alt.hn

4/1/2026 at 1:12:12 AM

Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years

 https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-survived-knife-s-edge-350-000-years

by Hooke

4/1/2026 at 7:15:18 AM

>somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years, longer than modern humans have been on Earth.

These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing.

Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is kind of messy.

There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle."

In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't have fossils, but something has to be our ancestors. So if we are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien ancestors sapiens.

Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died out. But... there were people everywhere.

Humans existed over a vast range. From south Africa to Northern Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it's confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different species.

Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic diversity we have today. In some sense, we are the inbred ones.

Also... population estimates are pretty dicey. We don't really know. Could have been booms and busts. Could have been ideal habitats with higher populations.

We still have a fairly poor grasp of human "natural history"

by netcan

4/1/2026 at 7:54:02 AM

> Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis.

Heidelbergensis is the last common anscestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and us.

We were all around for just as long, 400kya+, and before that, it was Homo Erectus.

All of them, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens were walking around at the same time. There's plenty of fossil records we've uncovered that show that to be true.

It was only in the last 100k years or so that we remained and the other variants "died out".

by jarjoura

4/1/2026 at 4:22:57 PM

Heidlebergensis is no longer thought to be on the sapiens lineage. It's probably the ancestor of neanderthals and denisovans. 400kya is around the time of this divergence, based on recent genomics. They were the same species at this time.

The Sapiens lineage is now thought to have diverged significantly earlier.

Erectus existed, but in pockets.

Other lineages existed also. At the very least, Homo naledi. Probably other dwarf lineages, an African "ghost lineage" and probably others.

Neanderthals and denisovans are structured... With subspecies, hybrid zones and whatnot.

There are also many sapiens lineages with no descendants. Most of them.

by netcan

4/1/2026 at 5:37:30 PM

We shouldn't use the word "species" lightly with hominins. There's no accepted way to properly classify archaic humans.

For example, some paleoanthropologists classify most archaic humans as h. sapiens. Anatomically modern humans become h. s. sapiens, neanderthal become h. s. neanderthalensis. This incorporates the middle pleistocene hominins from mainland Asia pretty well to boot. Many of those same people also use the "conventional" binomial terminology when they're not making a very specific point, so you can't just look at usages to understand where they're coming from.

There's also a hundred other classifications, some giving neanderthals their own species, others including it with heidelbergensis, and so on. None of them has clearly "won" and probably won't while we keep publishing "new" transitional forms every couple of years.

by AlotOfReading

4/1/2026 at 7:36:43 PM

Sure... and it would help if there was more consistency in general.

But given that there isn't, we should at least maintain internal consistency. That's what I was commenting on above. You can't use one conceptual framework for Neanderthals/Eurasia and another for Sapiens/Africa. It's confusing... and you end up with statements that are essentially false.

Neanderthal and Sapiens exist approximately concurrently. The "classic neanderthal" form doesn't predate sapiens. It only predates Sapiens if we define "Neanderthal" from the point of divergence. If we do that, we need to define Sapiens the same way. It can't be the establishment of a founder population for one and the emergence of a distinct form for the other.

I'm not advocating for one system or another... or even for the establishment of one consistent system necessarily.

by netcan

4/1/2026 at 4:10:34 PM

True, but I'm guessing they're referring to anatomically modern humans which have only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. Not sure that's a meaningful way to look at it since I'm assume Neanderthals also evolved somewhat during that time.

by stvltvs

4/1/2026 at 11:23:35 AM

Did they really die out, or did the population just merge with modern humans? Most people on the planet have some Neanderthal DNA, so clearly there was some intermixing. If modern humans were a much larger population, it makes sense that the Neanderthals only contributed a small amount of DNA to the gene pool. I could imagine that they were just slowly absorbed into the much larger Sapiens population.

by MadDemon

4/1/2026 at 1:52:04 PM

In Africa most people don't have Neanderthal DNA however in Europe probably everyone has. (I have no idea about Asia, maybe somebody can chip in)

I think they probably mixed in and we just became one, sort of

by hoppp

4/1/2026 at 2:31:14 PM

Virtually every population outside of Sub-Saharan Africa has Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA between 1-4%. This includes all of Eurasia, all pre-Columbian American populations, Aboriginal Australians, Papuans, etc.

by snovymgodym

4/1/2026 at 3:00:34 PM

Is there any research about why Sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have Neanderthal DNA?

Is the argument that the tribe of humans from Africa was good at repelling outside invaders, but themselves expanded outwards and assimilated (and then outnumbered) the other populations, or something else?

It just seems a bit bizarre given that all humans elsewhere have relatively similar amounts (but quite a low amount) of Neanderthal DNA, which seems to suggest a reasonable amount of migration, interaction and interbreeding between populations everywhere except Africa.

by ralferoo

4/1/2026 at 3:45:11 PM

Yes tons of research

There were multiple waves out of Africa but Most early anatomical human groups never left Africa as a result, there’s more DNA diversity within the continent than outside Africa

Its confusing because the non-african group grew exponentially while the intra-African continent continued to mature

The anatomically modern humans that left Africa spread rapidly and aggressively across the world basically absorbing and destroying every proto-human group and ecological niche and

now the world is ruled by the aggressive narcissistic chimeral hybrid of human (African) Neanderthal (European proto human) and denisovian (Peking man) that survived the exit snd expansion

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4067985/

by AndrewKemendo

4/1/2026 at 4:17:09 PM

Wow, so many judgments and racist descriptions in one paragraph attempting to describe scientific knowledge.

by IAmBroom

4/1/2026 at 11:26:33 PM

You might want to read about the Chadian introgression for the exception.

by selimthegrim

4/1/2026 at 4:27:00 PM

Everything typed above has empirical basis

Feel free to investigate each claim independently and come to your own conclusions

by AndrewKemendo

4/1/2026 at 5:40:03 PM

Why was this downvoted?

by kabaka

4/1/2026 at 5:01:10 PM

That's a common misconception that turned out to not be true.

https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-surpr...

