• @Glowstick
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    835 months ago

    iirc this has been known for a while. We had sex with them so much that they stopped existing as a separate species.

    • @EvacuateSoul
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      175 months ago

      Garrison would be proud. We truly fucked them to death.

    • Rhaedas
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      95 months ago

      The ones we didn’t kill. The more violent killing species is the one that survived. Yay us.

      • Match!!
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        205 months ago

        We have evidence of interbreeding, but how much evidence do we have of violence between humansnand neanderthals?

        • @kemsat
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          25 months ago

          Iirc there are no Neanderthal Y-chromosomes left, but there are X-chromosomes, suggesting we killed the males & took the females

          • @[email protected]
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            45 months ago

            This… doesn’t really match my understanding.

            IIRC there wasn’t any real trend. Men and women of either species interbred.

        • Coelacanth
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          15 months ago

          Nothing concrete I don’t think. But we do have many thousands of years of racial violence in our collective history so it’s not a huge leap of a guess.

        • Rhaedas
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          15 months ago

          I guess the evidence would come in the history of areas or sites where one group displaced another, perhaps leaving signs of a takeover. I have seen documentaries discussing the differences of the species, and how ours wasn’t the physically stronger, but our brain enabled us to plan and communicate better in a conflict or attack. I don’t know if that was based on evidence or just speculation using the characteristics we know of the two species.

    • qprimed
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      5 months ago

      yes, and the article mentions it.

      if you are on the fence about reading - its a medium length, layman accessible, enjoyable read.

  • TomMasz
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    145 months ago

    I’ve got a bit of Neanderthal DNA, and a lot of folks of Eastern European descent do as well. My ancestors were swingers, I guess.

  • @Omega_Man
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    5 months ago

    How were we able to procreate with a different species? Are there other instances of this in nature?

    I thought mating two species created sterile offspring (mules).

    • @mineralfellow
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      175 months ago

      Simply put, it’s not that simple.

    • @RunawayFixer
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      55 months ago

      There are examples of 2 distinct species (with different chromosome count) creating (sometimes) fertile offspring: https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/when-hybrids-are-fertile-3/

      But genetically the neanderthalers were far less different from us than those examples. Apparently all modern humans share 99.9% of DNA and neanderthalers shared 99.7% of that. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/are-neanderthals-and-homo-sapiens-the-same-species

      So the no viable offspring rule might not be that good for differentiating species, but that also doesn’t mean that neanderthalers and us were not the same species. The more I read on it, the more I think that we were. Apparently we interbred quite a lot over the millennia.

      • @Omega_Man
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        15 months ago

        Is there any way to tell if certain gender-pairs were more common in interspecies mating between sapiens and neanderthals? For example, are we able to tell if the male partner was more or less likely to be sapien or neanderthal?

        • @RunawayFixer
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          15 months ago

          I think that might be possible with mitochondrial dna (it always comes from the mother), but I only found 1 speculative source that draws a conclusion: “Nobody today has mitochondrial DNA like that in Neanderthals and, since it’s passed only maternally, this implies that interbreeding was more often between their men and our women.” https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-we-know-about-the-lives-of-neanderthal-women

          It’s an essay, not a research paper, I wouldn’t bet any money on this conclusion being correct.

    • Ephera
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      -15 months ago

      Well, this newfound knowledge could have us decide that Neanderthals were not a different species, actually.

  • Subverb
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    -175 months ago

    We call them MAGA now.

    • @ichbinjasokreativ
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      155 months ago

      In an archaeology sub. Really. This is exactly why the US is so divided and why violence is your most likely outcome. Grow a personality and stop dragging politics into everything.

    • @[email protected]
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      135 months ago

      Neanderthals had greater social intelligence than sapiens. Why are you complimenting Nazis?