Funny

Wut? I feel like I just took acid by reading this and have no idea what I just experienced.

For the same reason Neanderthals still exit: 59g9b7.jpg (click to show)

Neanderthals don't still exist (or exit). They went extinct around 40K years ago. But some of their DNA still survives in modern Homo sapiens. Like 2–3% in most non-African people. They were human like us, but a different species. They did pretty well actually, and survived for a long time (like 400,000 years or sth). So they must've got something right. They buried their dead, made artwork and tools. Maybe had language. They weren't the brutish "cavemen" of stereotypes"; they were actually pretty short and stocky, for starters. 400K years is a long time, so whatever they did must've worked. We may go that way one day and another species will take our place, or AI; who knows?

I bet they were less aggressive than us too. And probably didn't argue about libtards and conservatives on Twitter as much.

There was a good series on PBS's NOVA called Origins. Covered everything you said about Neanderthals. Too bad they went extinct. They were around longer than Homo Sapiens. At least they live on in us. MTG probably has a lot more Neanderthal DNA than 2%. Also, too bad Trump cut funding for PBS.

Yeah. It's fascinating to learn about and I agree: it's a real shame. How cool would it be to go back in time when there were two different human species (or even a few more like Denisovans) sharing the planet? Maybe we'd have to rethink everything we know about "human" rights. Right now, we're the only human species to survive, and our closest relatives are bonobos and chimps. But imagine if other *human* species still existed, capable of language, culture, art and so on like us? How would that work in the modern world? Would one group end up dominating the other one? Or would we have sort of a hybrid system and share the planet as two human species with very different ways of living?

Would we have different countries, somehow live together, or just fight all the time? (I mean, we can't even seem to get on now because of the color of our skin or culture, and we're literally the same frickin species. Difference in skin tone is such a superficial difference. Literally skin deep.

There are way bigger genetic differences than that between people that you can't see, but we fixate on skin tone and kill and subjugate each other over it just because it's so visual. Like, there's often more genetic diversity between two Black people from different parts of Africa than between either of them and, say, a European or Asian, but we lump everyone together based on color and call them one "race" because it's so visible, even though from a genetic perspective it's way too simplistic.

So imagine if there were other humans who were *actually* a different human species living side by side? Our track record tells me we'd end up fighting all the time. Who knows?

Can't speak for MTG lol. Although that actually brings up my whole original point: if MTG did indeed have more Neanderthal DNA, it doesn't necessarily mean she'd be more brutish and stupid and primitive like the old caveman stereotypes. Could well be the opposite. So if anything it could be a *compliment* to say she has more Neanderthal DNA. Maybe the Neanderthals were way more sensible and rational? I mean, they survived a damn long time so something must've worked, right?

Meanwhile, we can't even go a single year without having a war, and it's anyone's guess if we'll survive the next 50,000 years or just blow ourselves to oblivion because we're so aggressive and dumb. Fingers crossed we make it. I think we need AI to keep us sane and stop us destroying everything, coz we can't be trusted to not fight.

There was also the Hobbit species (Homo floresiensis) on the Indonesian island of Flores. They went extinct because of climate change (environmental changes like severe droughts and volcanoes). Probably will be the same reason for our extinction if we don't blow ourselves up before then.

Problem with that theory is that we're talking about species all over the world that have been around for millions of years who suddenly begin to evaporate after modern Homo sapiens arrived. Humans arrived in New Zealand, Hawaii, Madagascar, etc, far far more recently than the end of the last Ice Age, and despite the fact that their climates haven't changed (nor did they change much during the Ice Age), extinctions begin when modern humans arrive.

And in larger land masses like North America and Eurasia, animals didn't exactly suddenly go extinct at the end of the last Ice Age like commonly said. Not only did woolly mammoths persist as a dwarf version on Randall Island till 4500 years ago, they found the DNA of the regular larger sized versions in permafrost in the Yukon dating to that time as well. DNA of Prehistoric horses along with them. Giant longhorn bison persisted in that area till 450 years ago. That's right 450 - I didn't accidentally leave out a zero. It was still alive 450 years ago, 9600 years after they officially became extinct.

Then you go to South America which wasn't have covered with two miles of ice, and two entire orders of mammals just totally disappeared. Completely.

Giant ground sloths had originated in South America, later migrated to North America, adapting to the cold, and while no fossil remains have been found, their DNA has been found in eastern Siberian permafrost. And then they all went extinct from North all the way down to the tropics because the ice melted. Makes sense.

They were a lot more aggressive than modern humans, hence why they were built for it.

What does the circumflex mean? Were Neanderthals actually more aggressive than modern humans? Do you have any evidence to back that up?

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Have you not been on this site long enough to know that if you don't get a notification for a comment directed at somebody else that comment is not for you?

Ah, I'm always getting confused by these silly color lines.

Interesting. I've heard they were probably way stronger. And not actually that much shorter compared to ancient (modern) humans. (Just need to visit a Roman villa or Medieval house to see how much shorter people were only centuries ago, before modern nutrition was a thing and high-protein diets became much more accessible.)

Larger brain cases too. More robust and muscular. Bigger lung capacity. Better night vision. Basically better at almost everything physically. But not that they were necessarily more aggressive. Just much tougher to survive the cold European climate and hunt down megafauna, and a lot of their skeletons have a lot of damage from traumatic injuries of some sort, often from close combat with large prey animals. The brutish aggressive image was the Victorian stereotype of the archetypal "caveman" going "ugg" with a club. But us Homo sapiens were actually possibly the more aggressive ones was my understanding, although it's hard to know, I believe. Behavior doesn't get fossilized.

Often makes me sad they went extinct (or were killed off 👀 or simply outcompeted by us over time?). Must've been an interesting time to have two human species sharing the same land for so long. I wonder if we'd have been able to communicate with them with spoken language, since they also had the capacity for it, apparently, but would've sounded pretty different so who knows if we'd be able to reproduce each other's respective sounds.

And somehow tons of us ended up with a bit of their DNA (which we won't go into because we don't know how dark the reason was 💀), which may give us some advantages but also cause health problems, but I don't know much about that.