Neanderthals eaten by Syt's ancestors?

[Valmy]

"For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place,"

Aren't Neanderthals another species?

[Siege]

Stone age ethnic cleansing?

Come on, impossible.
Primitive people lived atuned with nature.
They protected their enviroment and loved each other.

Next, they are going to acusse the native-americans of waging war and cleansing smaller tribes.
Outrageous.

[Malthus]

"For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place,"

Aren't Neanderthals another species?

They are classified as one by many, but no one is sure. If we could interbreed with them, I suppose the answer is "no".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction_hypotheses

Ever since their discovery, both the Neanderthals place in the human family tree and their relation to modern Europeans have been hotly debated. At different times they have been classified as a separate species (Homo neanderthalensis) and as a subspecies of Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis).

I would think "cannibalism" isn't an inappropriate word in the circumstances.

[KRonn]

Stone age ethnic cleansing?

Come on, impossible.
Primitive people lived atuned with nature.
They protected their enviroment and loved each other.

Next, they are going to acusse the native-americans of waging war and cleansing smaller tribes.
Outrageous.

Yeah, this was going on in the Americas, and everywhere around the world and history for that matter, I'd say. Pre-historic humans would likely do the same.

[Valmy]

Stone age ethnic cleansing?

Come on, impossible.
Primitive people lived atuned with nature.
They protected their enviroment and loved each other.

Next, they are going to acusse the native-americans of waging war and cleansing smaller tribes.
Outrageous.

The patronising romanticisation of the Native peoples is pretty tiresome.  The 'noble savage' myth dies hard.

[Valmy]

I would think "cannibalism" isn't an inappropriate word in the circumstances.

Alrighty then.

Anyway if we can interbreed with them they almost assuredly just melded with the existing community over time.

[Malthus]

My own opinion is that the extinction was a very gradual process, rather than some violent campaign of "ethnic [or species] cleansing".

Whatever they were, Neanderthals were apex predators: evidence suggests they were more or less exclusively carnivorous. Apex predators are usually very vulnerable to ecosystem changes. Modern humans were omnivorous - capable of being apex predators it is true, but also capable of surviving on plants when meat wasn't available - hence greater population densities. I would imagine humans occasionally dined on neanderthals (and probably vice versa), but more significantly, any down-turn in the seasonal environment would hit the neanderthals harder: after each famine the percentage of humans was greater and the percentage of neanderthals was lesser; until after millennia, there just were no more neanderthals.

If you look at conflict among hunter-gatherers in the modern world at least, campaigns of outright extermination are pretty well non-existant - for one, that would require the sort of mass organization that in general hunter gatherers cannot do; secondly, hunter gatherers are usually very leery of tangling with such aggression except in the performance of a private blood feud (usually not uncommon) - fighting creatures that hunt for a living is, well, very dangerous. More likely is a sort of very gradual displacement, maybe aided by the occasional murder (and cannibalism).

[Malthus]

The patronising romanticisation of the Native peoples is pretty tiresome.  The 'noble savage' myth dies hard.

I think he was being sarcastic. 

[Malthus]

Stone age ethnic cleansing?

Come on, impossible.
Primitive people lived atuned with nature.
They protected their enviroment and loved each other.

Next, they are going to acusse the native-americans of waging war and cleansing smaller tribes.
Outrageous.

Yeah, this was going on in the Americas, and everywhere around the world and history for that matter, I'd say. Pre-historic humans would likely do the same.

Heh, when we think of primitive natives, we usually think of tribes who aren't really all that "primitive" at all - for one, most tribes we know of are actually agricultural (the notable exceptions being the indians of the West coast of north america).

Agriculturalists are usually much more violent and warlike than true hunter gatherers, by reason of higher population densities and greater degree of organization (again, west coast natives are the exception).

That doesn't mean that hunter gatherers are necessarily romantically peaceful by any means - only that their form of violence more resembles individual murdering and feuding a la the Hatfields and McCoys than what we wold call warfare or ethnic cleansing.

