If you find this article interesting, I highly recommend reading “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow.<p>They also dig into these new archaeological discoveries, and start to reframe some aspects of the historical record in a way that is deeply compelling and perspective shifting.<p>I’m still in the middle of reading it, but I can’t help but feel that it’s one of the more important books to come into existence in recent times.
There is some conjecture that Neanderthal ancestry brings a larger risk of schizophrenia.<p><a href="https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(21)00328-0/fulltext" rel="nofollow">https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-32...</a>
Something I think it's interesting to contemplate is that there's no reason to think an individual Neanderthal was any less intelligent than an individual human.
We are largely, but not completely modern humans. We are hybrids between modern humans and neanderthals. All the human sub/species throughout history existed on the werge of extinction, or were at best insignificant from the Nature point of view as a whole. We on the other hand took over the Earth in a few 10000s of years. There seems to be synergy in backmixing of populations that underwent the opposite specialization trajectories, group specialization vs individual skill specialization, where each specialization on its own would have likely death spiralled.
> Hybrid species of human, once seen by experts as science fiction, may have played a key role in our evolution. Evidence of the importance of hybrids comes from genetics. The trail is not only in the DNA of our own species (which often includes important genes inherited from Neanderthals) but also skeletons of hybrids.<p>Made me think of this, alternative explanation:
<a href="http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html</a>
Every time I read about natural history and ancestral human species I feel some sort of epiphany.<p>For thousand years all we had to fill up our ignorance was Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark and all those dumb religious fairy tales.<p>Now we have evidences to understand what we really are. And all of that was discovered just in the last 150 years.
Hete's Svante Pääbo (recent nobel prize winner) on "The Neandertal in Us"<p><a href="https://www.mpg.de/914714/Neandertal" rel="nofollow">https://www.mpg.de/914714/Neandertal</a>