Im aware of the size of Homo sapiens increasing alongside the easier access to food and better living conditions. So if Homo neanderthalensis also had the opportunity how big would they have gotten? Or would they have just remained shorter and stockier?
growing up a lot of the books i read protrayed human evolution as having two main theories; with the leading one being ooa and the worse one being the multiregional hypothesis but recently i read that its more complex than that, i was wondering what the current outlook on that is like and whether those two theories still have value?
Apparently chimp-bonobo hybrids have occurred in captivity about a dozen times, and the offspring show no particular health issues or fertility problems, but they are somewhat visually and behaviourally distinct from both of their parents populations.
The dude in the picture is a Bonobo-Chimp called Adam, the only chimp bonobo hybrid I could find a photo of. More info about adam from the social media page of the zoo that houses him:
Some more info on Adam: Meet Adam, the incredibly rare bonobo-chimpanzee hybrid residing at Zoo Bassin d’Arcachon in France. Born on 30 July 1992 at Kino’s Circus (Rech Circus), Adam is a living hybrid of two distinct sister species, proving that chimpanzees and bonobos can interbreed. His unique lineage connects two very different worlds: his father was Congo, a bonobo from Stuttgart Zoo, and his mother was a chimpanzee named Clara.
While many hybrid animals are sterile, Adam is completely fertile and has even fathered his own offspring, a son named Mooky. His rare genetics give him a distinctively fluffy coat of hair, making him look completely different from a typical chimpanzee.
Rescued from the circus, Adam now lives in a huge habitat alongside Zora, who is a chimpanzee. Surprisingly, the pair do not like spending time together at all and are normally found quite far apart from each other. Instead of interacting with Zora, Adam prefers to focus his attention on the public. No matter if you look directly at him or just walk past, he is always on the lookout for something to throw. Watch his highly dynamic behaviour as he stands upright, makes his completely unique vocal sound, and launches sticks at visitors. Fortunately for the crowd, his aim is rarely on target!
In the videos i've seen of him, he makes vocalisations that sound nothing like either chimp or bonobo vocalisations I've heard, he sounds more like a human trying to do an impression of a dog barking. Also he seems incredibly hyperactive and walks bipedally a lot of the time.
For hundreds of thousands of years we were hunter gatherers. You had a small group of 10-60 people and you’d travel around with them.
What if you wanted to get freaky though? I mean if you were too close to the fire everyone would see it and hear it. If you were too far away you’d risk getting eaten by god knows what!
As far as I see it, there would have literally been no privacy lmao. What do you guys think they did? Where would they have done it?
30 thousand years before any immigration. Not PoV.
reposted cos I improved some stuff. Recently found out Peter Brown, the guy who discovered and named Homo Floresiensis, is my grandmas first cousin. Crazy. I've been in contact with him.
According to the conventional picturing of "the ascent of man", as humans became more intelligent, they took to using stone tools, then clubs and finally spears. Over the same period, they became more strictly bipedal. ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini concurred that bipedalism freed our hands for gathering things and for using tools, for walking efficiently, and to stay cool.
These explanations from AIs trained on the scientific literature, are all about independent marginal advantages, and they aren't that interesting; their point is to teach that evolution can involve small advantages that add up. Also, none invoke outside actors, unless one counts inanimate factors like climate change. Evolving humans are visualized as the only actors on a bare stage where only the backdrop changes.
I want to sketch out an alternative explanation: humans evolved to walk on their back legs because that enabled them to forage on the food-rich savanna by the defensive use of spears.
The main technical problems with that explanation are:
(a) There is no direct evidence of spears earlier than the Schöningen spears found in a coal mine that had been a bog where horses had been hunted 350,000 years ago by almost modern man.
(b) Weapon use is associated with intelligence, while bipedalism evolved millions of years before distinctively human intelligence.
It can also be considered a category mistake to focus narrowly and specifically on spears, when they are just one type of weapon, weapons are just one type of tool. humans are distinctively tool makers, and anyway the earliest tools found are stones. But that also offers an opportunity to explore an opposite hypothesis built on relations with external actors.
