I mean, racism and people using anthropology to try and act superior to each other aside (which, I will grant, is a pretty big fucking aside): neanderthals were crazy strong and had bodies which had much more "explosive" muscle fibres than that of modern humans (or H. Sapiens of the era).
They, of course, had significant misgivings which likely led to their extinction- but I wonder how a stocky, heavy-browed, big-toothed, barrel-chested bloke with no chin but a jaw like a breeze block Neanderthal would get along in todays world. They're built for Rugby.
After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies. Neanderthals didn't get a rebrand because white people found out they shared DNA; the bad reputation was always built on dodgy science that was already being dismantled.
The whole "brutish caveman" thing traces back to 1908, when a French palaeontologist called Marcellin Boule got his hands on a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton and reconstructed it as a stooped, bent-kneed, gorilla-like creature[0]. Problem is, he got it completely wrong; the skeleton had severe arthritis, which he either missed or ignored, and he projected Victorian-era ideas about racial hierarchy onto the bones. It took until the 1950s for anyone to seriously challenge it[1], by which point the image was baked into popular culture.
The thing is though that the prejudice didn't even start with Boule. From the very first specimen found in 1856[2], scientists were already calling Neanderthals primitive because 19th-century science was obsessed with ranking humans into racial categories. Neanderthals were useful as a "below us" rung on a ladder that was already bullshit. So yeah, the video's not wrong that racial ideology played a role, but framing it as "white people discovered shared DNA and then rebranded Neanderthals" is a bit too neat. The rehabilitation started decades before the DNA findings, because the racial hierarchy framework that created the caricature fell apart first.
What we actually know now[3] is that they used pigments and art, made tools, cared for their sick, buried their dead, and survived wildly different climates for hundreds of thousands of years. They weren't H. Sapiens' thick cousins; they were a genuinely capable parallel branch of humanity that we happened to absorb (and probably helped push out, though the exact mechanism is still debated[4]).
The DNA thing is interesting but it's more of a "well, this is awkward" footnote to a correction that was already happening, it doesn't seem to be the cause of it.
>> After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies.
You are approaching this from the scientific angle. The reality is even worst that the video implies.
As soon as Neanderthals became genetic relatives of many living non-Africans ,-) Western portrayals became more willing to imagine them as human like, and even ...white.
The reality is that it's far more complicated than you make it seem.
Archaeology has not been taken over by WYT racist plotting. Neanderthalis did get an undeserved reputation for being thick and dumb. We're correcting that.
And, some people are grabbing onto bits and pieces, and trying to reconstruct that into some racist BS. Similarly, certain things from Norse history are being coopted, but that doesn't mean every new discovery or article about viking exploits is inherently part of a racist conspiracy.
Fair point, and those papers are interesting (particularly the first one, which directly talks about this..).
I think we might be talking about two different things though. The scientific evidence for Neanderthal sophistication was there from the late 1950s; Straus and Cave reexamined the La Chapelle skeleton I spoke about earlier and basically said "this fella could ride the subway in new york and nobody would look twice", the Shanidar burials showed care for the sick, and there were decades of tool and burial evidence piling up after that. So the science was there, it just wasn't penetrating into popular culture.
And I think that's where your sources make a good point, the DNA discovery in 2010 probably did act as the catalyst for the popular rehabilitation. It gave journalists and TV producers a reason to care about something archaeologists had been saying for decades. Whether that reason worked because of racial identification specifically or because "you have caveman DNA" is just a more compelling headline is probably where we'd disagree; I suspect it's both, honestly.
Where I'd still push back a little is on the framing that this was purely a "white people found out they're related, so rebrand" phenomenon. The racial hierarchy framework that created the original caricature was already academically dead well before 2010, the correction was happening regardless, it maybe just wasn't getting airtime.
I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
For any given IQ test, the norming sample is taken once. So if everyone gets twice as smart as before, everyone's IQ, as measured by any existing IQ test, would go up.
Look up the Flynn effect ... it refers to an actual change in performance.
That the scores on a given IQ test are occasionally renormalized so that the mean is 100 has no bearing on whether "IQ is a statistical distribution", whether intelligence or whatever the heck IQ measures can be measured absolutely, or on the validity and meaning of the previous statements by Epa095, sokoloff, and irdc and why they are or are not true.
If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, all of their IQs will shoot up until the scoring of every IQ test is renormalized to a mean of 100.
I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise.
It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”.
Maybe if we are a bit more generous with others we won’t be compelled to be so pretentious and denigrating by saying things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way”, about something someone said and believes.
Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.
It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."
This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)
I wouldn't give the Flynn effect a lot of weight. The numbers are from IQ tests. No one knows what they measure, they are tuned for a population, for the most of time the Flynn effect had place IQ test scores were used for hiring, school placement, and policy decisions (so Goodheart's Law was at play, how'd you think?).
It is a curious effect, I agree, I'd like to know why it was so, but probably I will not know for sure (I'm a big fan of a scientific method, but I don't believe it is up to a task), and so I personally prefer just ignore it.
Are you suggesting our brains are getting better? I find it far more likely that our improved education techniques and our skyrocketing access to information as being the cause.
Socrates was partly right. I am deeply indebted to written notes on just about everything. Pre-literate societies often had excellent memories, and have to rely on them for survival not just culture bearing. The Polynesians had excellent navigation skills without writing. Desert societies can remember oases and routes etc sometimes relying on song to memorise them.
