Comment by shakna
19 days ago
All I've done is speak where the evidence leads. They didn't live light and leave hardly a trace - they lived a very long time ago. Few weapons are designed to last millenia.
Dismissing half of academia's findings with a wave of your hand and an alternate speculation is... Leaning on speculation.
You said specifically "We have no evidence of warfare between the species."
I showed that to be incorrect. I followed the evidence, where you followed your gut.
> The vast majority of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals would go their whole lives, generations, without even seeing a member of the other species.
This is an absolutely ridiculous assertion, and entirely speculative. We have Neanderthal DNA intermixed with our own. For it to be possible, then the numbers intermixing cannot be some one in a lifetime event - its a global phenomena.
We have evidence of war, trade, and sex. There is no great division that these people rarely met.
That's akin to saying the Chinese never meet the Americans.
But to go further than just genetic history, Tinshemet Cave and Nesher Ramla show that we traded and lived together. (Which incidentally are neither in Europe nor Asia). We built societies together. We were not nearly as isolated as you speculate.
> Theories of the "uncanny valley" and raids by women-raping, spear-throwing humans are fanciful, and say a lot more about what our psychological hang ups...
No. Flatly no. It speaks to the consistency of human history. Our ability to trace genetic legacy, is not because of a psychological hangup.
The Rape of Nanjing was not a one time moment. And machine guns are hardly spears. The Crusades through the Middle East did not leave behind no legacy. Kidnapping prizes was the norm for so very long, it was a norm of our mythology. Who was Helen of Troy? How did the Chu marry his wife?
Why did the Assyrians put record of these spoils into stone? Anyone who disregards the massive historical evidence that mankind has always raped its way through war, is one who is utterly blind to all evidence before them.
Saying homo sapiens kidnapped Neanderthal woman, and vice versa, is not a claim of intelligence. It is an understanding of historical behaviour.
... All of our evidence points towards not homo sapiens and Neanderthals doing things. Rather, it points towards people acting as people. Tribal boundaries, but not species. They made war, crime, love and trade. They were people.
// I showed that to be incorrect. I followed the evidence, where you followed your gut. //
Even the authors of the original article didn't claim this was evidence of conflict between the species. They only claimed that it was evidence consistent with conflict between the species.
You are extrapolating far, far, beyond what the evidence would support.
There's one bone which is fractured in a way which is *consistent* with its being caused by a homo sapiens-style rock hitting it.
And nobody is claiming that we never got into the pleistocene version of a bar fight. Of course we did. Perhaps the bone mentioned in the article you cited was the result of such a fight. Perhaps not.
We have no evidence whatsoever of war between the species. None. Zero. A bar fight is not a war. And we have absolutely no evidence of any kind of genocidal berzerking. Any attempt to recruit the Assyrians or the rapists of Nanjing is anachronistic. That kind of warfare requires social coordination on the a scale which we wouldn't even invent until the Assyrians.
sigh it is an easy mistake to make---the evidence is consistent with what you want to believe. Therefore, it must support what you believe. :-( You have to resist the temptation. The more you want something to be true, the more suspicious you should be that it isn't true.