It also doesn't hold for the African Diaspora, especially in the Americas (and probably flowing back into Africa as we speak). It's also worth considering that many of the actual traits that Neanderthal-associated genes codes for probably have analogues in the much-wider African genome.

by underlipton

4/1/2026 at 3:56:28 PM

>Did they really die out, or did the population just merge with modern humans.

Most populations die out. Most sapiens. Most neanderthals. Most everything. The chance of becoming an ancestor is very, very low.

Neanderthals were not slowly observed. Most of our neanderthal DNA comes from a single mixing event/period.

Evolutionary history is a history of bottlenecks. Small populations that survive and become large populations. The rest don't make it.

by netcan

4/1/2026 at 2:03:47 PM

>> Did they really die out

There are a few still. One made it to President of the USA.

by Betelbuddy

4/1/2026 at 3:11:27 PM

Do not speak ill of the Neanderthals.

by bit-anarchist

4/1/2026 at 5:22:33 PM

One thing that confused me in TFA is that it says that "[neanderthals were] maybe a couple of thousand breeding individuals", yet they were enough to inter-breed with sapiens at some point(s) [1]. In my mind, tribes of "far-flung populations of just a few dozen individuals" would be shy and difficult to find.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics

by astrobe_

4/1/2026 at 8:35:56 AM

[dead]

by imadierich

4/1/2026 at 4:30:59 AM

It's wild to think how long very human-like beings and modern humans existed before the technological revolution really took off. Hundreds of thousands of years of existing on the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of hides, and fire. Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow. Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 6:24:42 AM

I think it is also interesting to realize that we have had a huge population boom since the last 50 years or so, thus currently, the entire world population alive makes up roughly 8% of the entire population of the world since the existence of Homo Sapiens. In summary, if you were to be randomly born as a human, you would most likely be born in the latter centuries, rather than the early ones, since the sheer amount being born recently than many years ago is so much more.

https://www.sifrun.com/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-ea...

by dainank

4/1/2026 at 9:32:49 AM

>the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of hides, and fire.

Don't forget, there are pockets of our species living at this level to this very day (uncontacted tribes)!

by roncesvalles

4/1/2026 at 7:59:34 AM

Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive. Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.

You would never feel like you have time to just, be. Instead you're focused on getting your next meal, and finding a place to sleep.

It only took a few ice-ages to force us to get smart about how we organize and then here we are.

by jarjoura

4/1/2026 at 12:39:32 PM

Here's some food for thought: Something like that was their normal and they likely had all of these sorted out with relative ease, given that they'd be experts at that kind of living. Also wild food sources were plentiful. Overall they may have enjoyed more downtime than us, who have to do quite a bit to maintain our higher standards of living. Estimates are that hunter-gatherers "worked" around 20 hours / week to sustain themselves, the rest being spend on low intensity tasks or idle time.

Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't imagine their life could have been considered stressful in that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has "more" regardless of how hard you work.

You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in modern society, not even considering that if there's any major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and starved within months if not weeks, with very little individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't operating somewhat smoothly.

by chmod775

4/1/2026 at 8:40:45 PM

One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer. It would have been especially horrific if you broke your foot or leg and weren't able to do anything about it.

Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.

How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.

Mosquitos carried pathogens, the other food sources were also of random quality.

If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.

I could keep going on, but the point is, being a self-aware mammal would have been absolutely torturous.

by jarjoura

4/2/2026 at 12:20:28 AM

> One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer.

Yes, people back then suffered a lot of broken bones, even fractured skulls. But just like their bones tell that story, we also know that they often survived those injuries and their broken bones (and even skulls!) healed. People lived in groups and cared for injured.

Also a scratch is probably not going to kill you. It could, but likely won't.

> Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.

Going after the children of an organized group of apex predators is probably not going to end well for the attackers.

And yes, sometimes women died in childbirth, but not that often (otherwise you wouldn't be here to type that). Also there's still a decent risk of that if you live in the US.

> Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.

Extremely rare on a hunter-gatherer diet. Our ancestors lost the ability to produce their own vitamin C internally millions of years ago, because they just didn't need it. Most other mammals still can.

> Mosquitos carried pathogens

Human-adapted mosquitos hadn't evolved to the degree they have today, so bites would have been much rarer, but pathogens causing fun diseases such as malaria did already exist.

> the other food sources were also of random quality.

You mean the food sources we evolved to consume? Are you talking about parasites? Most of the nasty ones really only started becoming an issue when humans gave them breeding grounds in their settlements.

> If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.

I guess?

> I could keep going on,

Please don't. You are clearly just guessing and making stuff up as you go.

That said, of course hunter-gatherer life was much riskier than modern life, but that was just their normal. Hedonic adapation and all that.

by chmod775

4/1/2026 at 1:23:15 PM

I have wondered if animal husbandry played a larger role than agriculture, alone. The horse, as we know it, altered all of civilization.

by paulnpace

4/1/2026 at 5:58:25 PM

The dog probably as well - and both horses and dogs are similar to people in that they are great at traversing long distances.

Horses also have semi similar more specialized analogues - you could argue Camels filled a similar niche for very dry areas. And other animals like Goats/Llamas/Alpacas for mountainous areas.

by Melatonic

4/1/2026 at 6:43:51 PM

I've always been partial to the notion that wolves domesticated human ancestors, honestly.

We like to say that dogs are wired to understand human language patterns, but who's not to say that we're not wired to emit canine 'linguistics'?

by komodo99

4/1/2026 at 5:13:11 PM

Fire, pets, electronic chips, all advanced human civilisation step by step in different stages. It's hard to estimate the relative importance of each.

Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all these are means for achieving higher goals. How many people think about that today? Quantity is not followed by quality.

by tsoukase

4/1/2026 at 1:49:09 PM

It was the cat, those little fluffy bastards walked into a human camp about 10,000 years ago and kicked everything off. That's why the Ancient Egyptians revered cats as Gods /s

by Monotoko

4/1/2026 at 2:11:37 PM

Honestly not sure how necessary that /s is.

Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.

Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.

Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe yoga was inspired by them too.

It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.

