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Scootaloo

(25,699 posts)
22. Not a problem
Sun Apr 17, 2016, 04:00 PM
Apr 2016

This "HUMANS DESTROYED THE NEANDERTHALS THROUGH X" drives me up the wall. It's a clear case of modern people taking modern scenarios and modern guilt and trying to transplant them back to the ice age. Neanderthals are a stand-in for native populations, and sapiens a stand-in for imperial european powers. it's a morality play among mammoths, and it's silly.

So, what happened to the neanderthals? Well... nothing, really. I mean there aren't "neanderthals" anymore, sure, but they didn't exactly "die off." We didn't kill them, we didn't infect them, we didn't outcompete them into starvation.

We bred with them. neanderthals were not "destroyed," they were absorbed. They have little modern genetic impact because they were a small population to begin with, thirty thousand years ago, and due to simple genetic attrition.

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