(a) THE "NO EVIDENCE" PROBLEM.
If early hominins did use spears, those would very seldom appear in the fossil record, because of the active food web for metabolizing lignin. Discarded spears would need to be quickly-buried below the savanna's biotic stone line that marks the limit of this activity, often between 10cm and 1m deep. A possible source of evidence could be long-lived striations on exposed granite outcrops on which sticks might have been scraped over many generations, to smooth and sharpen them.
Evidence from contrasting body plans of savanna primates.
One line of evidence that early hominins used spears comes from contrasting the hominin body plan with that of baboons, whose fossils were found associated with hominins at six South African cave sites. Arboreal monkeys and apes both settled the savanna, both were plant eaters, of comparable size, the hominins were doubtless as highly social as baboons. Several monkey lineages adapted into the dog-like baboon body plan that is common on the savanna, extending the common primate defense of biting by evolving longer jaws and longer canines, especially in the males. Those canines are conventionally attributed to sexual selection but they are also powerful inter-specific (aposematic) signals, recognizable by how seldom a human would try to grab a trapped baboon.
The strangeness of the contrasting hominin body plan is easily overlooked seeing that obligatory bipeds make up a third of the mammalian biomass on Earth. However, they belong to only a handful of related extinct hominin species, and to only one living species, out of over 6,000. To reverse the thought experiment about grabbing a baboon, what could make the baboon fear to bite a human would be a weapon in the human's hand.
(b) THE PROBLEM OF INADEQUATE INTELLIGENCE
Bipedalism evolved during a period from Sahelanthropus about 7 million years ago, close to the last common ancestor with forest-dwelling apes. Over that period lasting till Australopithecus africanus, hominin brain volume was increasing at about 14 cc/million years, 20 times slower than in the subsequent so-called encephalization. So, if early hominins used hand weapons, that could have had little to do with growing intelligence. That goes against the conventional position that weapon use requires big brains because it needs advanced planning.
The tiny Pom Pom crab contradicts that association between brains and weapons. It holds one stinging anemone in each claw, and it manages them intensely. When threatened, it pushes the stinging anemones at the threat. It trims the anemones and takes food from them, keeping them small. If it loses one anemone it tears the other into two and attaches half to the other claw, where it regenerates. When it molts or when it wants to clean its front it first attaches an anemone to one of its legs and later retrieves it. If it loses both anemones, it immediately tries to replace them. So, this is an obligatory relationship. These complex behaviors evolved with only the transmission of instincts and without any brain to speak of. And that habit affected its body plan, so that its claws are only useful for holding anemones.
Preadaptation of forest apes for defensive spear use.
It’s easier to reconstruct how forest apes would have preadapted grassland hominins for weapon use than it is to imagine how pom pom crabs could have picked up the use of stinging anemones, if we narrow our specification of what those weapons could have been.
Modern chimps use sticks to dig up tubers on the forest floor. It would be natural for a forest primate with a digging stick to try to keep an attacker away from it. The stick would then function as a spear, more particularly a thrusting rather than a throwing spear.
Two uses of spears
Two kinds of spear use have importantly different effects. A thrown spear can strike distant prey that is trying to escape, and if it lodges in the body, further movement is so painful that it slows or stops the animal. That is useful in hunting. Later humans are much better adapted for throwing spears than the australopiths were.
The thrusting spear has more complex defensive uses. It can stop an attacker, keep it at a distance and take the initiative from it, allowing time for others to join in the defense. If an attacker charges down a spear that has been grounded, its own momentum would impale it. Which is why an even much heavier attacker would lose the advantage of its weight.
A thrusting spear can also be pushed at the attacker, with as much effect as a desperate spear-holder’s vigor can achieve.
So, unlike the throwing spear and the African knobkerrie, which is the next more difficult effective weapon to make, the thrusting spear is both a stopper and a striker.
