'm saying this is one of them.
these conflicts cannot really be compared how you are comparing them. Also it should be noted that US lost 2,420 soldier in Afghanistan, probably 50 thousand or more Taliban died, and 200+ thousand civilians.. US may have not 'won' the war but Afghanistan sure did lose.
"Oh boi, not this horrible and flawed argument again" Starting out with your point written like this seems aggressive and patronizing.
"This idea of "Europe won because it is good at tech" really needs to die. " Because you don't like it?
I disagree. Spanish Conquistadors were some of the greatest and most experienced warriors in all of history, and were trained veterans of the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Why people want to discount the fact that obsidian shatters on steel, Spanish had shock cavalry, dogs, and just the thought of hearing and seeing a gun go off for the first time is wild. Disease catalyzed things for sure, and is definitely one of the biggest factors in the speed in which the conquest of the Americas happned, but to entirely discount The Spanish Empires elite warriors seems like a revisionist cope, because you want to demonize colonizers.
Only one Spaniard was injured and 2000+ Incan warriors were killed, the rest taken prisoner. That probably would nothave happened without cannons, horses, and swords
Actually, those were not warriors. Note the listings of the Stength of the belligerents in the information box, on the right of the article (on the right as seen in a PC browser):
>> 3,000–8,000 unarmed personal attendants/lightly armed guards [2]
The opening paragraph of the wikipedia article also makes it clear that the "battle" was more like a slaughter:
>> The Battle of Cajamarca also spelled Cajamalca[4][5] (though many contemporary scholars prefer to call it Massacre of Cajamarca)[6][7][8] was the ambush and seizure of the Inca ruler Atahualpa by a small Spanish force led by Francisco Pizarro, on November 16, 1532. The Spanish killed thousands of Atahualpa's counselors, commanders, and unarmed attendants in the great plaza of Cajamarca, and caused his armed host outside the town to flee.
>> 3,000–8,000 unarmed personal attendants/lightly armed guards [2]
Wikipedia said they had Knives and ropes
Almost all medieval battles end with routes and slaughter. What I am saying is 168 were able to take 5000 prisoners without the help of advanced technology?
How do you even know that? Text says they were armed with knives. And what do you mean "civilians" in this context? The article lists them as armed belligerents.
Well, I'm going by what the Wikipedia article says, that they were "Atahualpa's counselors, commanders, and unarmed attendants". According to the article the "armed host" was stationed outside the city and fled when the emperor was killed.
Cortes was an opportunistic lawyer/notary he had no military experience before the conquest of Mexico and I’m not sure there is any evidence that he had any military education.
Yeah he turned out to be a fairly competent commander but it was main his diplomatic skill that allowed him to conquer Mexico. There is no way he would have won without the tens of thousands of native allies that fought alongside the Spanish.
I think you are missing the point entirely, I am saying that there is a thing called collective military knowledge, The Spanish had experience in fighting wars for many years. This knowledge of tactics and techniques is passed on through training.
And I'm saying that virtually every country on Earth has some military knowledge. You really think that France/the German principalities/England/the Ottoman Empire/the PL Commonwealth/the Kievan Rus'/... just forgot everything after a war, and that Spain, miraculously, was the only country to understand that experience is a thing?
And do you believe that the Southern American populations religiously waited for the White Man to bring them the concept of armed conflicts, and that they lived in perfect harmony until then, miraculously oblivious to the concept of conquest and imperialism?
I think you may be putting words in my mouth and getting pretty worked up, because I didn't say what you are implying. I am just stating(for the third time now) that Spain was at the cutting edge in 15th century warfare. Regarding your last paragraph, which is on some other tangent, but since you brought it up, it is known that the Aztecs and Mexica had a very different view on the purpose of warfare.
While it’s true that the conquistadors had immense success in their initial encounters with the natives, the Aztecs would have adapted eventually to counter the Spanish had they not been crippled by the European diseases. This seems to have already been the case in the siege of Tenochtitlan where the Spanish suffers huge casualties despite having similar numbers (together with their allies) to the Aztecs. This was the case with many of the North American tribes and even with the diseases it took the Spanish another 150 years to subjugate all of the Mayan cities.
I’m not saying that they would have defeated the Spanisn in the long-term but conquering and permanently occupying all the native states in Central America would have significantly more expensive for the Spanish. Without the diseases I think it’s not unlikely the Spanish empire in the new world would have more closely resembled British India i.e. a bunch of semi independent states and directly controlled areas with the majority of population still preserving their culture and language. And in general European colonization would of the new world would have been more similar to what happened in the rest of Asia and Africa.
The Sapa Inka and his court were all wiped out by pox in 1527, then the successor died too of pox, then their successor also died of pox as well.
