Love those Neanderthals
Here’s some evidence that modern humans mated with Neanderthals, and that we carry remnants of the encounter in our genetic code.
I’ve long had a fondness (of the platonic sort!) for Neanderthals. At least in my imagination; in real life I might be a bit more perturbed by them, although by recent accounts they would hardly draw much attention on a modern street, if dressed and shaved properly.
And their behavior? They seem to have nursed their sick and wounded; had some sort of speech, even if rudimentary; made simple tools; kept largely to themselves as a group; harnessed fire; skinned animals; made shelters of some complexity; and buried their dead (with flowers, yet). They were successful hunters and might even have been responsible for some of the cave art once thought to be the exclusive province of Cro-Magnons. But there is great controversy over whether or not Neanderthals practiced cannibalism, or whether the evidence can be explained as ritual defleshing.
For those who are aficionados of the Paleo diet, there’s also this to ponder:
Early studies indicated that Neandethals were highly carnivorous and obtained all the protein in their diet from animal sources. Recently, however, traces of fossilized plants have been extracted from Neanderthal teeth found in Belgium and Iraq, indicating they also ate plants such as grains and legumes in addition to meat.
Perhaps they were just craving those carbs.
Humans and pre-humans have always been omnivores. First, they can’t afford to miss a bet and, second, our bodies can manage a lot of stuff except for basic plant material. Takes a particular gut to get anything out of grass.
Plants, you don’t have to worry about running away or fighting back.
Paleo diets aren’t about not eating plant material, but about avoiding processed foods (and often, eating mostly raw foods).
Of course there are several varieties, some higher in carbs than others.
Low carb diets are generally healthy, if balanced, paleo or not (as most high carb diets are not, as they’re unbalanced) 🙂
J.L.Wenting: Paleo diets exclude grains and legumes. The quote specifically mentions Neanderthals eating grains and legumes.
And the proper contrast should not be between low carb diets and high carb diets. No one’s suggesting it’s healthy for a person to live on bread and sugar. Low carb diets should be contrasted with medium carb diets that include some grains and legumes, as well as fruit. In other words, that don’t limit people to 50 grams of carbohydrates a day, or whatever the recommendation du jour might be for the low carb diet du jour.
The jury is still out on whether low carb diets are healthy or even sustainable in the long-term for most people, as was discussed in this thread. And they are hardly balanced in any conventional sense of the word, although they sustain life. I also discuss the matter in this thread.
Which reminds me of Julie Brown’s reference to Neanderthals in “I Like ‘Big and Stupid.”
I don’t know what Julie Brown’s Neanderthals eat. 🙂 Though I doubt that those who romanticize Neanderthals have had any direct experience with them- nor with members of Homo Sapiens they might label as Neanderthals.
But the song is still funny.
Actually, Russian peasants for centuries lived on diet of bread and bread kvass (a fermented home brew made from bread), eating meat once a year. Milk was mostly for infants only. So grain diet can be balanced and healthy, if the grain is of proper variety (rye) and supplemented by fresh green vegetables (in summer) and fermented cabbages in winter.
I got a book called How to Think Like a Neanderthal
http://www.amazon.com/How-To-Think-Like-Neandertal/dp/0199742820
It was an interesting attempt by two anthropologists/psychologists to recreate a typical Neanderthal personality from excavated data.
But the best was I was on a plane and the flight attendant asked about the book. I explained and she said she thought it was some kind of Self-Improvement book.
I too have a fondness for Neanderthals. They are our cousins in a way that more ancient tropical humanoids are not. The ice ages brought out the best in us I think.
And you got to give it to those Neanderthals… they have made quite a lucrative living lately doing insurance commercials.
On the other hand, some tribes lived for millennia on low-carb diet: Mongols, Inuits, rain-deer herders of Arctic tundra and some native American tribes who did not practice agriculture. When in Soviet Union these rain-deer herders were mandated to leave their children in boarding schools so they could be educated, they began to grow sickly on much more diverse diet with fresh vegetables, bread, grain porridge, milk and butter.