The brain as a working organ.
According to this argument so far, the high intelligence quotient of ancestral apes would have been irrelevant to hominins having uniquely adapted into obligatory spear use. That issue might be addressed by treating the brain more as a working organ than as the seat of intelligence. Consider these EQ values: Sloth 0.4 , Capuchin 2.8, Dolphin 4.5. Those numbers could be interpreted like this: The South American sloths and capuchin are both predated by eagles, but the sloth relies on being hard to find, while the monkey relies on sensing an eagle quickly and responding by fleeing quickly amongst branches. The dolphin's large brain enables it to rapidly process sonar echoes from the fish it is hunting. The high EQ of baboons and hominins enabled them to rapidly process actions during a mobbing attack on a predator.
Viewed from that perspective, the human EQ of 7 enables us to rapidly parse sentences, which has plugged us into the intelligence of the group. Until AI arrived to "help" us with that.
Hey everyone,
I doubt this is something that we will ever be able to answer confidently because of the fragmentary nature of evidence, so I'm just asking for your educated speculation really.
Do you think hominins/archaic humans did stretches? I mean they were spending their lives walking, running, carrying heavy stuff and hitting stuff, which I imagine would get them incredibly sore and stiff.
I remember reading aswell that Australopithecines almost universally show spinal pathologies, probably as a result of having become bipedal/ground dwelling relatively recently on an evolutionary time scale. So they would have had incredibly bad back pain their entire lives.
In modern great apes from the research i've found, it seems like the only stretching they actively do is pendiculation, ie the stretch-yawn response you do when you wake up. I imagine as well that hanging from branches would also be a pretty great stretch which they end up passively spending a lot of time doing anyway. But bio-mechanically their lifestyles are all entirely different to hominins.
So back to my central question? Do you think hominins did stretches? It's kind of a ridiculous image, imaging a bunch of Homo erectuses with their legs up on a rock stretching their calves a-la skinner in steamed hams.
The only alternative i can imagine is that they were just in pain all the time and kinda just copped it.
I'm sitting here right now with my rotor cuffs and shoulders and biceps and triceps and traps just so tight and painful from the mildest exercise ,and I'm struggling to imagine how ancient humans could have lived like this. What do you think?
This argument often shows up in online forums saying they must've been thick-furred because of being adapted to cold climates but I'd push back.
Neanderthals already had massive skulls and stocky bodies with short physiques and limbs that could've helped them minimize heat loss. This adaptation is evident in modern Inuit who suffer cold very little because of that anatomy.
>> Most Eskimos have heavily built, barrel-shaped torso and short arms and legs to minimize heat loss.
https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/anthropology/chpt/eskimos
They also wore and made clothes, which is evidenced by evidence of lice evolution, hide-processing tools with marks consistent with clothing-preparation, front teeth consistent with hide-softening and skeletons of thick-furred animals with signs of systematic hide removals.
>> A stone scraper from the site of Neumark-Nord in Germany had a small amount of residue on it, which likely got stuck during hide processing 200,000 years ago. The residue contained acid from oak bark, which can be used to tan, or preserve, animal skins. Whether this residue was from making clothing or fur bed covers, however, is unclear. Stone and bone awls (pointed tools) from a late Neanderthal site in central France also suggest these ancient people crafted tools specifically to attach hides together for clothing or shelter.
>> The genetics of head and body lice shows that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens diverged somewhere between 170,000 and 72,000 years ago and that one kind of body lice was reintroduced to H. sapiens from another ancient human population — possibly Neanderthals — 100,000 years ago. Because body lice live on clothing, this suggests our ancestors began wearing clothing sometime before that.
>> The front teeth of essentially all Neanderthals are worn down far more than their back teeth, which means they used their mouths to hold and manipulate objects, not just to eat. This dental wear in Neanderthals is similar to that of contemporary Inuit people, who use their teeth to soften animal hides to make clothing.