And then there's the profound cultural significance of Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually) calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...

by Schmerika

4/1/2026 at 6:53:20 PM

> introverts can hang with cats all day

There are certain personalities that are often attributed to modern sources, but haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte) living in a shack that has a predilection to collect herbs/mine rocks/watch the skies/you name it, that isn't thought much of or seems productive until someone gets sick/needs ore/wants to know the weather/etc?

All that said, what did crazy cat people do before cats???

by komodo99

4/1/2026 at 8:45:38 PM

> haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte)

I would bet the first human to do lots of stuff was that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes, domesticate a wolf, etc.

> what did crazy cat people do before cats???

I have no idea, but that's a great question.

by Schmerika

4/1/2026 at 12:07:08 PM

> Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive. Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.

If you wanted, you could ask any of the people living like that today what it’s like. You can find them even in any American city.

by nkrisc

4/1/2026 at 3:19:37 PM

Can you imagine how many grass grazing animals would have been just standing around waiting to be eaten? During the Pleistocene, some regions supported huge, stable herds of grazing megafauna that could provide reliable food. You just needed some friends to help you hunt. In areas with relatively mild climates and predictable seasons, people likely experienced long stretches, even generations, of comparatively low stress and easy resources. Granted, life could quickly become difficult when climate, animal populations, or competition shifted.

by tbirdny

4/1/2026 at 9:46:29 AM

> Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive.

Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent and food.

> Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.

Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.

> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.

Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.

We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!

by Schmerika

4/1/2026 at 1:18:59 PM

>pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling

It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science. Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.

Which, taking into account that their chores were quite physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.

That said they probably socialized more than us for many reasons, just not instead of work.

by broken-kebab

4/1/2026 at 3:27:29 PM

> Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.

Well, yes, climate and ecology matter a lot. Still, I believe that figure is including things like making sure a pot doesn't boil over, ie low intensity chores; and includes 'social' tasks which look and feel very different to, say, factory work.

Still, the idea that life was "nasty brutish and short" for most of human history is thoroughly debunked. Life wasn't constant misery for everyone, despite what many people learned in school.

I think it's important that we remember what we've lost, as much as what we've gained. Whether we worked 3 hours a day or 7.5, no one (outside slavery) was working 60 hours a week and just keeping their heads above water despite thousands of years of 'progress'.

by Schmerika

4/1/2026 at 3:07:41 PM

> A lot of food was more abundant

That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.

In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.

by ralferoo

4/1/2026 at 2:44:58 PM

On the upside they weren't stressed about the new "Grunt Hunt" models by Neanderthalic, which are likely take away all of the entry-level hunting jobs in the tribe.

by Saline9515

4/1/2026 at 4:56:11 PM

Yeah but eventually they were stressed by Homosapiensthalic

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 9:48:22 AM

Most hunter-gatherer tribes had exactly that: time to just be. Their lives weren't governed by this rat race to always move up. Except for the harshest circumstances, they probably worked only 15 hours a week. Of course their play was partially training for that work, but I think in many ways, they lived more relaxing lives than we do.

Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers, but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to disease after the agricultural revolution.

by mcv

4/1/2026 at 9:58:27 AM

I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual number of hours varies massively - seasonally and geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.

by whymememe

4/1/2026 at 10:28:54 AM

I'd bet that a lot of that in-camp work didn't feel excessively laborious when it was done while socialising within your group, and without a sense of "wish I was playing video games". Sitting around a camp fire now whittling away at something is more mucking around than chore.

by prawn

4/1/2026 at 3:30:47 PM

Exactly. I don't think there really was a clear separation between work and not-work back then. It's just life. Consider wild animals: do they work?

by mcv

4/1/2026 at 5:53:45 PM

Yeah pretty much, it’s a pretty tough to pinpoint what work actually is without paid labour.

by whymememe

4/1/2026 at 12:34:43 PM

Sure sitting around a campfire and whittling away at something now feels more like mucking about than chore, because it is. You don’t actually need whatever it is you’re whittling. It would probably be less relaxing if your survival depended on your handiwork.

by thfuran

4/1/2026 at 4:26:05 PM

I have friends who handweave clothes, blacksmith tools, and of course garden for food for their families.

The stakes are lower, but not the work level required, and they all do it for funzies, essentially.

by IAmBroom

4/1/2026 at 8:23:22 AM

Having one clear short term goal after another may sound to freedom for some people.

by solids

4/1/2026 at 10:07:44 AM

I think about this a lot. How much anxiety do most people feel from the millions of options that are available to them daily, or young adults that are told they can be anything they want, but clam up and choose to do nothing instead.

by seanalltogether

4/1/2026 at 10:16:10 AM

Most people don't have millions of options available to them daily, at least not in any meaningful sense. Anxiety and choice paralysis is very much a first world privilege.

by krapp

4/1/2026 at 8:21:14 AM

Welcome to Gaza I guess.

by actionfromafar

4/1/2026 at 8:50:07 AM

I immediately thought or Iran.

It’s neat what we do to each other…

by lostlogin

4/1/2026 at 2:01:10 PM

I think rope, twine, and weaving needs to be recognized as significant technical development. That has little record but would have been combined with wood for simple machines.

by detourdog

4/1/2026 at 5:23:58 PM

There seems a bit of an acceleration ~ 50-100k years from evolving brains similar to modern ones to agriculture, ~8k year from there to writing, ~4k to the printing press, ~400 till computers, ~40 till the web and so on. Each of those has kind of speeded intellectual progress and AI will probably be another speeding up.

by tim333

4/1/2026 at 7:15:57 PM

> Each of those has kind of speeded intellectual progress and AI will probably be another speeding up.

Maybe. I can imagine a dystopian Idiocracy type future where everyone is the "ideas guy".

by lelanthran

4/1/2026 at 6:02:42 PM

A fun way to look at this is that the "long head" (ramp) of the singularity began some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We're just living in teh exciting bit.

Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence of primates, etc.

by aaroninsf

4/1/2026 at 4:22:50 PM

> Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow.

