One thing that i think should be considered in human archaeology is the narratives/stories/myths from different cultures featuring "different sorts of people". Many were handed down orally from the misty past before being written down and hence may contain some truths to them.
We are often quick to dismiss them as mere fanciful story-telling of primitive cultures but i am not so sure.
gherkinnn
I have a soft spot for such folklore. Strictly speaking, much doesn't hold up to scrutiny but I see no wrong with wild conjecture for the fun of it.
For starters, some catastrophes do shine through more recent history:
The Arthurian legends and Robin Hood are two English-speaking examples of folklore snowballing into what we have today. I bet James Bond will join them in a few hundred year's time.
rramadass
You are mixing up a lot of timelines (mostly in AD) and hence not a good comparison.
I am talking about records from 5000-7000BC (deducing from Sanskrit literature) by which time they had already been orally transmitted for eons. So they are truly ancient with layers upon layers of grafting of realities/myths/stories over time.
TFNA
There is nothing in Sanskrit literature that securely old. The Vedas already postdate the mixing of Indo-European speakers and the people of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, and we know that was much more recent than the fantastical ancient dates that are passed around laypeople in India.
rramadass
No, you are wrongly conflating the date ascribed to a version of a text (speculation based mostly on linguistic studies) with the events described in the text itself which predate it by aeons.
The Itihasas/Puranas talk about vast time scales populated by different beings with different lifespan lengths in a very specific and detailed manner. It contains both cosmic and civilizational histories all bound together in a single multi-branched narrative. Hence it is a very unique historical corpus from which much can be gleaned and mapped against modern studies.
As an example, The events in the Ramayana are dated towards the end of "Treta Yuga" but the text itself mentions a very long list of continuous lineage before coming to Rama. Look up "Treta Yuga" in the above pages and you can see how far back this particular narrative goes; you could calculate it as; "length of dvapara yuga + length of kali yuga to current date" and it comes to >800,000 years into the past!. Now add the lineages mentioned in the text itself and you go even longer into the past.
The interesting thing is that each of those timelines have some sort of Human/other beings in it!
gherkinnn
I am aware of the timelines and posted links to areas of folklore and vague, percolating information I am vaguely familiar with. It's all fun and the basis for evermore unqualified conjecture.
cjs_ac
Some Aboriginal Australian cultures have folklore describing the rise of sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Also, Songlines are fascinating.
In the documentary "The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey", they say that the Aborigines are the survivors of the very first migration out of Africa. They went through the middle-east, moved through South India and thence to Australia and hence have DNA links to some South Indians/Sri Lankans.
Because they were isolated from the latter migrations, they have preserved much of the "true" Human archaeological history in their oral (and other) narratives. Anthropologists call this "Deep Time" oral histories.
snthpy
Agreed. Considering the range from neaderthals to homo florensis etc...
madaxe_again
Floriensis is a particularly good one, due to the Ebu Gogo mythology - and they seemingly died out 50kya ago. The locals specifically didn’t have giant humans in their mythology, rather tiny ones.
And then you go look at where there were Denisovans and Neanderthals, and those cultures have mythologies with trolls and ogres.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - in fact, it is speculated that floriensis perhaps hung on much, much later than 50kya ago - and I see no reason the same shouldn’t apply to Neanderthals or denisovans.
On a similar note - cultural memory runs deep. Take hill forts in the U.K. for instance. Commonly accepted as defensive structures. Except… the populations of these places, the topography, all of it, made them pretty crap defences - and the top of a windy hill, far from water, isn’t such a great place to live. So why? My take: the doggerland flood, and cultural memory. When the sea is slowly encroaching, building on top of a hill, building a dyke, a berm, sensible.
5000 years later, still doing the same thing. Why? Nobody quite remembers, but it’s important.
adastra22
They don't live on top of the hill, all the time. The local chief, maybe. It is a defensive place to retreat to when under attack.
rramadass
In the Hindu Sanskrit literature of Itihasas and Puranas it is actually made explicit that Humans ("Manusya/Manava" in Sanskrit) are distinct from other beings (eg. "Devas/Asuras/Vanaras/Gandharvas" etc. in Sanskrit), each with their own specific characteristics. And also there are plenty of stories of interbreeding amongst them.
It is fascinating to note that the distinctions are pretty clearcut throughout the vast corpus which implies it was common and wellknown at that time. There seem to be some good parallels to our anthropological knowledge of different Homo species.
