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One of my pet theories is that Neanderthals were the "Nephilim" [1] referred to in Genesis.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim
I think this idea definitely deserves a historical fiction book.
Aronofsky’s “Noah” has some pretty interesting depictions of what I believe were fallen angel stone giants intended to represent the Nephilim. I also found it interesting how the depraved human society God sent the floods to destroy was depicted as an industrialized society harvesting some sort of strange resource that was destroying the planet.
Not quite the same but The Inheritors by William Golding explores the coexistence of the two groups.
So does Robert J. Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" series:
https://www.goodreads.com/series/40828-neanderthal-parallax
Here's one more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Tiger
Eaters of the Dead by Michael Chrichton has Neanderthals as the monsters Beowulf fights. Cool movie as well.
I wonder where else the Neanderthals might be mentioned in old stories.
If by stories you mean written, surely nowhere. There are some 40,000 years between the last Neanderthals and the invention of writing.
Though I’m not even a history hobbyist, it seems incredibly unlikely for those stories to be passed down orally for that long in any distinct manner.
The Aborigines in one area tell a story of a hill in their lands that one day spouted fire which created the land they live on. It’s actually an extinct volcano that extended the coastline 37,000 years ago creating their wetland habitat. Details linked.
https://www.earthdate.org/the-oldest-story-ever-told
We know cave paintings were remarkably consistent across extremely wide geographic areas for more than 15,000 years. It's not inconceivable pre-literate cultures could maintain the fundamentals of an oral tradition on these timescales.
I think most of the stories got reset during the ice age. We may not find may reference.
Ancient people got confused with fossils. For example, the cyclopes myth may have its origin in the fossils of Pleistocene dwarf elephants, because they look like a giant skull of a one eyed human, if you use your imagination.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopes
(see Possible origins section)
There is a very good book called "The First Fossil Hunters" that deals with discovery and interpretation of fossils in antiquity. Bones of large prehistoric mammals were frequently dug up and displayed as "giants." Some of the more esoteric animals in Herodotus are probably actually references to fossilized dinosaurs.
https://www.amazon.com/First-Fossil-Hunters-Dinosaurs-Mammot...
Also, ancient people would hike up to the top of a hill or mountain and see fossils of sea shells and fish and would accurately conclude that this ground used to be under water. Of course they would have naturally assumed there must have been a helluva flood at one time. Which is perhaps why there are flood myths in so many different cultures.
I strongly believe the flood myths we find from cultures around the globe is due to the end of the last ice-age and the influx of polar icecap meltwater[0] into the oceans during the incredible global climate catastrophe around that time[1]
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
but Neanderthals were short and stupid.
I think the Nephilim, given the way they were described as tall "sons of God" who were "heros" and "warriors of renown" were an African people
Some think they are stupid but we know they had 1700 cubic centimeters of brain volume compared to 1200 cubic centimeters for an anatomically modern human.
It is possible that they were not that stupid and they were simply outbred by humans.
They were certainly very conservative in their stone tool design. Mousterien tools change little over more than 100 000 years of their existence.
They also lived in an ice covered world full of lethal megafauna instead of a post ice age world with fertile lands ready for agriculture and smaller animals.
I once met a girl who among other interesting ideas was dead convinced that ancient humans were not warlike at all and that there is no archeological evidence of war from a time before written records. And that the natural human instinct when meeting strange human groups is to mate, not fight. Her main argument for why that is obviously true was 'just look at all the screwing going on in youth hostels'. Having had the pleasure of growing up in a town that had, let's say, 'territoriality' as an integral part of its youth culture, I begged to differ.
There actually isn't unequivocal evidence of war in the early archaeological record, although that is more to do with the definition of "war" than "humans were inherently peaceful."