The atlatl was undoubtedly earlier, and a bigger advance. It essentially doubled a hunter's arm length, and thus impelled speed - with force proportional to the square of speed. An atlatl can put a dart straight through an enemy's gut, or easily pierce a deer's hide.

by IAmBroom

4/1/2026 at 4:51:03 AM

Also nukes. We've got the whole place rigged to blow in case a few of us just doesn't feel like it anymore.

by Fricken

4/1/2026 at 5:57:00 AM

Yeah when you read it in Dune "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing". sounds super cool and badass and like totally brilliant strategy but in real life not so much.

Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon

https://medium.com/luminasticity/predicting-the-worst-and-st...

by bryanrasmussen

4/1/2026 at 7:47:54 AM

Nuclear war would be a major inconvenience, but it wouldn't nearly destroy the world.

by eru

4/1/2026 at 10:04:13 AM

Unless it's a very limited nuclear war, it would probably destroy the world as we know it, but that's a vague and flexible concept. It would likely destroy countries, societies, our way of life. Many people would die, but humanity would survive.

Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.

by mcv

4/1/2026 at 11:11:13 AM

I agree. My much more limited point was that we don't actually have enough nukes to glass the planet; but I could probably have made that more explicitly.

by eru

4/1/2026 at 11:35:22 AM

We have enough nukes to sterilise large areas of the planet.

But most of them are tac nukes, and they don't come with the support hardware needed to deliver them to large areas of the planet.

Reality is that Europe, Russia, the US, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and parts of the Far East could have a really bad time.

But most of South America and Africa would likely survive with only economic and political damage rather than physical destruction.

by TheOtherHobbes

4/1/2026 at 11:40:15 AM

Not sure sterilisation lasts long on earth: life re-claims sterilised areas.

See your favourite massive volcano outbreak, or look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

(The impact of the disaster at Chernobyl is much smaller in area than a nuclear explosion would be, of course. But life has re-conquered everything there.)

In any case, I largely agree!

by eru

4/1/2026 at 3:27:33 PM

It might be worth noting that the number of direct deaths caused by Chernobyl is very low (2 perhaps?). But there have been hundreds of thousands of birth defects in its wake.

The survivors of nuclear war would have a really bad time, but humanity would survive.

None of this is to suggest we should be careless about it; it would be a massive disaster. But not the end.

by mcv

4/1/2026 at 6:43:49 AM

We are all just evolving on vibes at this point ;-)

by firecall

4/1/2026 at 4:38:44 AM

> Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.

It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.

by tyre

4/1/2026 at 5:15:05 AM

> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough

This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history.

What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.

by delta_p_delta_x

4/1/2026 at 6:19:45 AM

There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK.

We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.

Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.

by jandrewrogers

4/1/2026 at 6:40:27 AM

1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire.

Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.

by Retric

4/2/2026 at 6:21:05 AM

It is interesting precisely because we know it wasn’t smallpox and we know it killed a large portion of the native population in places like Mexico. 1545 was just the first year the disease was documented by Europeans. There have been a dozen epidemics of this into the 19th century and then it just disappeared, long before smallpox was eradicated. It also didn’t spread indiscriminately across North America, it was correlated with specific types of environments.

The particular epidemics in question killed both natives and Europeans. Furthermore, the manifestation of the disease was unfamiliar to the Europeans.

You are assuming facts not in evidence. This is actually pretty interesting because it suggests there is a latent pathogen with a very high fatality rate in the Americas. It wouldn’t be the first.

We saw this with the hantavirus. The Old World hantavirus species were never dangerous enough to even deserve a footnote, but the New World hantavirus species are essentially like Ebola. But outbreaks are very rare and hantavirus doesn’t seem to be communicable between humans, so the damage is localized. The hemorrhagic fever that killed millions of people in the desert-y parts of the Americas a few centuries ago was something else.

by jandrewrogers

4/1/2026 at 7:49:55 AM

Well, we have plenty of plagues to go around in Eurasia. There's plenty of diseases we barely notice, because pretty much everyone has enough immunity to mostly shrug it off.

by eru

4/1/2026 at 6:37:44 AM

> There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people

I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?

by mock-possum

4/1/2026 at 9:46:19 AM

> disease we can’t explain

Disease we can't explain that spread a few decades after European ships full of plagues arrived.

I mean, yeah, sure.

by surgical_fire

4/1/2026 at 11:42:22 AM

You're making a fair point. Any native pathogens would have been shipped back to Europe with slave populations.

The fact that Europe didn't have the same catastrophic population decline suggests that either that didn't happen (possible, but a stretch) or that Europeans already had immunity.

Which would only be true if there was some freak genetic immunity (also a stretch) or the disease was already in wide circulation (far more likely).

by TheOtherHobbes

4/1/2026 at 8:40:27 AM

[dead]

by imadierich

4/1/2026 at 5:49:27 AM

That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer.

I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 9:48:40 AM

Around 90% of the people died of plagues.

It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues.

Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.

by surgical_fire

4/1/2026 at 5:02:55 PM

I agree that if the disease luck had gone the other way and a large fraction of Europe had died of disease then it's possible the Native Americans would have remained unconquered. If the disease factor was just taken out of the equation completely, I think the Native Americans would have been conquered, simply because of the great European advantage in technology. But the conquest would have looked more like England's colonization of India, and many more of the native cultures would probably have had a chance to evolve and assimilate modern technology, like India's cultures did, rather than just going extinct.

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 4:02:12 PM

There's some speculation that Syphilis may have been a new world plague. The first major outbreak was a couple of years after Columbus returned, but figuring out when the first ever case was has proven more difficult.

by OkayPhysicist

4/1/2026 at 8:31:44 AM

It’s impossible to tell. If it had taken decades or a century longer because their numbers were higher, they might have had time to start up their own production of technology.

by actionfromafar

4/1/2026 at 5:31:20 AM

The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared.

IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.

by AJMaxwell

4/1/2026 at 7:10:03 AM

I never understand the “lack of animals to domesticate” angle. They did domesticate animals, such as the llama and alpaca.