Firstly, this is completely orthogonal. But it's also improper reasoning.
If Neanderthal had bigger brains (they did) or had different cognitive abilities, there's a chance they were baseline smarter than homo sapiens at the time.
Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.
> average Neanderthal cranial capacity for females was 1300 cm3 and 1600 cm3 for males. [Modern humans, 1473 cm3.]
Nor the dude Neanderthals, since they were using the swollen brainparts for vision and coordination:
> Neanderthals had larger eyes and bodies relative to their height [...] when these areas were adjusted to match anatomically modern human proportions it was found Neanderthals had brains 15-22% smaller than in anatomically-modern humans.
Edit since I don't even agree with the concept: even if the extra capacity was differently distributed such that they had more ... powerful? ... executive functions, what's smartness? More imagination, OK, more self-restraint, more planning. More navel-gazing, more doubt, more ennui.
Or it could be more communication, often proposed as what gave sapiens the edge. Chattering bipeds. It's an association between the brain doing something and the species proliferating, that's what we're calling smart, but doing what? It could just mean our ancestors were compulsively busy. Same thing as smart, perhaps.
We will never get that the cranial volume is not the same as inteligence/brain function, or whatever you might call it. Reminder that Einstein brain was smaller than average, and female brain are smaller than male. Phrenology will haunt us forever, in one form or another.
Most likely, some Neanderthals were asimilated into modern humans, most were exterminated in tribal clashes. Reminder also that our almighty specie was almost wiped out from history around 800,000 years ago (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487), being the most intelligent organism ever existed.
I don't think that matches archeological findings. From what I understand the reason neanderthals are understood to have been less intelligent than sapiens is because neanderthal tools found are cruder than sapien tools from around the same periods and areas.
> Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.
Considering most human groups have a % of Neanderthal DNA, they didn't exactly lose... Based on the % of Neanderthal vs. Sapien DNA, it seems Neanderthals were simply outnumbered.
Are numbers everything? Are sardines more evolved than whales?
Anyhow, the traditional view is that Neanderthals were brutes who were actually out-competed and killed off by Sapiens. The more realistic view considering the evidence is that Neanderthals were much closer to Sapiens, equally or even more sophisticated, but less numerous, and thus their contribution to our DNA is smaller than Sapiens.
But do keep in mind the Neanderthals live on because Europeans and Asians are all part Neanderthal.
I think especially given TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators who occasionally raped human women.
I don’t much believe the friendly smiling museum depictions that have lately become fashionable. Their eyes alone would have made them something you didn’t want to run into at night.
The minuscule sample of tools we have are more primitive, but we don't have any examples of their wooden tools, nor any trace of most of their activities, languages, rites, etc. They could have invented animal husbandry and wool spinning and build awesome wooden cities and we have no way to know because everything would have disappeared without a trace, crushed by glaciers of later ages. We know almost nothing of them.
The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it.
Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?
Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important.
Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their genocidal policy recommendations seem less scientifically sound, so they put a lot of effort into denying that IQ scores can be improved by interventions. Even though they have been, for decades.
It seems obvious that IQ test scores can be improved with interventions and further that actual [as opposed to measured] general intelligence can be affected by environmental factors that shape whether the brain develops under good, neutral, or damaging conditions (nutrition, sleep, language usage, stress, etc.).
With all the energy that's been spent on the topic, I'm slightly surprised that this isn't entirely settled by now and any opposing view being relegated to fringe/flat-earth territory.
I don't see why it's surprising: IQ is one of the few tools that modern scientific racists have in their toolbox. One wouldn't expect them to let such trifling concerns as "evidence" and "testable models with successful predictions" take that away from them.
There is such a thing as general intelligence which differs between different people. Arguing that IQ isn't real because IQ tests are imperfect, is like arguing in the year 1500 that temperature isn't real because all thermometers are imperfect.
Our lack of ability to precisely measure something does not mean the underlying thing is not real. There is such a thing as general intelligence which correlates strongly with almost every type of performance and life outcomes.
IQ tests are useful for measuring features of populations, but they're a very noisy measure of an individual's "general intelligence" (if such a thing even exists), with several confounders: whether you've trained to pass IQ tests, TDTPSATDIBCA [1], how well-rested you are, how stressed you are, how hungry you are, whether environmental conditions are distracting you… Many of these are also a factor in group averages, although in the context of measuring children's educational attainment, this is a feature rather than a bug: in that setting, IQ tests are a good measure (to the extent that educational attainment is something we want to be optimising for, which is another question entirely).
However, in this thread, we were discussing "the typical racist's use of IQs". Nobody was "arguing that IQ isn't real": you brought that up, unprompted. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The Flynn Effect covers from around 1930s to 1980s and the phase out of leaded gasoline happened during the very end of that timeline, meaning adolescent IQ measurements during the time the Flynn Effect covers would have all been raised in an environment where leaded fuel was either dominant or at least common.
If the measured cognitive abilities of a typical 2000-era Homo sapiens are statistically significantly different from 1900-era Homo sapiens, to me that casts some doubt as to how likely similar a 125K years ago and since out-competed species was.
Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?
(This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)
>Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?
I mean if you look at the rate of technology change and population growth, ya probably.
What we cannot compare is if the older species could assimilate all the information that we had to in that period. The vast wealth of knowledge of the human super-species wasn't avaliable then.