[Siege]

My own opinion is that the extinction was a very gradual process, rather than some violent campaign of "ethnic [or species] cleansing".

Agreed that it was probably gradual, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't violent or without cleansing.

The Neanderthals were shorter but probably much more physically stronger than humans. I wouldn't be surprised if every single encounter between the two was a violent one, due to the human intrinsical mistrust of strangers, let alone a clearly diferent species.

Also, the Neanderthals probably stole and raped a lot of human females. They were obviosly prettier and taller than their own ugly women.

When you look at the diferences between humans and neanderthals, I think there is a lot of potential for "violence-on-sight".

[viper37]

I kinda buy it, though I don't actually think there is any one reason (until recent history and man's encroachment on all) historically for species dying out. Maybe they went as far as they could, given being fodder for sneaky old humans, and whatever other factors may have been at play.

But I'd put money ofn Human beings "helping" evolution along, as we've done in so many cases.

But not every team member agrees. "One set of cut marks does not make a complete case for cannibalism," said Francesco d'Errico, of the Institute of Prehistory in Bordeaux. It was also possible that the jawbone had been found by humans and its teeth used to make a necklace, he said.


that's the important part, there's simply not enough data to make a conclusion right now.

[viper37]

Also, the Neanderthals probably stole and raped a lot of human females. They were obviosly prettier and taller than their own ugly women.

Assuming their standards of beauty are the same as ours...  A gorilla might not find your wife to be cute, yet, I'm pretty sure you think she is.  To a gorilla's eyes, a human female would probably look too thin and too frail.  So making the assumption that Neanderthals would automatically find human female 'pretty' is quite a subjective argument, and is totally baseless.

Besides, aren't you some kind of creationist?  Doesn't it contradict the Torah or some old book that there was a humanoïd species not totally human before we appeared?

When you look at the diferences between humans and neanderthals, I think there is a lot of potential for "violence-on-sight".

Not everyone is an Israeli, you know.  They don't find the urges to kill their neighbours on sight just because they don't have the exact same culture.

[Malthus]

My own opinion is that the extinction was a very gradual process, rather than some violent campaign of "ethnic [or species] cleansing".

Agreed that it was probably gradual, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't violent or without cleansing.

The Neanderthals were shorter but probably much more physically stronger than humans. I wouldn't be surprised if every single encounter between the two was a violent one, due to the human intrinsical mistrust of strangers, let alone a clearly diferent species.

Also, the Neanderthals probably stole and raped a lot of human females. They were obviosly prettier and taller than their own ugly women.

When you look at the diferences between humans and neanderthals, I think there is a lot of potential for "violence-on-sight".

Heh, different species may have different notions of beauty. You don't find gorillas raping humans much. 

On the contrary, I would expect that in general the two species (assuming that they are different species) probably avoided each other more often than they fought - that's the usual pattern with hunter-gatherer bands, who generally have elaborate territorial "rules" which divy up the landscape for purposes of exploitation (think of the notion of having "traplines". The local Algonkians where my family now has a cottage, for example, had traditional lakes and rivers which were the "property" of individual families for purposes of hunting, worked out over generations).

You forget that, to these people, the local neanderthals/humans would not necessarily be "strangers" - they grew up and lived in the same locations over generations. This would not of course have precluded a degree of conflict, but it would most probably have been more like a family feud than a military campaign of extermination - the latter was simply beyond the organizational capacity of humans living in bands of hunter-gatherers.

The sort of mass extermination and displacement familiar to us seems to be a product of the agricultural revolution - but that occurred long after the neanderthals were history.

[Valmy]

I think he was being sarcastic. 

I know.  I was agreeing with his point.

[Malthus]

Not everyone is an Israeli, you know.  They don't find the urges to kill their neighbours on sight just because they don't have the exact same culture.

Maybe they were like the Quebecouis, and tried to force the neanderthals to speak French. The horror of that fate did them in.