More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…

by AuryGlenz

4/1/2026 at 7:21:13 AM

Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.

by t-3

4/1/2026 at 7:51:24 AM

Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour, but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed of scraps or whatever they find around the house and garden.

In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.

by eru

4/1/2026 at 3:57:49 PM

In North America, deer eat acorns, but apparently are not suitable for domestication.

by pfdietz

4/1/2026 at 4:34:15 PM

Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have also been domesticated as beasts of burden across northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer) population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other, larger, native species like moose are usually considered too big and too aggressive to tame.

by t-3

4/2/2026 at 12:07:58 AM

I think plenty of animals eat acorns. It's just that humans can't really do much with them.

I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.

by eru

4/1/2026 at 5:13:44 PM

The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement, because it did take place, but took a very different form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior) adapted other parameters they could control to the natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations.

E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...

by underlipton

4/1/2026 at 6:43:30 AM

So a lack of animal husbandry is the same as lower technology and a lack of farming.

by alsetmusic

4/1/2026 at 6:06:10 AM

In things like the battle of Cajamarca the Incan lost a battle against the Spanish with 8000 warriors against 150. All the 150 survived.

Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).

by riffraff

4/1/2026 at 6:26:22 AM

I just read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca

It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.

by tehnub

4/1/2026 at 9:32:13 AM

Well, yeah, and if you keep reading about it, the whole rest of the campaign has the same tenure.

Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168 men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds etc.

The scale of this is absolutely insane.

by riffraff

4/1/2026 at 8:34:55 AM

> the Incan didn't fight at night!

To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night–vision–equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.

by avadodin

4/1/2026 at 6:42:29 AM

Around the same time, 460 men in 6 ships destroyed 30000 men in 400 ships taking over Ormuz. Portugal and Spain were just incredibly OP during that time period. And the people in Ormuz were more advanced than the natives in US. And they still got absolutely destroyed.

by vasco

4/1/2026 at 9:08:29 AM

You're missing a zero. It was EIGHTY thousand, not 8000.

by circlefavshape

4/1/2026 at 9:30:09 AM

I thought so too, but wikipedia says 8k

by riffraff

4/1/2026 at 10:22:16 AM

Ah weird - the text of the page says Atahualpa had 80k troops, but then the infobox describes the Inca forces as 3-8k in size. I guess not all the 80k were involved in the battle

by circlefavshape

4/1/2026 at 7:48:59 AM

Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.

by eru

4/1/2026 at 6:58:17 AM

They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the bronze age or so.

by ywvcbk

4/1/2026 at 7:10:11 AM

American agriculture was very advanced for the time and the crops and ideas developed transformed food and agriculture throughout the rest of the world. What was lacking were beasts of burden and metallurgy and resistance to smallpox.

by t-3

4/1/2026 at 8:34:19 AM

Isn’t there indications that even large parts of the Amazon is in actuality planted?

by actionfromafar

4/1/2026 at 9:46:43 AM

> What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.

They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.

by mr_toad

4/1/2026 at 6:13:30 AM

There’s some more recent scholarship than Guns, Germs, and Steel. See Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 [1]. The truth is maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand.

Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.

[1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056

by peyton

4/1/2026 at 6:45:37 AM

> we happened upon them

That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.

by alsetmusic

4/1/2026 at 12:14:39 PM

Yeah, someone would have started to cross the oceans eventually. Europeans happened to do that first.

by zirgs

4/1/2026 at 11:51:55 AM

Stupid people may not be able to read sarcasm. I figured HN would have enough internet literacy, but maybe not.

by alsetmusic

4/1/2026 at 9:21:22 AM

The Americas were always going to be behind Euro Asia due to the shape of the continents. Going North-South you get big changes in climate and thus agricultural techniques and plants. Civilizations in the Americas could have spent thousands of years in a grow and bust cycle and never reach a similar level of development as the old continent.

by MyHonestOpinon

4/1/2026 at 5:07:39 PM

The East-West thing probably does confer an advantage, but it might be overstated. I'm not sure that the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesopotamia and Europe was actually any smaller than the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesoamerica and North America.

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 5:28:02 AM

The Inca Empire had crazy plant breeding techniques.

by melagonster

4/1/2026 at 6:32:21 AM

they also didn't even invent the wheel

by poisonarena

4/1/2026 at 1:30:36 PM

Yes they did, they had wheeled toys. They just didn't have a use for the wheel for transportation because of poor terrain, lack of pneumatic tires, and a lack of beasts of burden.

Everyone gets caught up in the wheel thing, but how many people have tried rolling a non-pneumatic tire loaded with weight up mountains or even just across broken terrain? We still got people carrying fridges and shit on their back up mountains in Nepal because wheels are still not useful on that terrain. Not to mention something we think of as old like the wagon wheel is the culmination of over 1000 years of innovation.

by AngryData

4/1/2026 at 11:25:04 AM

they did invent the wheel, they just didnt use it for transportion.

by Aefiam

4/1/2026 at 6:52:55 AM

The wheel isn't that useful if you live on terrible terrain and have nothing to drive it with.

by ViscountPenguin

4/1/2026 at 7:11:06 AM

I live on a hilly plot and use a wheelbarrow or cart all the time in the summer.

by AuryGlenz

4/1/2026 at 6:59:46 AM

llamas and alpacas

by poisonarena

4/1/2026 at 7:39:34 AM

Llamas were used for some logistics, but they're not the most sturdy, modern Llamas can carry around ~40kg but I'm unsure if it would've been higher or lower with the breeds they used back then. Either way, better than nothing, but definitely no horse.

by ViscountPenguin

4/1/2026 at 7:13:46 AM

Not great beasts of burden. Barely better than dog with travois, arguably worse than having an extra human to carry things.

by t-3

4/1/2026 at 9:44:30 AM

Er, Aztecs and Incans definitely had agriculture. They actually had highly complex societies.

What they mostly lacked were antibodies against the numerous diseases brought by the Europeans. Measles, Mumps, Cholera, Tuberculosis, and so on.

by surgical_fire

4/1/2026 at 10:16:47 AM

They had agriculture, yes, but they hadn't had it long enough to bootstrap an advanced civilisation before the Europeans arrived.

