8 billion people: How different the world would look if Neanderthals had prevailed

Phys dot org ^ | November 17, 2022 | Penny Spikins, The Conversation

[SunkenCiv]

In evolutionary terms, the human population has rocketed in seconds. The news that it has now reached 8 billion seems inexplicable when you think about our history.

For 99% of the last million years of our existence, people rarely came across other humans. There were only around 10,000 Neanderthals living at any one time. Today, there are around 800,000 people in the same space that was occupied by one Neanderthal. What's more, since humans live in social groups, the next nearest Neanderthal group was probably well over 100km away. Finding a mate outside your own family was a challenge.

Neanderthals were more inclined to stay in their family groups and were warier of new people. If they had outcompeted our own species (Homo sapiens), the density of population would likely be far lower. It's hard to imagine them building cities, for example, given that they were genetically disposed to being less friendly to those beyond their immediate family.

The reasons for our dramatic population growth may lie in the early days of Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago. Genetic and anatomical differences between us and extinct species such as Neanderthals made us more similar to domesticated animal species. Large herds of cows, for example, can better tolerate the stress of living in a small space together than their wild ancestors who lived in small groups, spaced apart. These genetic differences changed our attitudes to people outside our own group. We became more tolerant.

[EEGator]

https://www.yardbarker.com/entertainment/articles/the_25_most_memorable_phil_hartman_characters/s1__26476910#slide_1

[Magnum44]

[grimalkin]

Interesting to think about, but this article has a lot of conjecture.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Like a Democrat controlled Congress?

[FarCenter]

The increase in population really began when the smelting of ores and manufacture of metal tools began.

With metal for plowshares and pruning hooks, farmers could increase the amount of food produced far beyond what Neolithic farmers with stone tools could produce.

With metal for swords and spear points, cities could extract the produce from the farmers in their hinterlands and multiply the city populations. Serfdom and slavery became the lot of the rural populations.

It is said that humans are a cancer, but that is not true of pre-urban humans. Only when the city begins is it analogous to a tumor, which penetrates the surrounding tissues and appropriates an excessive amount of resources for its uncontrolled growth.

And cities also send out expeditions to explore other lands, found new cities and exploit new hinterlands, just as cancers emit cells which migrate to other tissues of the organism and metastasize.

The Age of Exploration beginning in the 1400s should really be known as the Age of Metastasis.

[bunkerhill7]

Half the world is Chnese.
Good thing they only let`em have one kid per family.

[Dr. Sivana]

Chesterton covers this well in Chapter 2 of "The Everlasting Man".

It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words ‘They wore no clothes.’ Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock. But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for instance, might have become more and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal. One civilisation might specialise in things that happened to be perishable, like weaving and embroidering, and not in things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies. A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory machinery might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor and manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked—or possibly wore iron hats and trousers.

[MinorityRepublican]

I guess Africans never left the continent so they do not have any Neanderthal DNA in them, unlike the Europeans and Asians.

[KarlInOhio]

given that they were genetically disposed to being less friendly to those beyond their immediate family.

On which chromosome is that genetic difference? Or is the author just talking out of her ass about it being a genetic disposition rather than a cultural one or not a disposition at all?

[grey_whiskers]

You win the thread!

[SunkenCiv]

The second one. :^)

[BiteYourSelf]

😂

[BiteYourSelf]

Modern humans have been on this earth three hundred thousand years.
They say it took humans ten thousand years to go from hunter gatherers to walking on the moon.
So, I wonder how many civilizations rose and fell in that time?🤔

[.44 Special]

Homo S

apiens were so “friendly” they killed off the Neanderthals.

[FrdmLvr]

LMAO!!!! Exactly!

[I-ambush]

Klaus Scwab announces the WEF’s Return to Neanderthal Project, funded by Bill Gates.

[dforest]

The neanderthals and the sapiens disappeared. But the homos abound.

[mabarker1]

Is this where the Hatfield and Mc Coy thing got started ?

[Carriage Hill]

Could Neanderthals play banjo?

[BlackbirdSST]

You own the internet for the rest of the year. Do with it as you may.