Neanderthals displayed as healthy, misleading

[Still Waters]

Our image of prehistoric man as healthy and fit is wrong as they were often old, crippled, or children, a leading scientist said.

Displays in museums showing strapping cavemen are misleading when actually they would have looked like they had ‘been in the wars’, archaeological evidence shows.

Penny Spikins, an archaeologist at the University of York told the British Science Festival that of 50 skeletons of Neanderthals unearthed worldwide, around a third had some kind of disability.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7462229/Neanderthals-looked-like-wars.html

[Piney]

They were heavily inbred and ate almost nothing but red meat and the few plants they could gather weren't exactly loaded with vitamins.

The ones in Spain who ate shellfish and fruit were probably a lot healthier, but I didn't see them mentioned in the article.

 

[Duke Wellington]

18 minutes ago, Piney said:

They were heavily inbred and ate almost nothing but red meat and the few plants they could gather weren't exactly loaded with vitamins.

The ones in Spain who ate shellfish and fruit were probably a lot healthier, but I didn't see them mentioned in the article.

 

You are taking what is currently promoted as healthy eating advice for a human and applying it to a different species. It doesnt work like that.

Virtually all animals (except humans) can synthesize vitamin C and even for those few that cannot then eating liver gets them it. Something meat eating species do a lot off.

[Piney]

1 hour ago, RabidMongoose said:

Virtually all animals (except humans) can synthesize vitamin C and even for those few that cannot then eating liver gets them it. Something meat eating species do a lot off.

Who said I was talking about C? 

Who said they were a completely difference species if they could have viable offspring with us? 

No Ice Age animal was doing well during that cold snap that knocked Neanderthals for a loop and caused a dieback. There was hardly anything to eat. Period. 

[+Noteverythingisaconspiracy]

The fact that they died out should be a pretty big clue that they might not have been all that healthy. Nature is harsh that way.

[Piney]

6 minutes ago, Noteverythingisaconspiracy said:

The fact that they died out should be a pretty big clue that they might not have been all that healthy. Nature is harsh that way.

They were never a huge population to begin with and I imagine they suffered a "bottleneck" in their genetic history. 

 

[+Noteverythingisaconspiracy]

1 minute ago, Piney said:

They were never a huge population to begin with and I imagine they suffered a "bottleneck" in their genetic history. 

 

Sounds very likely. We almost suffered something similar, but we were more capable of adapting to a different enviroment. We have shown the capability to live anywhere from the Sahara to the Arctic.

[Piney]

5 minutes ago, Noteverythingisaconspiracy said:

Sounds very likely. We almost suffered something similar, but we were more capable of adapting to a different enviroment. We have shown the capability to live anywhere from the Sahara to the Arctic.

We actually acquired our cold weather adaptations from Neanderthals.  It was "hybrid vigor" but H.Sapiens bred faster, breeding out most of their genetic mark. 

[Duke Wellington]

10 hours ago, Piney said:

Who said I was talking about C? 

Who said they were a completely difference species if they could have viable offspring with us? 

No Ice Age animal was doing well during that cold snap that knocked Neanderthals for a loop and caused a dieback. There was hardly anything to eat. Period. 

Nice, evade me pointing out the flaws in your argument and then engage in distortions.

Neanderthals were a different species from us and inter-species breeding does not negate that fact. The next thing you know you will be claiming tigers and lion are the same species because they can produce ligers.

You can not take what experiments say is the optimum diet for a mouse, then scale it up to humans, then also apply it to Neanderthals. Not only is current healthy eating advice largely untested in our people (it comes from mice experiments) but Neanderthals arent even the same species as us. After 100,000s of years adapting to the European Ice Age environment then they might not have needed plant matter at all.

We humans need plant matter (or liver) because we cannot synthesize vitamin C. We are one of very few species in which evolution has stopped the metabolic pathways that make vitamin C from working. 99% of other species including chimps and gorillas can produce it. Dont assume Neanderthals needed their greens.

Every animal species which has specialised for a cold environment hibernates. Modern humans maintain the ability to hibernate but unless you are an Australian Aborigine it will kill you. Clothes, fire, housing, together they have reduced our exposure to harsh cold climates and as such we have lost our evolutionary edge when it comes to hibernation.

Neanderthals were specialised for a cold environment so with hibernation in mind we cannot accurately ascertain their lifespan, how often then needed to eat, their vitamin requirements, or how long per year they spent awake. We cannot determine what was a healthy diet for them. Therefore your claims are mere speculation which under scrutiny fall apart.  You need to stop claiming a diet heavy in red meat was bad for them or that ones eating shellfish were healthier. You are projecting what you think is a healthy diet for our species onto them.

[Duke Wellington]

10 hours ago, Piney said:

They were never a huge population to begin with and I imagine they suffered a "bottleneck" in their genetic history. 

The problem with the current position on why Neanderthals went extinct (with a few instances of inter-breeding) is it makes an awful lot of untested assumptions.