If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.

by jstanley

4/1/2026 at 2:18:06 PM

What do you mean they didn't have an advanced civilization? They had city densities above the best in Europe and their gold work put European goldsmiths to shame. They had the abacus, pain medications, aqueducts, armor, dams, beer, gold plating along with sintering soldering and lost wax casting, roads, the concept of zero in mathematics, advanced astronomy, plumbing, the suspension bridge, multiple unique writing systems, and tons of food preservation techniques. That is a far cry from some dudes tieing rocks to sticks.

by AngryData

4/1/2026 at 2:19:46 PM

Friend, this is just not true. Thousands of years of large sophisticated governments and civilizations in what is now Mexico and farther south. Its reductive to the point of being completely wrong to think of the Americas in this way.

Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering, and a very large implied economy built so long ago the name of the people group is not recorded.

Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops, yes. The rest? I would be cautious.

by vessenes

4/1/2026 at 6:15:02 AM

[flagged]

by alsetmusic

4/1/2026 at 6:20:24 AM

It's just objectively true that the Native Americans were far behind Europe in military technology and many other technologies in 1492. The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 6:49:15 AM

> The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.

They did. Natives didn't have agriculture:

> It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.

The unfortunate thing is that those dumb Natives didn't learn to grow things. Something that had been observed for thousands of years.

by alsetmusic

4/1/2026 at 7:39:53 AM

Commenter upthread said they "did not invent it quickly enough", as you quoted, which is not the same thing as "did not invent it". They just meant that the Native Americans invented it later than the Europeans did, such that the natives had less time to develop advanced (military) technology.

by kelnos

4/1/2026 at 10:54:39 AM

Do you really think that a process that was discovered repeatedly throughout the world was thousands of years behind on one side?

Edit: We're talking ~10k years difference.

by alsetmusic

4/1/2026 at 7:26:34 AM

He wasn't claiming that the Native Americans didn't have agriculture, he was claiming that Native Americans didn't develop large-scale agriculture as early in history as Eurasians did, and as a result had less time to develop the kinds of technologies that are enabled by having large-scale agriculture.

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 6:44:50 AM

[dead]

by fleroviumna

4/1/2026 at 4:37:01 AM

> Harmful mutations can accumulate through inbreeding. Yet somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years

It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained.

So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once they reach a threshold, as implied by the article.

It’s a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going “extinct”. And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the process, but it works.

On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become pervasive.

The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic diversity as a shield against new diseases.

by Nevermark

4/1/2026 at 7:31:09 AM

In captive breeding, it's a brutal way to "improve stock" but in wild populations this is pretty normal for large mammals. It also generally happens more slowly... so isn't that different from every other ambient process that selects some genes and culls others.

Fwiw... something similar also occurs with outbreeding/hybridization. Novel gene combinations can be maladaptive, just like double recessives.

These are all pretty normal population dynamics.

There are billions of us now... but that's not normal for a large animal, especially predators. How many leopards, or bears, or elephants are there at any given time?

These tend to be sparse, structured populations.

by netcan

4/1/2026 at 5:17:57 AM

I wouldn't single out the concern new diseases if the population is small. Most diseases co-evolve intra-population. The lethal ones are the ones that suffer a mutation and are suddenly able to be passed to a different 'species'. So, if they already survived on a 'knife's edge', immune variety is of comparatively low concern (but still existential) on the list of things that can end your species (climate change, competition, demographics - 2-3 infertile females in a group of 20, say bye bye to tribe).

by gobdovan

4/1/2026 at 5:36:41 AM

Isolated populations are all going to be creating isolated variants of any disease doing well enough to stick around.

And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.

Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.

But you are certainly right that the cross-overs are incomparably worse. And diversity becomes species extinction protection at that level.

by Nevermark

4/1/2026 at 7:51:55 AM

> The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.

For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0])

> Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.

Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out. Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza. Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an inter-connected population, requiring a critical community size in the hundreds of thousands.

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/2011/202...

by gobdovan

4/2/2026 at 9:38:32 AM

I think we are more or less agreeing, but emphasizing different valid sides.

After all, as much as cross over illnesses are orders of magnitude more dangerous, they are also orders of magnitude reduced in threat distribution, for any low population species.

The integrated surface x time surface area for transfer just isn't there. Lots of low population species last millions of years, or tens. And even then, die off for other reasons. despite their extreme and persistent low-diversity vulnerability to any successful cross over parasite/illness. Neanderthals are not exceptional on that count.

To be clear, I am agreeing with you (and me!).

by Nevermark

4/1/2026 at 4:42:22 AM

350,000 years of just chilling, picking berries, you die in identical technological and cultural environment as when you were born. Now we got to be around when God is made in a data center

by atleastoptimal

4/1/2026 at 5:56:38 AM

Nature's finest achievement. A hyper-efficient "mind" built on a pyre of fossil fuels and rare minerals so it can help us burn the rest faster. Surely the Neanderthals stand envious that millions will be able to confide their unemployment woes to ChatGPT after GPS-navigating to the Dollar General in the nearest bleak strip mall in search of affordable goods.

by picafrost

4/1/2026 at 8:38:48 AM

Poetic

by actionfromafar

4/1/2026 at 5:24:32 AM

Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.

by oceanplexian

4/1/2026 at 6:15:11 AM

Parasites are my main go-to when I meet someone complaining about the modern world. In the history of multicellular organisms on earth, only (some) humans—and only in the last ~100 years—have had the luxury of not being completely infested with parasites.

