The first comment on the substack links to this article, from 2010, that basically refutes this theory and this book.<p><a href="https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2010/10/killer-neandertals-does-this-o/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2010/10/killer-neandertal...</a>
It makes for a good story to be sure, but probably little else. Much like the popular myth of the noble savage influencing academics of the time, contemporary popular disdain for the people and cultures of the past colors many contemporary academics.<p>Another weird thing, So we have found evidence of the feathers of dinosaurs, but not the fur of something from 40k years ago? that seems rather unlikely. In this case, the absence of evidence for fur is evidence of its absence, much like the absence of worked neanderthal clothing is. A better simpler explanation would be, they had decent subdermal isolation and brown fat. While most people today think humans cant work outside on a typical winter day in northern europe without clothes, they are just wrong. Go to any country with a snowy winter and ask the first person you meet if they have that one friend or acquaintance who goes about in shorts and tshirt during winter, who seems just absurdly resistant to cold in general. They will give you a name. Luck, ample food and cold growing up, and you too could be walking barefoot through the snow with me, feel the refreshing -5 C wind on your chest when snowboarding in a tshirt, and alway be told you everytime you leave somewhere that you arent wearing enough jackets, pants, scarfs, gloves, and hats.<p>Besides its unnecessary for the story being told. Humans lived next to chimps and gorillas for millenia and they are furry, cannibalistic, violent tribal monsters. Fitting the story of orcs and goblins even better. But even that is unnecessary, people just like making shit up, but people are also terrible at actually doing that. So almost everything looks like a human or animal or combination.
Why do we have to posit non-human monsters as explanations for these myths? After all, there were (and still are) real monsters out there that would kill, rape, kidnap and torture people - people from other communities. Strange danger was serious business back in the day, why could that not evolve into all kinds of boogeymen?
I feel like either I am very confused about something, or the author is:<p>> the population of humans dropped to as few as 50 individuals. Something terrible happened to the human race.<p>> When did this population bottleneck occur? A number of teams have analyzed mutation rates to find out. The mutation rate in our Y chromosomes suggests the bottleneck occurred 37,000 to 49,000 years ago.<p>Is the author really suggesting that the human population was down to 50 individuals 50,000 years ago?<p>How on earth does this square with human migration? Humans were already spreading near <i>Australia</i> 50,000 years ago, let alone Europe and Asia.<p>Is he suggesting that all the fossils throughout Eurasia and near Oceania were deposited by earlier humans, then nearly every human on the planet died at the same time, and then the survivors all <i>re-spread</i> to those areas, without leaving any archeological evidence of this?
So even if we accept everything being said of the Neanderthals, this is left completely undefended:<p>> Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous? Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.<p>Is the author really suggesting that these stories are the product of an unbroken chain of 50,000 years of oral tradition? If not, what do events from 50,000 years ago have to do with myths from 2000-6000 years ago?
> and carried off and raped our women. (How did you think the Neanderthal DNA got into our genome?)<p>I don't know if Neandertals were rapist, but given the behavior of Sapiens, it wouldn't be completely surprising if it was in fact the opposite: Sapiens abducting Neandertal females and raping them…
I'm not sure about the descriptions of Neanderthals presented in this article, but the idea that old tales of orcs and elves originated many millennia ago as descriptions of other human species or other primates isn't <i>that</i> far-fetched.
Humans have historically had much to fear from furry things with large teeth, so don't need to resort to questionable theories.<p>The word "Orc" itself used to refer to Norse invaders, who did much of the same stuff "real" orcs do and unfortunately more (which is also directly related to what is now called xenophobia, or intolerance to foreigners and their culture).<p>So a strange-looking humanoid with traits of a predatory animal is a natural monster.
TIL what "InfoGalactic" is:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day#Infogalactic" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day#Infogalactic</a><p>After clicking some of the links in this article I went to what looked very much like wikipedia, so much so i went on a typical half hour wikipedia-dive, but wasn't actually wikipeida (I have a big monitor and the links I clicked all directed to subsections of articles so I didn't see the info-galactic logo at the top).<p>Really puts this article in a whole new (bad) light.