Then the remaining of the court had to choose a new Inka, and we get to civil war between the new Inka (who was a teenager) and Atawallpa. The whole Empire was already in civil war for three years before the Spanish arrive, and the diseases were spreading through their lands faster than the Spanish. The last battle of the civil war counted 35 thousand dead according to recent research, and that is only the final battle, the one that gave victory to Atawallpa. This battle was few months before Pizarro appeared on the scene.
It was on the same year that the Spanish arrive in their land, that Atawallpa became Inka. Yes, this was not a stable Empire that met Pizarro, it was an Empire just out of a brutal civil war, whose new government didn't had any time to adjust or consolidate.
Atawallpa tried to manipulate the Spanish after seeing their lust for gold, he was arrogant. The Spanish didn't win because horses and guns, the Spanish won because the Empire was in shambles, because Atawallpa thought he could manipulate those white skinned people, because pox killed a ton of people including the ruling elite before the Spanish arrived.
> The real question is why — why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous?
I assume that most myths of orcs, elves, dwarves, vampires, etc. were based on ugly-looking Homo sapiens as opposed to other hominid species. Humans have also had a strong incentive to (literally) dehumanize other tribes of humans.
This article states that humans were likely pushed to near extinction by Neanderthals, with one figure being the at one point we were reduced to 50 individuals (??!!). How is this possible considering no Neanderthals ever lived in Africa? Were there periods where humans were also absent from that continent? Seems unlikely...
If this is being presented as a work of speculative fiction, it's pretty neat. If it's being presented as serious academic work, it's asinine bullshit.
So I think this argument can be broken up into two parts: (1) that all of these different myths and legends across cultures (Cyclops, bugbear, ogre, oni, etc.) have a common root, and (2) that Neanderthals are the source of this common root. This article, and most of the criticism, are focused on the second part of that argument, largely because that's where most of the concrete evidence and facts can be considered. But there's a lot to criticize about the first part of that argument as well. There's so many differences between all of these different stories that I can't really imagine there is a common origin point going back tens of thousands of years. I mean the only common thread here is a large humanoid creature that eats people, and even that vague description leaves out more than a few of the mythological creatures referenced in the article. Is it so hard to believe that people could come up with such an idea on their own, independently and without a real-life example to work with?
Every article that begins with "Every human culture" should be considered as BS right away...
edit: But after reading, even if most of the article is heavily biased, not prudent, etc. It's still interesting and thought-provoking. I might give the book a go.
edit2: A better and most interesting point of view can be found in Julien d'Huy "Cosmogonies", which parallelized the corpus of myths and legends to genetic migrations - with the help of a bit of AI. Once you validate the theory that myths survive better than languages, and that they evolve with time, it's super interesting.
One really cool thing with global warming is the old stuff frozen in the glaciers and ice slowly being unearthed. There might just be a neanderthal or two, or some of the other early hominids. It would answer a great many questions and provide invaluable material for genetic modification.
We've got plenty of examples of ordinary humans in documented history being mistaken for gods or supernatural beings. People report seeing ghosts, monsters, aliens and such all the time even now. There are low budget documentary TV shows about these sightings on the schedule constantly.
Claims about skeletal differences are probably pretty well supported by physical evidence, and again, it's a reasonably small difference in size and scale.
Differences in facial structure seem likely just from differences in skeletal structure, our face maps pretty closely to skeptical structure. But also, we can see pretty wide genetic variation in facial structure in humans, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Pastrana
Humans are pretty cannibalistic already, I don't buy his evidence that neanderthals were, but a human could survive on an almost entirely meat diet, no reason to think neanderthals weren't more inclined to.
Pupil shape seems like the farthest out there, but there is variation in pupil shape within the human population too. It's plausible... again I don't really buy his evidence as proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloboma
In general I don't think this article is meant to say "they looked exactly like this", but "they probably looked monstrous", if it turns out there pupils were the same as humans, but also they had sharper more claw like nails, the point wouldn't change in the slightest.
I think many comments (and also researchers in the comment articles) are rejecting the idea of an troll like neanderthal too fast.
Yes, some details are rather fantasy then based on real research, but the overall idea makes sense.
Controversy around why the neanderthal went extinct exists for a while now.
I think it is very unlikely that a successful human-like species goes extinct without a fight. They where stronger and bigger then homo sapiens.
If it is true that they replaced homo sapiens as the dominant species for a while then maybe they are not the friendly giants they are thought to be. Even homo sapiens cannibalize, so that some physically stronger Neanderthals would also do this seems not unlikely.
The last neanderthals might have lived in relic populations in north eurasia until several thousand years ago without leaving much archeological evidence.
Also oral traditions might survive for very very long.
But yeah, maybe it is not so politically correct to 'talk bad' about a race that fell victim to genocide. We rather focus on the positive things about them.
By which I mean: if we interbred with neanderthals so would our myths and folklore.
As a hypothetical example: if, say, a neanderthal mother brought up interbred children it would be her myths about monsters that would be likely to be passed on.
https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2010/10/killer-neandertal...