Even now we have more parasites than we probably know or care to admit.

by justonceokay

4/1/2026 at 7:53:17 AM

This was / is likely a factor in the "kernel of truth" with the whole "deworming tablets cure covid-19" thing, the chances of survival of people in certain areas infected with the virus increased if they were administered deworming medication because they also had a parasitic infection.

by Cthulhu_

4/1/2026 at 2:39:49 PM

Yes my friend took ivermectin recently because he grew up in he Virgin Islands and realized he had likely been harboring parasites his whole adult life. I don’t know if it is placebo but his eating habits changed significantly after his dose

by justonceokay

4/1/2026 at 6:56:05 AM

And just like that we just learned that parasites may have been good for us [1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8162934/

by davidkuennen

4/1/2026 at 7:48:35 AM

The fact that low-grade parasite-infections dampen autoimmune diseases isn't that big of a win. Presumably our immune system is as aggressive as it is in part due to the parasite-load our ancestors were exposed to.

by sehansen

4/1/2026 at 8:09:32 AM

We solved the parasite problem and at the same time changed the ecology we were accustomed to. The irony of dynamic systems.

by gobdovan

4/1/2026 at 7:45:10 AM

You forgot the enlightened ~200 years when we tried to kill God, to finally be in control of our destiny.

Then some idiots decided it's time to create an artificial one in their image. Enjoy your golden idol, pray it doesn't decide to turn you into biofuel.

by sph

4/1/2026 at 5:10:32 AM

What some otherwise intelligent people will convince themselves is God, anyway.

by nozzlegear

4/1/2026 at 5:25:55 AM

To our pets we're gods - in some ways it's just a matter of perspective

by RealStupidity

4/1/2026 at 6:16:08 AM

To paraphrase an Arabic saying: “dogs believe man is god and follow his word, but cats are aware of the one true god and so stand unmoved”

by justonceokay

4/1/2026 at 6:01:15 AM

I don't think my stubborn ass dog thinks of me as a god lol, but I understand your analogy

by nozzlegear

4/1/2026 at 9:38:35 AM

The phrase "survived on a knife edge" or the dramatization is a product of awareness of modern living. For them at those times, neither "survival" nor "struggle" has any meaning. There was likely no consciousness of such concepts. They just continued via instincts and evolutionary goals such as reproduction, food gathering, hunting etc, which were just the same activities their ancestors did, with no changes. Lack of change should actually mean pretty normal life, instead of rapid change-related struggle that we go through now.

by zkmon

4/1/2026 at 9:42:02 AM

We are also surviving on a knife edge from the perspective of a super advanced civilization that doesn't deal with disease or has more energy than they know what to do with. Everything is relative

by vasco

4/1/2026 at 9:47:07 AM

Funily enough, that could describe pretty well the first sapiens that learned how to make fire.

by PowerElectronix

4/1/2026 at 9:50:58 AM

Hunter-gatherers were always on a knife edge, as they were in equilibrium with the food supply. Killing children in dry years, constant fighting over resources, massacres of entire tribes. Of course they didn't know they were on the knife edge, so what?

by jojobas

4/1/2026 at 10:07:19 AM

Relative terms such as "living on edge" require normative references. It was just business-as-usual, normal life for them, in their own normative reference frame. Just like how cultures in some parts of the world today see things as normal, which would be abnormal to others. It's all your reference frame. There is no permanent or universal norms that can tell what is normal.

by zkmon

4/1/2026 at 3:26:05 AM

I know even with humans pre-modern populations were drastically smaller, but it's still just astounding to me how small of a population size it seems like Neanderthals had.

by Glyptodon

4/1/2026 at 4:55:08 PM

FWIW the populations weren't actually as small as a lot of these articles (including about human bottlenecks) allege in the popular press. This comes from a knowledge gap in the public compared to a biologists understanding here. The biologists are talking about effective population size (1) in most all these cases. This is an idealized sort of population size based on the idea of using the smallest possible population size that can fully capture the observed genetic diversity. It makes sense to use this measure, considering you are never fully sure how large a real population can be beyond its effective population size. So you just use the effective population size and implicitly acknowledge its assumptions.

This is well past HS biology though so popular press just skips that nuance and equates it to true population size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size

by asdff

4/1/2026 at 3:59:50 AM

I didn’t see it mentioned in the article, but I think it’s hard to fully appreciate how at risk they were to predators and that they were certainly not the top of the food chain yet. Humans and similar aren’t naturally adept for survival in the wilderness. We developed coping mechanisms but it took some time. Had to extinct a few big cats, bears, wolfs, etc along the way.

by conductr

4/1/2026 at 4:33:47 AM

Were they really not at the top of the food chain before modern humans came along? It's hard for me to imagine big cats and wolf packs being higher in the food chain than beings that had their own social groups, language, fire, and spears and that are known to have effectively hunted big game.

by hax0ron3

4/1/2026 at 6:21:20 AM

They/we also are weak and helpless for large portion of early life. Can’t reproduce unless they survive a dozen or so years. And even then pregnancy and child birth are also huge risks to life. This probably really stunted our ability to grow large populations.

Fossil evidence exists pointing towards large eagles scooping up 3-5 year olds. It’s been a long time since we had to think of our toddlers safety the same way we think of a lap dogs.

by conductr

4/1/2026 at 4:47:02 AM

I feel like it's more to say that, "getting eaten was a legitimate concern" they weren't really the single top of the food chain because there were other animals that would reasonably consider them prey. Cave lions were massive and definitely targeted neanderthals.

by hattmall

4/1/2026 at 1:50:35 PM

There's new evidences that even Sapiens "introduction" in Europe happend multiple times in the scale of thousand years with migratory waves comming from Africa/Middle East.

There's a 12h Collège de France course from Jean-Jacques Hublin that display new understandings that is really captivating. It's in French though

by remify

4/1/2026 at 1:58:37 PM

You're talking about "Sapiens remplace Néandertal"?

by throw-the-towel

4/1/2026 at 4:41:29 AM

Why was this the case? I thought they were at least as intelligent as modern humans and had more muscle mass, used rudimentary tools and had control over fire. They lived in a climate without a lot of dangerous animals or a lot of disease and disease vectors at least compared to the jungles of Africa.

by dyauspitr

4/1/2026 at 12:58:21 PM

I liked the recent Nova episode on neanderthals. They talked about how awful the last ice age was for the neanderthals despite being adapted to cold climates, and how modern humans survived it by staying away until it got warmer.

by ghtbircshotbe

4/1/2026 at 9:59:25 PM

As is usual for such a distant past, we can't answer basic questions: how many persons and where they were distributed, how their evolution and life was and mostly why intermediate species between modern human and the rest of primates don't survive today.

by tsoukase

4/1/2026 at 12:49:31 PM

The females in this article look exactly like modern age humans, the males have these long beard but apart from that there is no visible change in the looks. Far different from what we used to see depicting neanderthals. Is that AI generated?

by prplxd_nihilist

4/1/2026 at 7:53:47 AM

Perhaps some cultures' stories about "wild men" are about Neanderthals.

Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.

by razorbeamz

4/1/2026 at 8:49:34 AM

Without being an expert that still seems very unlikely to me.

The epic was written around 2000 BCE which was well over >> 10k years after agriculture and more than 4 times that much after neanderthals died out.

It's possible but much more likely that they refer to something more contemporary. There are always "wild men" around no matter who you ask.

by Vespasian

4/1/2026 at 5:14:32 PM

I believe Enkidu also became much more wild over time. In Against the Grain the author suggests earlier tellings of Gilgamesh presented Enkidu as unusual, but human. When the same story was being recorded a thousand years later, he was a monster. If the story was preserving some ancient memory about Neanderthals, such significant change seems unlikely.

by poncho_romero

4/1/2026 at 4:56:26 PM

Could also just be someone with mental illness ostracized from society at the time.

by asdff

4/1/2026 at 8:03:09 AM

Shouldn't have bothered....

by SarahC_

4/1/2026 at 7:22:07 AM

How ironic that the science.org website wants to verify I am a human!

by mproud

4/1/2026 at 10:18:11 AM

Seventy years ago, a scientist published a book about Neanderthals. According to his scientific opinion, they didn’t speak; they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to sleep early because they couldn’t see those gestures at night, lol.

In my country, there is an area with archaeological sites of Neanderthal villages and their mammoth hunting grounds. In one area, there are thousands of mammoth bones. Imagine having only wooden spears and ordinary stones at your disposal. Maybe flint spears, maybe not. In this area, flint is too rare and is mainly used for cutting, because the nearest flint deposit is 400 km away.

by Fokamul

4/1/2026 at 11:02:17 AM

> they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to sleep early because they couldn’t see those gestures at night, lol.

LMAO did he never saw a dog or a cat in is live ? They don't speak but can still use sounds to communicate

by poulpy123

4/1/2026 at 3:54:17 AM

I spent a year of high school in the Basque Country, and it always stuck out to me that a common feature of the Basques, especially the beefy ones, was incredibly caveman-like.

I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very small population.

by lobf

4/1/2026 at 4:21:11 AM

My Dad wrote an article about this 25 years ago or so: https://aoi.com.au/LB/LB705/ (How the Neanderthals became the Basques). He would really get a kick out of people reading it (he's 90 now). His website goes back to 96' and it shows.

by tren

4/1/2026 at 5:28:06 AM

Greetings to your father from a European with O- blood, fair freckled skin, and a receded chin! I've always been fascinated with Neanderthals. Happy to see science slowly realising these were not some stupid brutes...

by dumol

4/1/2026 at 5:35:10 AM

That is a gem of the old internet; concise, informative, well articulated, it's got it all. Tell your pa thanks for keeping it up for me!

by onlypassingthru

4/1/2026 at 4:59:07 PM

>His website goes back to 96' and it shows.

The thing loaded instantly. What a breath of fresh air in 2026. Hats off to Dad.

by asdff

4/1/2026 at 6:24:46 AM

It was a fun read!

Although one of the references goes to a now dead "reptilian agenda" website which might have been even more interesting:)

by riffraff

4/1/2026 at 11:08:44 AM

Sorry for your father but nothing in the article makes sense

by poulpy123

4/1/2026 at 4:32:17 AM

Ah, reminds me of good old CGI websites.

by olibhel

4/2/2026 at 8:51:52 AM

The basque and sardinians seem to have the most of DNA from the neolithic european farmers. The sharp features in the rest of europe might come from the steppe people. That way this totally makes sense.

by prplxd_nihilist

4/1/2026 at 3:59:05 AM

Basque Country also has an interesting language which doesn't seem related to other European languages. Basque language (or Euskara).

Seems as though it could have been an enclave of neanderthals who eventually integrated with humans.

by boxedemp

4/1/2026 at 5:25:01 AM

This is a much-discussed topic. All we know of the Basque language is that it is pre-Indo-European.

The last time I looked in to this, the consensus was that it was most likely a version of otherwise-extinct ancient Celtic.

Now that doesn’t mean that the Basques don’t have a potentially outsized Neanderthal genetic influence, but the odds of their language being so ancient as to pre-exist modern humans entirely is unlikely.

by lobf

4/1/2026 at 5:38:10 AM

If it has any relation to Celtic languages, then it's Indo-European by definition.

We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.

by vintermann

4/1/2026 at 5:51:42 AM

Oh! Sorry- I meant to refer to the hypothetical proto-Celtic language!

This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me.

by lobf

4/1/2026 at 7:45:43 AM

Proto-Celtic is also an Indo-European language...

by piperswe

4/1/2026 at 8:04:54 AM

I'm just an armchair wikipedia browser, but it's an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Basque_language

This article talks about the Basque language from before contact with the Romans, 5-1 centuries BCE. It also references a "pre-proto-basque" language, that would have been the one before the Celtic invasion of Iberia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtiberians).

The rabbit hole kind of ends there, as not much linguistic artifacts or history remain from BC unfortunately. But one can imagine the Basque society would live in relative isolation for a long time before that.

by Cthulhu_

4/1/2026 at 12:40:07 PM

What is more interesting is how they went extinct.

I would assume there were local populations that lived for a long time. But then they were gone too.

Some DNA is in modern humans, so there must have been some inter-breeding, but that in itself alone can not explain why the Neanderthals went extinct.

by shevy-java

4/1/2026 at 9:07:49 AM

Food, water, then the RNG is solved by large N.

Was it a knifes edge at times? Sure. Was it abundant at times? Also true.

by brador