New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal 505
ThinkComp writes "In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus that has held for decades, recent research suggests that the traditional conception of Neanderthals being "stupider" than Homo sapiens may in fact be misleading. As articles about the research findings state, 'early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.' The data used in the study is available on-line along with a visual description of the process used."
Not Aggressive enough (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty simple. They weren't aggressive enough and we wiped them out through brute force like we do everything else that's different.
Big shock.
Debunk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
Collectively stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
We tend to try to compare individual intelligence but this is probably meaningless. The real reason for our species' success is not that we're individually brilliant, but that we are very good at dividing up large problems to solve collectively. This works thanks to our social instincts: respect for authority, sense of fairness, competitiveness, group belonging, etc. etc. The whole gamut, the reason why we read and post to Slashdot, because we're a social species and bloody good at it.
Neanderthals, larger, individually smarter, were presumably generalists that could do more by themselves but could not compete as well a group of modern humans, when it came to hunting and perhaps fighting.
Of course I'm defining "intelligence" very much in the sense of "how humanity thinks and solves problems". It's easy to claim superiority when one is the species writing history.
We aren't getting smarter. Not really. (Score:4, Insightful)
While there have been great advances, really we've been dealing with the same level of intelligence throughout history.
What has changed us is the quality of life.
When you don't have to slay a beast, drag water 4 miles and fend off hordes of enemies, robbers and the plague you can get 'more' done.
I'm sure in history there were many brilliant people. Some 4000 years ago with the documents we have people still had the same ideas, the same drama.
The Steven Hawking of 1000 years ago would starve or be stuck in a mud shack thinking about how to eat and if his family would leave him in the jungle. That doesn't happen in the developed countries.
After visiting the slums of Rwanda I often asked myself what these people would do if they had access to clean water. The answer - the same thing the Romans, the Greek, the Europeans, the French and the Americans. Build, expand and innovate.
D~y
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because Europe has a long history of peace and tranquility.
Africa currently lives in perfect communion with one another.
Russia is a paragon of pacifism.
And Asians are known for their brotherly love.
No brutal kidnappings and murder in Mexico.
And no death squads in South America.
Face it, humans are fundamentally flawed.
At least Antarctica is peaceful (but shrinking).
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. GP is both funny and insightful.
Ouch! (Score:3, Insightful)
...possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus...
Or a major contribution?
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:5, Insightful)
There are quite a few. We're just smart enough to build weapons, and we have the hands for it. Spiders, tasmanian devils, and blue jays aren't really capable of mining metal and forging weapons. Chimps sometimes organize to kill other chimps (and sometimes other neighboring apes).
Why do so many people think that nature is peaceful?
Re:No Surprise to Me (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the end result of a Politically Correct(tm) education, folks. Years of considering the strong and the weak as somehow magically "equal", and we arrive at this as the pinnacle (as in, highest point before we plunge off the evolutionary cliff) of Western culture.
I have to admit, though, that idea does logically derive from the false premise that we all have some innate equality and value. Still doesn't make it true, but a valid conclusion.
When you can see things from another individual's perspective and exchange ideas, it makes the world of difference.
No. You want to know why "we" won and the neanderthals ceased to exist? Because, at some point, we wanted their stuff, and they didn't want to give it to us. So, we applied our tool-making skills to the task of killing, and did it just a little bit better than they did. And then we wiped them out and took their stuff. Almost exactly the opposite of the "empathy" you would praise.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
Many long-held beliefs suggesting why the Neanderthals went extinct have been debunked in recent years. Research has already shown that Neanderthals were as good at hunting as Homo sapiens and had no clear disadvantage in their ability to communicate. Now, these latest findings add to the growing evidence that Neanderthals were no less intelligent than our ancestors.
It's evidence against the old, already-discarded concensus. So we can chalk this up to the lay media's love of turning articles into "scientific renegade tales", and inability to comprehend that science is continuously revising itself.
Re:Mod parent troll! (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly, he lacks the "sarcasm" tag at the end of his post when his tone makes him look completely serious.
Yes, the GGGP post left off this tag. Is that a requirement of sarcasm? Should "A Modest Proposal" be modded as "troll"? I say the GGGP should me modded funny. Or offtopic. But troll? Not so sure.