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/did-neanderthals-wear-clothes
>> We compared animal bones from Neanderthal and modern human archaeological strata. We targeted mammalian families used for cold weather clothing in the recent past. Cold weather clothing species occur in both Neanderthal and early modern human strata. Leporids, canids, and mustelids are more frequent in early modern human strata. This supports the hypothesis that Neanderthals employed cape-like clothing while early modern humans used specialized cold weather clothing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416516300757
Clothing is very maladaptive for a dense-furred animal as that traps moisture.
>> Health risks associated with dressing pets include skin problems and overheating, especially in short-faced (brachycephalic) breeds.
https://news.vin.com/default.aspx?pid=210&catId=-1&id=11476874
They also made fire and built shelters to keep themselves warm, this reduces need for a thick or dense fur.
>> Archaeological evidence makes a compelling case for Neanderthal-created fires 400,000 years ago in Suffolk, UK — plus, how chatbots can sway the opinions of voters.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04059-4
>> The research, focused on the 220,000 year old cave site of La Cotte de St. Brelade on the Channel Island of Jersey, has begun to bring a period of important change in way early human organised their lives under examination. Detailed studies of key parts of the site have revealed how Neanderthals used the site as a home base, part of more complex lifeways emerging on the edge of the human world.
And genetic evidence suggest that humans lost fur before diverging from Neanderthals, to which re-evolving it would require complex evolutionary changes.
>> Evidence for this theory also comes from studies that have found switches for some genes responsible for determining whether certain cells develop into sweat glands or hair follicles. "So all of these things have a related developmental pathway," says Lasisi. "If we look at that in combination with some of the things we're able to infer about genes that increased human skin pigmentation, then we're able to basically confidently guesstimate that 2-1.5 million years ago… humans probably would have lost their body hair."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230310-why-dont-humans-have-fur
>> According to the coevolutionary tale of humans and their lice, our immediate ancestors lost most of their body fur 3 to 4 million years ago and did not don clothing until 83,000 to 170,000 years ago.
>> That means that for over 2.5 million years, early humans and their ancestors were simply naked.
We also inherited Neanderthal genes that regulate our skin and keratin function, which suggests Neanderthals had a similar skin/hair architecture to humans. We also have inherited Neanderthal genes associated to less back hairs.
>> So why is a dermatologist concerned with this? Because of that small 1-3 percentage, around 70% is expressed in your skin. As one researcher put it, "Neanderthal DNA in your skin punches above its weight class." Human skin is rich in Neanderthal DNA and it primarily codes for a thing called keratin. Keratin is the fibrous protein that makes up our skin, hair, and nails. It is the basic building block of these structures and quite strong (a rhinoceros horn is made out of keratin also).
https://vitadermatology.com/neanderthal-genes-and-skin/
>> While our Neanderthal heritage may be limited, it does have a handful of associations with our traits. For instance, Neanderthal genetic variants are associated with having straighter hair and with being less likely to sneeze after eating dark chocolate. And counter to the popular perception, Neanderthal variants are actually associated with having less back hair! Perhaps most intriguingly, some scientists believe that interbreeding with Neanderthals even provided modern humans with evolutionarily advantageous traits as they migrated into Europe.
https://blog.23andme.com/articles/why-23andme-love-neanderthals-and-you-should-too
With this a hairless Neanderthal with thick hair scalps and clothing-use is more likely than a dense-furred (and cartoony) Neanderthal.
I'm obsessed with our ancient past ,can anyone recommend easily digestible books on the subject
I've read multiple similar books like "sapiens" but looking for something new
I’m not sure if everyone here is familiar with [humanphenotypes.com](http://humanphenotypes.com/), but I assume most people don’t know that there used to be an older version of the website that was taken down a few years ago. I did some research and found the email address of the original creator(ratatoskr). If anyone wants to bring back the old website and preferred it over the new one, feel free to email [humanphenotypes@hotmail.com](mailto:humanphenotypes@hotmail.com).
Please don’t be rude, he already got attacked back then for his website.