A plausible modern definition of war is that it is a conflict between two polities that sanctions otherwise illegitimate violence by particular people. That is, war is undertaken by government (not individuals); it requires the use of special participants (military forces); it requires a definitive, positive interaction to commence (e.g., a declaration of war); and it has rules that need to be observed. The exact contours of the definition will differ from author to author, and there are plenty of conflicts that sit in a nebulous gray area (would The Troubles constitute a war? or the Colombian conflict between the government and FARC? or gang wars?), but broadly speaking, you will see some sort of line being drawn between warfare and mere violence.
Archaeology tells us that there is pretty clear physical evidence of mass violent deaths as early as the Mesolithic. However, cultural evidence of warfare is not easily established: cave paintings in the Paleolithic don't depict anything like warfare, and even in the Mesolithic, evidence for warfare in paintings is kind of thin. It's really not until the development of sedentary agriculture in the early Neolithic that we see clear evidence of warfare, and even here, the evidence can easily be interpreted in a way that suggests it wasn't a major feature before then.
If we compare ourselves to other primates both chimpanzees and gorillas show deadly violence with a relatively high frequency. Even bonobos are quite vicious when they are not fucking.
Meaning all high status males have probably killed at least one member of their species in their lifetime.
Orangutans are the odd elevated ones.
Thank you for writing this!
Her reasoning wasn't this deep though. It went mostly along the lines of idillic prehistoric humans solving every issue with mating until patriarchy driven civilizations came along and messed up the world.
People seem to forget that Native Americans were stone age people before European contact.
I guess Ă–tzi [1] would also beg to differ. Too bad he was brutally murdered about 5k years ago (long before written record).
[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
Just because people fought does not mean they did not also mate. I believe something like 1 in 200 people today are descended from Genghis Khan (
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/1-in-200-men-d...
)
To the victor go the spoils, which, historically, women would be considered a "spoil", not a lot of courting that one might see in a modern youth hostile.
So she somehow missed the lesson from her presumably ~9+ years of schooling that the history of humanity until quite recently is that of famine and brutal war over land to produce enough calories to survive for another year.
(my pet peeve: history ed in school spends too much time on details, and not enough time on the macro perspective)
https://time.com/5137272/condoms-at-olympics/
Humans fought Neanderthals.
Humans fought humans.
Neanderthals fought Neanderthals.
The most interesting question is, did humans and Neanderthals form coalitions against humans, Neanderthals, or other human and Neanderthals coalitions?
It does seem likely they did, we were both territorial predatory species (or sub-species if you like). However I doubt Homo Sapiens and Neanderthalensis were monolithic groups. There would have been patchwork local rivalries and maybe alliances over time. It’s also interesting just how long we lived alongside each other.
I wonder if there were ever any mixed communities. Human Hunter gatherers are know to take captives and slaves, which over generations could lead to a level of integration, just as one possible mechanism, although there are plenty of other plausible scenarios over that amount of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...
> In Eurasia, interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans with modern humans took place several times. The introgression events into modern humans are estimated to have happened about 47,000–65,000 years ago with Neanderthals and about 44,000–54,000 years ago with Denisovans.
The original article (linked at the bottom) seems better illustrated. _"This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence"_
https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-...
I really like this way of doing heavy hyperlinking, btw.
I submitted that same link the day it was published and got no votes. Bad timing I guess :)
I guess you sometimes need a brand like the BBC to get ahead.
The BBC headline is interestingly different from the original article's more equanimous "War in the time of Neanderthals: how our species battled for supremacy for over 100,000 years." The phrasing implies Neanderthal volition and cohesion against a non-aggressive and similarly cohesive "us."
https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-...
Also this article posted here 2 days ago...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983589
Is it not now commonly accepted that Neanderthals were sexually compatible and merged into our modern genetics? And that they may have been seen as human by our ancestors?
I think that question requires an in-depth analysis of what it means to be "seen as human". I argue that humans have only seen all other humans as humans for a very short time. In times of slavery, I think the concept of humans must have been different than today.
>In times of slavery, I think the concept of humans must have been different than today.
I think with regards to slavery you are bringing in modern views of humanity. I think it was the modern African chattel slavery practiced by the West that introduced the concept that slaves were less than human.