Re:Whew! (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you haven't seen the gangsta rap crowd walking around with their pants half way down their asses and 50 pounds of bling around their necks.
Re:We aren't getting smarter. Not really. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask yourself - why do we have clean water and they don't ? According to you there is no reason, as we all have the same innate intelligence. In the real world somebody has to organise the people to guarantee the clean water supply. And that's what's missing in places like Rwanda. They are too busy fighting amongst themselves to provide the basic necessities of life properly. So for them to progress to western levels they actually have to progress - it doesn't happen naturally by mere right of existence, or the existence of "intelligence".
And exporting better technology to these places might provide a short term boost, but is worthless if no-one is learning the basics to create their own technologies. Somebody has to be able to fix this technology or they are forever dependent on the west. At some stage thinking has to turn into doing.
I can imagine the scene in any western country if the government were to suddenly cease to exist. Things would just stop getting done. Sure the people with the knowledge would still exist, but the guy who fixes the water main isn't going to get paid for turning up every day. Pick your utility - the same situation applies. We would be back in the dark ages within 20 or 30 years, maybe excepting small pockets of rich people who could keep their lifestyle going. So like I said, back to the dark ages. And people still don't seem to realise that if you forget the mistakes of the past you get to repeat them.
All in all, intelligence is not the driving factor in "civilisation", cooperation is. And that cooperation usually has to be enforced, hence government. Your standard of living depends on the quality of the government, not how bright each individual is. Bad government uses guns to get its own way, so doesn't need a happy healthy population. Good government knows that it costs less to keep people happy than to fight them, and they can enjoy the benefits of that cooperation too.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:3, Insightful)
* There are 9 planets orbiting the sun. Turns out Pluto isn't even a planet.
That's not really a scientific fact though. It's not as if a planet is some universal constant that we happened to discover Pluto doesn't match. Stating so would be as illogical as stating that we recently discovered the Pluto wasn't "awesome anymore". It's just a classification method. Pluto could very well be validly classified a planet if we so wished.
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do so many people think that nature is peaceful?
Because we usually pacify it before taking a stroll and all the scary predators run away from us.
I can see why that could lead to a false impression.
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:3, Insightful)
For most people, "nature" means that beautiful park where they had that nice picnic last week. A more accurate example of nature is 5 hyenas ripping a lion apart. Probably not a good place for a picnic.
Evolution going forward? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe this just means that we're getting dumb and dumberer as time goes on (backwards evolution)?
This implies that there is some goal to evolution. I assure you that there is no forward or backward, just change. We might indeed be changing into something that is dumber but this is not backward progress ITS JUST CHANGE.
Re:Not Aggressive enough (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so. I think we just outfucked them and out ate them. Fucking and eating are the secret to a species survival, not warfare.
There was a song back in the stone age (late 1960s:)
I'm a Neanderthal man
You're a Neanderthal girl
Let's make Neanderthal love
In this Neandrethal world
Obviously the Neanderthals neither ate enough or fucked enough. I have two children, a lady friend of mine has thirteen still alive (one drowned). She beats me at the extinction/evolution game thirteen to two, despite the fact that she's dumb as a box of rocks and I'm a nerd. Having sex beats being smart any day when it comes to passing your genes, which is what species survival is about.
Re:Well, that's just great. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Hubbardite". "Scientologist" is trademarked by a cult and actually makes it sound like something scientific might be taking place.
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Language made the difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, well then the real question, is what is REALLY so adventageous about higher motor skills, communication, etc.?
I should think the advantages of these things in out-competing and out-reproducing other species of primates would be apparent, but it is a valid question. A lot of evolutionary biologists and psychologists spend a lot of time theorizing about how particular behaviors would have construed an evolutionary advantage. Just as a good place to start, I would recommend The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. There are probably other texts that focus on the issue more specifically, but those happen to ones I've read that came to mind.
And why were they adventageous for primates and not adventageous for dinosaurs or hermit crabs?
You are still thinking of this in the wrong way -- your question assumes that because a trait like complex language is advantageous, it should have arisen in hermit crabs. That is just a rephrased way of thinking that evolution is driven by necessity, that somehow because the trait is good, every species ought to have "decided" to evolve it or something. Again, the traits arise by chance, and will be kept if they happen to be helpful. In dinosaurs and hermit crabs, they just didn't happen to arise.