In particular, the "Vanaras" were a humanoid ape-like species who have all the human psychological characteristics but with ape-like physiology. This was one source of inspiration (amongst others) for the "Na'vi" in James Cameron's Avatar movies.
aetherson
The vanaras were probably conceived of around let's say generously 3000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago. You live ten times closer in timeline to the original Ramayana story than neanderthals did.
It's just not very plausible that hindu mythology is a corrupted record of living with multiple species of hominids. Timeline-wise, it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
sieve
One is not like the other.
We have no idea when the Rāmāyaṇa was composed or who composed it. We traditionally attribute it to Vālmīki and call him the ādikavi and the work the ādikāvyam -- first poet and first piece of poetry respectively. The entire set up presents it as the story of a man named Rāma.
The poet specifically says in the fifth sarga of the Bālakāṇḍa:
तदिदं वर्तयिष्यामि सर्वं निखिलमादितः।
धर्मकामार्थसहितं श्रोतव्यमनसूयया॥ ४
"Now I shall recite the entire thing from start to end. As it relates to dharma, kāma and artha, it should be heard without complaint/malice/envy/etc."
The neo-Western standard of written or epigraphic evidence being the only real evidence was not really that relevant in the ancient world. Hinduism itself is based on the concept of time as a cycle instead of the linearity that is common in Western religions.
So, the story could have received its present form some time in the past 3-4K years, and has been fiddled with by grammar-obsessed scribes across the country over the past 2K years, but it could encode memories from a time long before that. The story has many fantastical elements like the tale of Sagara and his 60K sons and the descent of the river Gaṅgā from the heavens, but it is much more reserved in other aspects. The etymology of the term vānara itself is debatable. Has it been derived from narō vā (is it a man/human)? Or vanam + naraḥ (forest + man = forest dweller)?
Not that I 100% believe that the Vanaras were cultural memories of Neanderthals, but it's pretty hard to prove or disprove this. Maybe they were. Maybe a whole bunch of stories we tell throughout the world are cultural memories of events long past.
I kinda choose to somewhat believe in this hypothesis because it's mighty fun, and makes the past look so much more romantic!
aetherson
Equally, you and I can't prove that hindu myth isn't a record of contact with advanced space aliens, and wouldn't it have been fun if it was.
But it's implausible for all kinds of basic reasons.
It's just clear all throughout history that humans do not have trouble making up fantastic creatures. There's no reason to think that these fantastic creatures weren't made up. It just seems at first blush that there might be a reason because it was "very long ago." Until you realize that "very long ago" by the standards of hindu myth are wildly different than "very long ago" by the standards of hominid species.
rramadass
> But it's implausible for all kinds of basic reasons...Until you realize that "very long ago" by the standards of hindu myth are wildly different than "very long ago" by the standards of hominid species
I am not talking about what might actually have been; but merely pointing to parallels in one specific culture which has maintained links to its hoary past via oral and then written literature.
> The vanaras were probably conceived of around let's say generously 3000 years ago.
No, that is purely your speculation since we don't have evidence one way or the other.
> it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
This is the oft made comparison which is a meaningless red herring, since we know Tolkien wrote his stories in modern times (20th century). Not so with Sanskrit literature; they are accumulations over time, first orally and then written down gradually.
One must not be glib in dismissing ancient narratives/myths/stories, and equally, accept it as fact without thought and corroboration (of whatever type).
David Frawley coined "Frawley's Paradox" w.r.t. Sanskrit literature vs. Archaeology, where on the one hand you have a massive corpus of quite advanced texts on various subjects, while on the other hand, you have evidence of advanced civilizations (Indus valley, Harappa etc.) with no decipherable/surviving textual evidence.
If you now consider the various ancient vernacular languages (i.e. Prakrits and Proto-Dravidian) their actual archaeological evidence predates Sanskrit!
It is all highly fascinating and gives one a lot of food for thought as we add to history using modern means. But as i said in the beginning, we should not limit ourselves to archaeology exclusively, but look at the sum total of what a culture says about itself and has maintained over time w.r.t. linguistics/literature/narratives/myths etc.
usrnm
Those myths and legends are old enough to contain traces of shared Indo-European beliefs, so the real old stuff should be found, in some form, in other cultures, like Greek or Norse mythology. But I don't think it is true in this case
rramadass
> shared Indo-European beliefs, so the real old stuff should be found, in some form, in other cultures
No, this is pure speculation.
While there does seem to be some commonalities (ancestral) it is also the case that entire species lived in different parts of the world following different timelines and experiences with no knowledge of each other's cultures. Thus not everything can be mapped to common ancestral factors.
