I always thought of the interbreeding of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals as being a sort of “one off event” or something. I mean, obviously not literally just once, but maybe some little era, part of the process of us wiping them out.
But, 7000 years is a while. I mean, how long has our current civilization lasted? I guess it depends on how you define it. But certainly that coexistence, whatever it was, lasted longer than any countries or other institutions have…
There's something endlessly humbling about looking beyond a human lifespan. It's at least one of the reasons I find the Long Now Foundation so intriguing.
This seems to be very dismissive of all the physical evidence we _do_ have.
Text isn't the only way to store information, i.e. we can draw lots of conclusions from fossils, ruins or even sediment layers etc.
If written records are to be believed, Earth has seen tons of supernatural beings, dragons, giant fish, entire Middle East being flooded, etc. This is not counting humans being produced from clay, etc.
What passes for scientific evidence in history is something that cross-checks with a bunch of other things that are dated reliably, through multiple sources, astronomy, and methods from other hard sciences.
It should also be noted another paper also came out today with new ancient DNA from a modern human whose bones carbon dated to around 45kya. The data suggests the individual was only 80 generations from the Neanderthal interbreeding event suggesting it happened around 45-49 kya. The event may have happened over a few generations realistically but I think 7000 years is unlikely due to the rapid expansion of humans out of Africa (or to be more precise an extremely successful expansion of a population of modern humans whose signal is difficult to filter out) all sharing this same introgression signature.
I always thought of the interbreeding of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals as being a sort of “one off event” or something. I mean, obviously not literally just once, but maybe some little era, part of the process of us wiping them out.
But, 7000 years is a while. I mean, how long has our current civilization lasted? I guess it depends on how you define it. But certainly that coexistence, whatever it was, lasted longer than any countries or other institutions have…