> The production of bone grease, which required huge quantities of bone to be worthwhile, was previously considered to be something limited to Upper Paleolithic modern humans. This find pushes back the timeline by thousands of years and represents a fundamental shift in our knowledge of Neanderthal diet and adaptation.
If I had to guess I’d say we learned it from them.
I still struggle with the repeated assertions from the scicommss set that the 'neanderthals died out' or 'humans outcompeted neanderthals who went extinct', while at the same time acknowledging that 3% of DNA of everyone outside the African content is neanderthal. With that being the limit of 'the data' generally cited at hadn't, wouldn't a gradual, passively amicable merging (e.g. absorption) be just as explanatory as that Neanderthal's 'went extince' or 'were outcompeted'?
It's interesting to think about, and yes, I would think it's more accurate to consider that homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis are part of what became us, and in that case it seems odd/wrong to talk about them being outcompeted when there was interbreeding and their descendents are still here.
However they are still extinct!
It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the saxons are 'us'.
Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule of the northern part of England, but it's not like they suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of settling.
They had been vikings. They integrated very quickly on the continent, inter-married with locals and absorbed the culture within a couple of generations. It was nothing like the power structure that was put in place in England.
It doesn’t seem that much of a coincidence that some of the history’s foremost boat-based pillagers and raiders were the descendants of Vikings, right?
I think it's because that 3% number is so small, it actually comes down to "outcompeted". A merger of two equally fit sub-species would result in more DNA persisting.
I think that's the crux of the cognitive dissonance we all experience when described the trope for the first time. 3% of group B's genes persisting eons later in the combined genome A+B isn't necessarily reflective of the original relative size of the population of B vs. A. Evolution only countenances which genes conferred a survival benefit edge to persist.
Suppose population A was one million individuals, and population B was only one hundred (a 10000X disparity). Assume complete absorption of B into A over an instantaneous period of time. The proportional genetic representation argument, if it were operative, would imply that eons later, only 0.01% of the combined genome is from population B. Only that's not how genetics works - what matters is how much of a survival benefit did population B's genes confer on the inheriting offspring? To put up a concrete example, if population B had a gene conferring immunity to a regionally endemic pathogen, then that pop. B immunity gene is going to quickly saturate representation in the offspring populations as pathogen-vulnerable population members die off from disease.
Isn't there already an overlap in the upper 90% between humans and apes? I don't know how much the neanderthal DNA differed back then, but it couldn't be more than that, could it? So wouldn't 3% of the total be at least a third of the parts that did differ?
It's always confusing how those DNA comparisons are worded. We share almost 99% of our DNA with chimps, for example. But this just means that if you go down the genome, we have 99% of the same types of genes. And that's true even though we don't even have the same number of chromosomes as chimps! (We also share 50% of DNA with bananas - which just shows how incredibly complex basic stuff like cell respiration is.)
This is different than the statement that you share 50% of your DNA with your siblings, of course. Because in that case, you actually have the exact identical alleles as your siblings in 50% of your DNA.
The 3% neanderthal DNA is the second type of comparison.
The 99% identity with chimps is extremely misleading without clear qualification.
The fact that it has been used without qualification has a lot to do with the fact that most of our genome was assumed to be junk, which we know today is not the case, per the ENCODE project for example.
Thus, the 99% number needs to stop being perpetuated.
Today we know that the alignable parts (parts that are similar enough that they can be aligned with each other) are down in the 80s percents between humans and chimps, which can be digged out from e.g. this recent big study (some numbers are in the paper, and some needs to be digged out of the supplementary material):
There are a number of ethnic groups (not species or subspecies, I realize) that are less than 3% of the gene pool today (and happened over a much shorter timespan I would suppose) such as Irish, Jewish, Armenian, etc. Would they be considered having been outcompeted at this point?
No. There are still 100% individuals of all those groups, and the timescale of recorded history is too small for the same kind of competition as between neanderthals and sapiens anyway.
I am pretty sure most experts in the field would share your assertion that the statement ("neanderthals died out") hides complexity.
Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement can be useful tho. I teach media technology — and a useful simplification is to have students think about inputs and outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism did.
I am convinced that early humans were a lot smarter then given credit for. My guess is the same as yours and that they were part of a long chain of steps of learning and development that went back much farther then we have evidence for.
Possibly however homo erectus used the same design for their hand axes for over a million years. This implies the design was hardwired in their brains, in the same way the design of nests are hardwired in bird brains, as opposed to a rationally thought out design.
If I had to guess I’d say we learned it from them.