That is why Sanskrit literature is so fascinating since there seem to be records of "different types of people" coexisting. Note that i am merely drawing parallels and not that they were actually distinct species of Homo.
usrnm
> No, this is pure speculation
What is? Shared cultural ancestry between the people speaking early Sanskrit and many of their European counterparts is common knowledge at least since the 19th century, it's very well researched and not really contested at this point.
rramadass
I meant that your use of the phrase "real old stuff should be found, in some form, in other cultures" is not necessarily true. Much of the commonality is based on linguistic studies only and does not include other cultural aspects.
The more important point is that once the cultures diverged into different geographies, they came into contact with other cultures with their own realities/stories which were incorporated into Sanskrit literature and handed down orally while a similar thing did not happen with the others to the same extent.
ButlerianJihad
It is really not far-fetched that these passages describe some ancient memories of coexisting with another quasi-human race. And certainly the narrative of interbreeding is tantalizing. Perhaps if it did not actually happen this way, we believe it now, because many Christians would need to interpolte truth about the past and reconcile these passages.
1 When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them,
2 the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased.
3 ...
4 The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
27 They do not rest with the warriors
who fell in ancient times,
who went down to Sheol fully armed.
Their swords were placed under their heads
and their shields laid over their bones;
For there was terror of these warriors
in the land of the living.
33 There [in Canaan] we saw the Nephilim* (the Anakim are from the Nephilim); in our own eyes we seemed like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”
It can be no coincidence that George Lucas chose to name his antagonist "Anakin", taking this Hebrew word from the ancient race of quasi-human adversaries. Perhaps the very narrative of Darth Vader's fatherhood and clash with the peace-loving, spiritual Luke and rebels, is a recapitulation of humanity's own struggle with our brutal Neanderthal past.
bregma
Neanderthals were fully human. They were the same species (Homo sapiens) as us. We could interbreed and produce viable offspring and we often has similar customs (burial of the dead, lithic art, tool manufacture and use). There was no coexistence with a quasi-human "race", there was just coexistence with different peoples.
gpvos
As far as I know, the discussion is ongoing and H. neanderthalensis is still a current classification. But yes, the consensus is moving in the direction you describe.
We'll probably never know how they were perceived in society back then, if it was e.g. like Asians versus westerners now.
gnz11
Neanderthals are classified as Homo neanderthalensis and not Homo sapiens.
bregma
Neaderthals are classified as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, we are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens.
Of course, it depends on who you are reading. There are plenty of disagreements on taxonomy among the published academics and 19th-century literature is still influential, and pop-sci writers and their AI pets rarely do thorough research.
Just last week I was in the Coa valley in the iberian penninsula observing upper paleolithic rock art that could only be credited to Neanderthals (because there is zero evidence sapiens has migrated to Portugal 35,000 years ago; Spain was still covered in ice sheets and provided a physical barrier). Excavations had found stone tools and even a burial at nearby sites. Chances are really really good you wouldn't be able to pick out a Neanderthal if one were wearing modern dress walking down the street. Those academics who classify them as a separate species are merely propagating old imperialistic beliefs from the 19th century.
gnz11
The widely held consensus to this day is still two species. My point was mostly pedantic.
ButlerianJihad
It is interesting if Neanderthals are really supposed to be a unique species, because that would preclude their widespread interbreeding with us. And my DNA reports from 23andMe are confident that I'm walking around in the 80th percentile of Neanderthal descendants. So if these reports are accurate, and we're not sayin' they are, then surely it was possible for Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens to procreate. And that may explain the ancient legends and scriptural passages.
If, on the gripping hand, Neanderthals were a completely separate and unique species, they shouldn't have been able to interbreed, by definition, right, Mr Darwin?
F7F7F7
Pluto and the modern day understanding of Neanderthals are probably Top 5 learning corrections in my lifetime.
hardbass
What was it about Pluto?
no-name-here
Presumably that it’s now considered a dwarf planet and that there are multiple other d. planets in the system, of similar size such as Haumea (minor-planet number 136108), Eris, etc.
hardbass
The dwarf planet is just a naming thing. I don't know if beyond oluto bodies are a new or recent thing. I was thinking someone discovered something completely different like totally new findings about its geology or something like that.
Ectiseethe
Pluto is Mickey Mouse's pet and is not anthropomorhic. Not to be confused with Goofy that is an anthropomorphic dog and Mickey's friend.
Xenoamorphous
And Minnie is a mouse and has a cat as a pet, Figaro.
ButlerianJihad
Here's the funny thing about cartoons and confusion. In the comic Popeye the antagonist is named "Bluto" but only sometimes. He was renamed as "Brutus" because of a misunderstanding of rights ownership.
