Comments on: Sex and the Single Neanderthal: Inter-Species Breeding in the Upper Palaeolithic?

By: Tonja

Tonja — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 09:39:03 +0000

I am sure the two species interbred, whether it was consensual, by rape or both.

“Modern man” continues to have sex with animals, so please, what would stop them from having sex with Neanderthals and vise versa?

By: onyx

onyx — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:54:05 +0000

thats ok. however research into absolute huntergatherer situation is much more limited to archeology. for example in educational values and the position of woman there is a scale , huntergatherer- herding- sedentary agriculture, where their rights are progressively disrespected. so i think sometimes deductions from comparably remote technologies society’s are valid. glad you don’t acknowledge research indeed warrants to see this relation between protein-shortage and slavery. btw i didn’t know inuit had the romantic wife kidnapping thing, there is the assumption of replacement by the ‘tunuit’ (the big inuit) i know, but i have not seen wether that has been proven to exclude the (kidnapped) tunuit females from reproduction. possibly because that mostly concerns research from before the human genome.

By: Luis

Luis — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:28:08 +0000

My point is that agriculturalists are normally very different from hunter-gatherers: their societies are, their cultures are and their values are too. “Wild” farmers from Papua or Scandinavia are surely much closer to modern or historical societies than to hunter-gatherers. Of course civilization (and other elements) add further distinctions but in my opinion foraging and farming are just two totally different socio-economical realities and the most fundamental such barrier that humankind has ever crossed.

I do not accept farmers as example of hunter-gatherers in any case. Farmer societies are generally much complex, with growing notions of property and hierarchy that can’t exist among hunter-gatherers. While from the city is maybe the easy thing to see them all as “savage” or “primitive”, there is a cultural and socio-economic abyss among them.

By: onyx

onyx — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:54:09 +0000

it is statistics from research about cannibalism in the amazone, that also sidesteps on this. hm yes vikings were ironage, but they were also less agricultural, in that sense closer to hunter gatherer and tainted with the bias of ‘wildness’, wich to the current day get’s people to look at their roots and tribal tradition (eh eg. in afghanistan). slavery as an institute in agricultural society comes with foodstress, i only know from several incidences that enslavement may be a component of canibalism, headhunting, and violence as phenomenons of foodshortage. also in north america cannibalism and enslavement appear to go hand in hand when they occur.

By: Victoria

Victoria — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:51:05 +0000

What an amazing amount of unsupported speculation from what should be a scientifically based website blog.
Slavery? rape? seriously? This is what you think of AMH?
Let the genome do the talking about whether or not there was interspecies breeding, and leave all the drama to Fox News.

By: Luis

Luis — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:58:19 +0000

Nathan: high cheek bones seem quite widespread among archaic humans. They prove nothing on their own (it’s like saying “prognathism” or “browridges”).

By: Nathan

Nathan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:55:02 +0000

I watched the video- out of Africa. It showed that the Navajos and the Nomads of ancient Siberia shared Genes. Which means during the ice age Russia and Alaska were connected. Both Native Americans and Russians, share some Genes, like High cheek bones. Germans and the Neanderthals have high cheek bones.Humans migrated just like any other animal with a vertabre. With migration comes change, and that creates differences. Different climates create differnces with many spieces. Maybe one day will find if the 2 spieces interbreeded.

By: Luis

Luis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:17:22 +0000

… i took it as a comparison with modern huntergatherer society’s that under foodstress tend to indeed ‘enslave’ persons of other groups…

Totally unheard of to me.

… for example the vikings that habitually robbed woman…

Vikings were not hunter-gatherers but an Iron Age society (including, of course, farming and animal husbandry).

I think you are basically wrong, though the fact that “romantic” wife kidnapping happened until recently among Inuits is for real. But these same Inuits don’t seem to have ever interbred with the Tuniit that preceded them in the same ecological area: they essentially replaced them instead.

By: onyx

onyx — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:19:48 +0000

maybe it is farfetched to call it enslaving, i took it as a comparison with modern huntergatherer society’s that under foodstress tend to indeed ‘enslave’ persons of other groups, sometimes. indeed in sexual matters a prisoner could be abused without consent. allthough it is not that evident, for example the vikings that habitually robbed woman, as to (in contemporain literature) enslave them (wich was a most common event in exactly the developed cultures describing the vikings) in practice married them so much the load of scandinanvians with dark hair can be retraced to these events.

the point here being that such mechanism would have much facilitated interbreeding, since as far as we know under circumstances of population stress (wich we may assume the (if) existant influx of ‘new’ humans into europe created) woman are more often kept, then abused in singular events. within tribal structures. so i think its is a good point, although the literal interpretation of enslavement, and humans being ‘property’ may well have only developed with the ascent of monetary systems. in the least those cultures that early on ruled and minted for the surrounds (say greek, babylonian, roman) all share the trait of slavery. in a much ruder and more widely applied form then the , intrinsically romantic, abduction practice that has long been part of marital strategy’s.

By: Tim Jones

Tim Jones — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:09:54 +0000

I suppose the next question would be, who was doing the enslaving – AMH, the Neanderthals or both? Or is it even possible that prospective mates were traded between species, selected to create alliances, or chosen for other reasons that might not appear obvious to us tens of millennia later?