Lets say Neanderthals hibernated for lengthy periods of time and only bred during warm spells. From that they might have lived 500 years while only producing 5 children during that time. As such their population could be completely absorbed into ours leaving behind just the 2% to 4% genetic footprint in our species without any warfare, hostility, being outcompeted, or extinction.

Its like say all immigrants in your country have 20 children, while as the natives have 2. Then 50,000 years later scientists wrongly assuming the immigrants wiped us out. When in fact we lived in harmony but they simply bred more than us.

[Piney]

2 hours ago, RabidMongoose said:

Its like say all immigrants in your country have 20 children, while as the natives have 2. Then 50,000 years later scientists wrongly assuming the immigrants wiped us out. When in fact we lived in harmony but they simply bred more than us.

Which is what I said happened to neanderthal

2 hours ago, RabidMongoose said:

Neanderthals were a different species from us and inter-species breeding does not negate that fact. The next thing you know you will be claiming tigers and lion are the same species because they can produce ligers.

Which are sterile so they are 2 completely different species. Neanderthal and Sapien were both sub-species of each other and much more genetically closer

2 hours ago, RabidMongoose said:

 Modern humans maintain the ability to hibernate but unless you are an Australian Aborigine it will kill you.

2 hours ago, RabidMongoose said:

Neanderthals were specialised for a cold environment so with hibernation in mind we cannot accurately ascertain their lifespan,

..........ok, now I can answer...

2 hours ago, RabidMongoose said:

Lets say Neanderthals hibernated for lengthy periods of time and only bred during warm spells. From that they might have lived 500 years while only producing 5 children during that time.

No hominid hibernates or even can and in certainly doesn't increase your lifespan. It actually stresses the bodies of mammals that do.  

[Duke Wellington]

4 minutes ago, Piney said:

Which is what I said happened to neanderthal

Which are sterile so they are 2 completely different species. Neanderthal and Sapien were both sub-species of each other and much more genetically closer

..........ok, now I can answer...

No hominid hibernates or even can and in certainly doesn't increase your lifespan. It actually stresses the bodies of mammals that do.  

Neanderthals are separated from us by at least 300,000 years in the evolutionary tree. We are separate species. You know that chimps are separate from humans too yet it should be possible to produce a viable hybrid - a humanzee.

Some Australian Aborigines (ones living in the desert where the temperature plummets at night` have indeed been recorded as entering into a hibernation state https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809007

You can too but the odds are it will kill you. What happens when people experience hypothermia is they feel cold and they struggle to think. As their body cools they reach a body where they feel unbearably hot and get the urge to strip naked and hide away somewhere where they wont be found. Thats hyperthermia kicking in.

In a modern European we haven't had to hibernate for a long time so we have lost our evolutionary edge - the defective ones who couldn't hibernate weren't eliminated from the gene pool.

[Piney]

19 minutes ago, RabidMongoose said:

Neanderthals are separated from us by at least 300,000 years in the evolutionary tree. We are separate species. You know that chimps are separate from humans too yet it should be possible to produce a viable hybrid - a humanzee.

 

Chimps are separated from us by millions of years. 

20 minutes ago, RabidMongoose said:

Some Australian Aborigines (ones living in the desert where the temperature plummets at night` have indeed been recorded as entering into a hibernation state https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809007

Nice source...

They wouldn't need to because they have the same cold adaptation Denisovan genes that I do. 

22 minutes ago, RabidMongoose said:

In a modern European we haven't had to hibernate for a long time so we have lost our evolutionary edge - the defective ones who couldn't hibernate weren't eliminated from the gene pool.

I don't know where you get hominids hibernated from.  They have never been recorded doing it. 

[Duke Wellington]

Just now, Piney said:

Chimps are separated from us by millions of years. 

Nice source...

They wouldn't need to because they have the same cold adaptation Denisovan genes that I do. 

I don't know where you get hominids hibernated from.  They have never been recorded doing it. 

`Nice source` followed by `they have never been recorded doing it`

Hint - Put the two together. Actually dont, at that point its obvious you are trolling lol.

[Piney]

12 minutes ago, RabidMongoose said:

`Nice source` followed by `they have never been recorded doing it`

Hint - Put the two together. Actually dont, at that point its obvious you are trolling lol.

No, you just can't find a academic paper showing hominids hibernated. 

[+Hammerclaw]

They were human, just another type of human and we interbred with them. Any hypothetical divergence from the basic human archetype is nothing more than fanciful speculation. 

[+Desertrat56]

17 hours ago, Piney said:

They were never a huge population to begin with and I imagine they suffered a "bottleneck" in their genetic history. 

 

I don't know about that, a lot of us have neatherthal dna, so they aren't completely gone.  They must have been healthy enough for some of them to breed with homo sapiens.

[Piney]

8 minutes ago, Desertrat56 said:

I don't know about that, a lot of us have neatherthal dna, so they aren't completely gone.  They must have been healthy enough for some of them to breed with homo sapiens.

They were. They just had a hard life.