You might just as well ask why humans didn't evolve a chitinous exoskeleton, or an abdomen shaped to inhabit the empty shell of a sea snail. Those things, after all, must be advantageous, or they would not have evolved in hermit crabs, right? It is the differences in which random mutations happen to come along and prove advantageous in different populations that makes those populations grow into different species.
Furthermore, of the random traits that arise, the advantages or disadvantages of any of them will be affected by which traits that species already has -- a gene that causes your saliva to dissolve clam shells is great if you are a starfish. If the same trait arose in a clam, however, it would likely not be passed on.
The point is that just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it will automatically evolve. Evolution doesn't say anything like that. It simply says that random mutations occur, and those that happen to make the mutant more likely to reproduce will be passed on to its decedents.
Re:Mods are mostly right on (Score:2, Insightful)
Biologists, on the other hand, have endless reams of evidence.
Re:No Surprise to Me (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the notion of a superior human species touched by God. You kind of prove my point.
Hmmmmm. I sometimes wonder how some people would react to a stronger species if it actually came along. That's nothing like what was being implied as the strong and weak argument was at the heart of it (just what is it that made us strong, because it wasn't intelligence), but anyway, please continue.
Hmmmm. Let's wander off on a completely orthogonal bullshit tangent (whatever it is) and try and make myself look clever.
You might care to explain why that happened. The above is just simplistic bullshit we already know that explains nothing. There is a mechanism as to why that happened though, and why 'we' did it better than 'they' did, with a lot of towing and frowing as to why that was in the scientific world. You've added jack shit to that debate, but it's what I've come to expect from the current IQ level of the average Slashdotter these days (and modded insightful too!).
Re:Pop culture != scientific consensus (Score:3, Insightful)
"How can you trust anything science says? It revises itself to be accurate, that's why. An unchanging theory constructed in year X is one that is unlikely to become more correct with the collection of new evidence in the years to come, except by some fluke of blind luck."
Right. But if a theory was correct *to begin with*, it doesn't actually need revising. The more correct and trustworthy a piece of scientific knowledge, the *less* it will change over time. So logically speaking, we should be more skeptical of new "discoveries" and more trusting of old knowledge. And the more and deeper "scientific revolutions" we encounter the more cynical it should make us of any claims to knowledge of any kind.
After a couple of such revolutions, we should feel deeply uneasy, uncertain, bewildered and emotionally devastated. We should feel traumatised, like a war or disaster survivor, because learning that people you respected were teaching you falsehoods and can give you no confidence that they are telling you the ultimate truth now *should* feel like a deep personal betrayal.
Feel familiar?
Robert Persig describes this phenomenon quite well in 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. The nature of science is to generate and disprove hypotheses, not produce 'truth'. There's an illusion that science is progressing and converging toward truth. But the more hypotheses we generate, the more contradictory alternatives we actually have in our minds, and the less able to respond to the world we become.
It's a little like Windows patches. If you keep having to retroactively fix things, you're doing it wrong.
Red in tooth and claw (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they just haven't looked closely enough.
That beastie in Alien, the one that was supposed to scare the bejeebers out of you as some sort of paragon of mindless violence; it's just a variant of creatures that are commonplace right here. A little bigger than most perhaps.
The face-hugger thing wouldn't raise a compound eyebrow in the caterpillar world. They face that sort of parasitism every day. And killing things and eating them as fast as you can whether they are still alive or not is standard. You only bother killing them if their wriggling might be a problem.
Re:Actually, we don't know (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that Homo Sapiens only developed warfare after discovering bows and arrows. Chimpanzees make war, or at least violent tribal conflict, and as far as I know they don't use bows and arrows. We share a lot of DNA with chimps.
Re:No Surprise to Me (Score:3, Insightful)
No. It's the same old meaningless bullshit claptrap that people masquerade on Slashdot as 'scientific discussion'. But, whatever. Yer, we know it's a case of strong versus the weak. However, the scientific discussion about our superior place on the planet revolves around just what it was that enabled us to be superior and be stronger, and on this evidence, it wasn't our outright intelligence.