“had some sort of speech, even if rudimentary”
Are there any examples of beings with rudimentary speech*, and what does it sound like? Does it lack verbs, or pronouns, or inflections and conjugations?
I know of mistreated children (e.g. Kasper Hauser and others like him) whose speech was odd, but certainly wasn’t rudimentary.
It would seem Australopithecines, were they able to talk might lack our sophistication, but what is omitted in them that might be gained later in evolution? Indirect objects? Another vowel? Self-referentiality?
* No talking dogs or mumbling horses or sign-language apes please: wild animals only. The Neanderthals weren’t taught to talk by college professors.
ErisGuy: the Wiki entry I linked to goes into it somewhat. See this.
For those interested in Neanderthals, I can recommend, without reservation, John Hawks’s blog on paleoanthropology (johnhawks.net/weblog).
Here’s a recent example:
Measuring by genetic change, agriculture was many times more important than the appearance of modern humans throughout the world. The important point with respect to archaic humans is that there are precious few genetic changes shared by all (or even most) humans today, that are not also shared with Neandertals, Denisovans, or plausible other archaic human groups (such as archaic Africans).
Many Neanderthal remains have shown one arm longer than the other, generally the right arm, and the hypothesis has been that the leading arm became longer from spear thrusting while killing animals. However, recent tests show that it’s actually the following arm that gets a greater workout. So, back to the drawing board to find the cause of the asymmetry.
Ethnograhic research indicates that each person needs a new suit of clothes once a year. The new theory is that Neanderthals tailoring skills may have played a roll. The intense and prolonged scraping of several skins to create one suit, sans button holes because button holes are really hard and buttons hadn’t been invented, caused the dominant arm to develop to a greater degree than the other, thus, the longer arm. Neanderthal was perhaps more Suzy Homemaker than previously thought.
http://www.history.com/news/big-neanderthal-arms-caused-by-making-clothes-study-suggests
It is easy to believe that there is a rouge Neanderthal gene or two in existence when I look in the mirror early in the morning.
Actually Neo, making the contrast between high-carb/low-carb diet regimes tells me you completely miss the point:
Paleo diet ‘users’ burn FAT rather than sugers as their mail source of energy. I can tell you from experience, when I went mostly paleo, my altitude asjustment and ability to climb high mountains quickly became So. Much. Easier. so as to no longer be a big challenge.
Again, it’s slow, steady FAT burning that is the main source of energy, not more or less carbs which cause sugar ups and downs.
A great blog to read over time is Mark’s Daily Apple. I say over time because it’s a tremendous mental shift which takes time to comprehend. You can feel it in your body though and it’s amazing.
Be well.
Webutante:
I am not making a comparison between high and low carb diets. I was criticizing one of the comments here that did so.
Have you actually read what I’ve written in the linked threads, where I detail some of my experiences with going on different types of diets? See this for an example.
As far as burning fat goes—well, if you look at my experience with Atkins (which is supposed to cause that effect as well, because the person goes into ketosis), I lost hardly any weight and felt awful on it.
It’s great that you feel good on a Paleo diet. But ketosis (when the body is in fat-burning mode rather than relying on glucogen for energy) is a very controversial thing. Whether a diet is Paleo or Atkins or Taubes (and I realize they differ from each other), the thing that propels the body into ketosis and fat-burning mode is that they are all very low carbohydrate and deprive the body of its preferred fuel, carbohydrates, so it must go to burning fat instead (which, by the way, it converts to glucose).
Does the process by which the body is forced into ketosis really seem like a good idea to you? It sure doesn’t to me:
Here’s a 2003 study:
And this:
Neo,
I have read much that you’ve read over the year on how badly you felt on a low carb diet…..with attending discussion on ketosis.
Let me say what little I know about this, it appears these diets have little carbs with little fats like olive oil or coconut oils and force your bodies into one of those starvation modes that burns you body tissues with all the bad breath that goes with it.
What I’m talking about is NOT that.
I am not an intellectual about all this, just learning experientially. I’ve watched myself decades ago and others, including my daughter go into paniced low-blood sugar attacks, almost collapsing in the process. It was terribly to watch. They simply ran out of sugars, including carbs.