Prior to this, slavery was just considered something unfortunate that happened to a person. A person could become a slave because of debts. A person could become a slave if they lost a battle or their city was conquered. For sure, it sucked, and they did not have any rights, but again, there wasn't really a concept of human rights. In addition, there was no real concept of equality. These were very hierarchical societies. Thus, a slave, I think, would have been considered human, but at the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. In addition, there was no real ethnic component to slavery. There were Greek slaves and Greek masters. Slaves also were not considered intellectually inferior - see for example the Greek physicians and tutors that Romans would have as slaves.
Ironically, it was the push for equality and human rights that made African slavery so toxic. In the past, without concepts of human rights or equality, slavery was just what happened to people who were really unlucky somehow. However, with the concepts of equality and human rights, people realized that slavery was incompatible with that. However, they still wanted to enslave Africans. The way they dealt with this dilemma was to say that Africans were not really human, which magnified the damage caused by slavery a 100 fold, since that horrible idea persisted even after slavery ended in the West.
I'm surprised you're being downvoted. This is an important facet of the history of slavery that people tend to forget / ignore today.
The article ("Did Neanderthals go to war with our ancestors?") is about events that took place ~100k years ago at the _very_ latest.
The GP post is talking about things the happened ~2.5k years ago (greek slavery) and less than 0.5k years ago (african slavery).
It's off-topic. Not incorrect, not unimportant. Just off-topic.
It was on topic to what GP was replying to, though. It's fine for discussions to wander.
I agree that we cannot make broad claims or assumptions about early hominin culture. However, some of these claims about the history of slavery are either incomplete or false.
1. The image of the enslaved Greek language tutor gives a misleading picture of ancient slavery. It's true Greeks and Romans seem to have divided their social world on language and religion rather than skin color. But the massive numbers of Carthaginians and Gauls worked to death in copper mines were almost certainly not seen as equals by their enslavers.
2. I may be misreading you here, but the claim that "it was the push for equality and human rights that made African slavery so toxic" is reversing cause and effect. Racial plantation slavery in the Canary Islands predated modern movements for universal human rights. It was slavery that made human rights a European-only idea, not human rights movements that made colonial slavery a racial institution.
> Slaves also were not considered intellectually inferior - see for example the Greek physicians and tutors that Romans would have as slaves
Seems it depends
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#Slav...
"Xenophon notes the accepted practice of treating slaves as domestic animals, that is to say punishing them for disobedience and rewarding them for good behaviour.[130] For his part, Aristotle prefers to see slaves treated as children and to use not only orders but also recommendations, as the slave is capable of understanding reasons when they are explained"
There's plenty more. I think you're being a bit rosy-tinted here. Some like josephus did ok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus
but many slaves got worked to death.
Maybe not then, but certainly in the United States slaves were considered inferior in every way.
Yes, it's been conclusively demonstrated that there was Neanderthal introgression into the modern human genome. There's no little to no evidence (or theory for how to operationalize what we have to that end) for how they would have been perceived though.
Sure. I remember a respectful burial of a 1/8 Neanderthal youth in a Cro Magnon site. So not only were Neanderthal worthy of sexual relations, their offspring were kept in the tribe, and their grand-offspring.
We modern humans have been trained to classify living creatures using Linnaean taxonomy, but ancient hominids didn't necessarily apply the same conceptual framework. In other words that question might not have even been relevant or meaningful to them.
neanderthals might be our ancestors, atleast in part.
Neanderthals ARE our ancestors. Each of us likely have genes originating from Neanderthals to one degree or another. What an odd headline.
If I remember correctly, this is only true for European population. That's where Neanderthal lived, and several times bred with Homo Sapiens.
Also most of Asia, particularly in the north. This includes everyone who crossed the Bering land bridge into the Americas.
Neanderthals OF WARRRRRR!!
anti-neanderthals articles are popping up everywhere. Why the haaaaate brah? - AR15s are their gift to modern humans!