A nice fairytale. And like all fairytales it doesn't need to be falsifiable to be worth telling.<p>>> If early Greek, Roman, Norse, and Chinese mythologies are anything to go by, the legends spun by early humans centre around an heroic human (almost always a man) who is pitted against an ugly, evil cruel monster with superhuman strength…<p>As a PoGO (Person of Greek Origin) my impression of our ancients' myths and legends is somewhat different. Yes, there was the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy, but neither Titans nor Giants could be mistaken for "orcs" or "ogres"; the former were nightmare beasts with tentacles and the latter simply had a hundred hands. But most of our mythology is about the sexual lives of the gods, particularly Zeus' transformations to various animals that allowed him to sneak into maidens' beds (no accounting for taste) or the deeds of great heroes like Hercules, who however typically fight chimeric monsters (like the chimera itself, or the sphinx, or the harpies etc) or actual beasts (like the Erymanthian Boar or the Stymphalian Birds) rather than big burly monster men.<p>Where ancient Greek heroes fight beast-men, those are literally beast-men. The Minotaur is the child of a woman and a bull. The centaurs, who are not evil monsters, are a cross between man and horse. The sirens are depicted as birds with human heads. The Sphinx has a lion's body and a woman's head (there was clearly something going on with bestiality in ancient times). The cyclops Polyphemus and the giant Antaeus, slain by Heracles, are porbably the only examples of "orcs" that could be plausibly identified in Greek mythology. And even those are not very orc-like. Why would memories of Neanderthals be recorded in myths and legends as <i>one-eyed</i> giants?<p>Now the tale of Antaeus is an interesting one: Heracles wrestles him and keeps winning but everytime Antaeus bounces back. At length Heracles realises that Antaeus is drawing power from the Earth. He grabs him by the waist and crushes him preventing him from touching the ground, and so he wins. There is a clear symbolism there, of victory over an enemy that <i>draws his strength from the land</i>. But what does it mean? Who <i>was</i> this enemy? It doesn't have to be another species: a more ancient tribe that pre-dated the tale will do fine. It's an interesting question but we will never know the answer. As with the Neanderthals, that should not be license to imagine whatver we fancy, though.
> Europeans defeated indigenous peoples throughout history, by superior technology and numbers.<p>Oh boi, not this horrible and flawed argument again. People have learned nothing from recent research into the impact of diseases in that history? Popular books like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and "1491" give you a view into these matters and provide one with references for their sources for research.<p>This idea of "Europe won because it is good at tech" really needs to die. The best weapon Europe had when fighting indigenous people in the Americas was actually various kinds of pox.
> The real question is why — why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous?<p>I assume that most myths of orcs, elves, dwarves, vampires, etc. were based on ugly-looking Homo sapiens as opposed to other hominid species. Humans have also had a strong incentive to (literally) dehumanize other tribes of humans.
This article states that humans were likely pushed to near extinction by Neanderthals, with one figure being the at one point we were reduced to 50 individuals (??!!). How is this possible considering no Neanderthals ever lived in Africa? Were there periods where humans were also absent from that continent? Seems unlikely...
If this is being presented as a work of speculative fiction, it's pretty neat. If it's being presented as serious academic work, it's asinine bullshit.
So I think this argument can be broken up into two parts: (1) that all of these different myths and legends across cultures (Cyclops, bugbear, ogre, oni, etc.) have a common root, and (2) that Neanderthals are the source of this common root. This article, and most of the criticism, are focused on the second part of that argument, largely because that's where most of the concrete evidence and facts can be considered. But there's a lot to criticize about the first part of that argument as well. There's so many differences between all of these different stories that I can't really imagine there is a common origin point going back tens of thousands of years. I mean the only common thread here is a large humanoid creature that eats people, and even that vague description leaves out more than a few of the mythological creatures referenced in the article. Is it so hard to believe that people could come up with such an idea on their own, independently and without a real-life example to work with?
If anyone is interested in a more informed and modern take try <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(book)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(book)</a>
Every article that begins with "Every human culture" should be considered as BS right away...<p>edit: But after reading, even if most of the article is heavily biased, not prudent, etc. It's still interesting and thought-provoking. I might give the book a go.<p>edit2: A better and most interesting point of view can be found in Julien d'Huy "Cosmogonies", which parallelized the corpus of myths and legends to genetic migrations - with the help of a bit of AI. Once you validate the theory that myths survive better than languages, and that they evolve with time, it's super interesting.
Sometimes heterodox means “interesting and unfairly dismissed” and sometimes it means “absolutely nuts”.<p>If Neanderthals were alive today I doubt we’d even class them as a separate species.
Reminds me of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaters_of_the_Dead" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaters_of_the_Dead</a> or the movie adaptation, "The 13th Warrior" (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120657/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120657/</a>)
One really cool thing with global warming is the old stuff frozen in the glaciers and ice slowly being unearthed. There might just be a neanderthal or two, or some of the other early hominids. It would answer a great many questions and provide invaluable material for genetic modification.
We've got plenty of examples of ordinary humans in documented history being mistaken for gods or supernatural beings. People report seeing ghosts, monsters, aliens and such all the time even now. There are low budget documentary TV shows about these sightings on the schedule constantly.
I think many comments (and also researchers in the comment articles) are rejecting the idea of an troll like neanderthal too fast.
Yes, some details are rather fantasy then based on real research, but the overall idea makes sense.<p>Controversy around why the neanderthal went extinct exists for a while now.
I think it is very unlikely that a successful human-like species goes extinct without a fight. They where stronger and bigger then homo sapiens.
If it is true that they replaced homo sapiens as the dominant species for a while then maybe they are not the friendly giants they are thought to be. Even homo sapiens cannibalize, so that some physically stronger Neanderthals would also do this seems not unlikely.<p>The last neanderthals might have lived in relic populations in north eurasia until several thousand years ago without leaving much archeological evidence.
Also oral traditions might survive for very very long.
But yeah, maybe it is not so politically correct to 'talk bad' about a race that fell victim to genocide. We rather focus on the positive things about them.