I’m saying again, whatever the Atkins regime, this is not it. This is not it. This is not it.
Your body finds sustained energy elsewhere and when it works you feel better than when you were 20. When it doesn’t, you feel bad….I suppose with ketosis.
I promise, if you go back and read and try again untill you get it right, you might find it amazing.
Webutante: I already I explained that I know it is not the same diet. However, if it claims to burn fat rather than glycogen, and that is a good part of the way it operates, it can only be operating that way because it is a low-carb diet.
I don’t have problems with low blood sugar. Fortunately, I feel pretty good (knock wood) and my energy level seems fine as far as I can see. I would simply like to lose 15 pounds. I have never lost weight on low-carb diets, plus I find them very difficult to follow and stick to and feel like crap on them (and I have followed them for at least two months at a time, so you can’t say I didn’t give them a fair test). Paleo is different from Atkins but it limits grains and legumes, perfectly healthful foods which I like very much. The medical evidence I offered in my previous comment indicates that if any of these diets work, it is because the person eats fewer calories. Plus, long-term, they are all about the same, and all are difficult to stick to.
That doesn’t mean that some people don’t do well on them. But it’s a personal, individual thing. Those who do may have hidden food intolerances (such as to wheat) and do much better when they are eliminated.
Indigo.
WRT arms: In a right-hander, the right arm is the following arm. Ever done bayonet training? The dominant arm does the thrusting work, provides the power; the forward arm, the subordinate arm, aims or does the lateral slashing moves. Then the dominant arm is the power in the buttstroke. Don’t see much difference in spears.
IMO, repetitive work, laborious work, would be shared between arms because you can keep going longer and when getting the thing done faster is the objective, that’s what you’d do. So skin scraping would be ambi. If you’re sanding something manually and one arm gets tired, you don’t quit until that arm recovers. And skins got scraped clear up to the last deer hide somebody on your block did last hunting season. We’d need to find tanners with an arm differential.
Hey, it wasn’t my study. It was a Cambridge study.
Indigo.
Okay. So consider the source. Also consider thinking about it. IOW, does this study make sense? “Of course it does. It’s science.”
Concur ref John Hawks’ blog. Best if you know some genetics, which I don’t.
Paleo diets exclude grains and legumes. The quote specifically mentions Neanderthals eating grains and legumes.
That’s so, in both cases.
One has to ponder when they ate those grains and legumes. At the end of the growing season, before the start of winter. A time when it really doesn’t hurt to put on a few pounds when your best shelter against the cold weather is a drafty cave.
Now we have access to those foods 24/7/365, not just at harvest.
Which is why I describe my diet as a faux-paleo, it’s just higher in proteins, lower in carbs, not afraid of butter, and minimize the amount of sugar ingested.
Humans have sex with sheep, goats, donkeys, dogs, melons, and many other things animal, vegetable, and mineral. Few of those partners conceive, but if there is any chance of interfertility it is bound to have happened. The Nazi ideal of racial purity was perhaps the dumbest idea ever.
Thing is, the Neanderthals are gone and we’re here. That means the mixed-species offspring were in and kept in and survived in the Cro-Magnon bands.
So. Did they capture, seduce, or buy females of other species? Did the C-M baby daddies go to bands of other species seeking their offspring from a lengthy hunting trip or vision quest to bring back to the C-M band? Did the C-M women get impregnated by non-C-M?
Were the bands mixed from the get-go due to the contingencies of paleolithic living?
Lots of possibilties for the novelist.
Kaba,
That’s why, after looking in the mirror, you apply your rouge.
Neo,
Yes I think our bodies do give us feedback that we should listen to. The primal diet is not a weight loss regime—though some do lose weight—it is a high and sustained energy regime. I adapt it as needed and the days I feel less than well, I take note of what I did the day before etc. I take fruit smoothies early in the day.
BTW, I are rice today for lunch. No big deal. I loved it and so did my body. Also ate green beans and roast beef at the best country store on the South Holston. I’m not a purist, but I do lean towards certain principles and over time they are the ones that give me energy for a high octane life.
Best wishes.