However, because it was a misunderstanding, his "Bluto" moniker was later restored, and even retconned as the name of twin brothers.
Popeye has never been a Disney property. But the funny thing is that my father told me that they renamed "Bluto" so that he wasn't phonetically confused with "Pluto", who is obviously a different character in a different property. And that premise is the one that I grew up believing, until Wikipedia was invented.
modzu
still to come, the sasquatch in Canada
usrnm
You forgot the "2 = 5" one
rao-v
These findings always seem to be suggesting that we more or less warred (fought, disputed territory ranges - pick your euphemism) upon them opportunistically over centuries and didn’t lose.
There is a bit more to the story. There was interbreeding, which we can make up explanations for but none have any evidence to support them. Neanderthals were also under a lot of environmental stress. They were very inbred well before Homo Sapiens shared their range. We have no evidence they hunted from range (no arrow heads, for example, and their shoulder joints are not adapted to throwing) but relied on close range attacks. This would have become increasing more difficult in the Ice Age, due to the nature of the terrain and the increasing size of the megafauna.
There is a good case to be made that Homo Sapiens were just lucky to be based in the milder climate of Africa, and by chance being more adapted to hunting megafauna due to our body structure. Homo Sapiens are also very inbred. IIRC there are two main genetic bottlenecks that have been detected in our DNA. We almost didn't make it.
rao-v
I mostly agree with all of this, but it doesn't really invalidate the horror / tragedy that it really was a lot of war / murder (?) alongside.
The paper I linked shows that we were in and out of Neanderthal territories (or vice versa) a bunch.
Punctuated equilibrium (is that still in fashion?) suggests that the inbreeding / limited population eras of humanity are when we got a lot of our special capabilities!
tonis2
They live in Netherlands now
jacquesm
That would explain so much here.
gpvos
Yeah I misread that too at first.
gpvos
(In fact, the Neander valley, where they were first found, is just east of Düsseldorf, only about 60 km from the Dutch border.)
cekanoni
I've read what happen to Nederlands ...
singularity2001
We ate them (and married)
chasil
As I understand it, their mitochondrial DNA does not survive, so they were always the fathers of any hybrids that contributed to the modern human genome.
" recent Science study found evidence that couplings followed a distinct pattern: Neanderthal males with modern human females."
it's not clear to me how they determined that these were in fact different species and not just variation/evolution within the same species
mjh2539
When biologists, botanists, etc. use the term "species", they are not using it in a principled way. The distinctions are oftentimes quite arbitrary, I'm very sorry to say.
For what it's worth, there isn't even much agreement on what constitutes a genus or species among professional philosophers of science (i.e. academics who care about giving a principled definition for species/genus), even for those that share many of the same views otherwise (like ur-Platonists, Aristotelians, Thomists, Scotists, etc.).
rramadass
This is a broader fundamental question which you are better off asking AI to give you an overview. It involves various techniques like;
1) Paleo genomics i.e. DNA study of any surviving material.
2) Statistical study of Human Morphology i.e. variation w.r.t. current day human (and close primates?) biological structures. Eg. Current-day human cranium sizes vary within known limits. So if we find a fossil cranium which is outside these limits then there is a high chance it might be a different species.
3) Fossil dating shows different species (w.r.t. above data) occupying the same geography and within overlapping time periods.
spwa4
TLDR: we are the result of that other theory of evolution, also started by Charles Darwin. The one that is still wildly controversial. It is sometimes referred to as "island species theory". If 2 species or races that occupy the same niche exist in the same environment, only one comes out alive ("extant"). Nothing remains of the smaller group except trace DNA.
Controversial, because of the prediction it makes for human populations. If we keep traveling the world, it is a matter of (a surprisingly short) time before only a single race survives. If the current situation continues, in about 5 centuries all our kids will be the same race.
We are often quick to dismiss them as mere fanciful story-telling of primitive cultures but i am not so sure.
For starters, some catastrophes do shine through more recent history:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Then, Nuclear Evangelism is a fun idea, proposing a religion teaching us to stay away from nuclear waste for 10k years: https://www.nahomatsuda.com/nuclear-evangelism
Or you can poke around linguistics
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics
- https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/does-your-name-belong-...
The Arthurian legends and Robin Hood are two English-speaking examples of folklore snowballing into what we have today. I bet James Bond will join them in a few hundred year's time.
I am talking about records from 5000-7000BC (deducing from Sanskrit literature) by which time they had already been orally transmitted for eons. So they are truly ancient with layers upon layers of grafting of realities/myths/stories over time.
The Itihasas/Puranas talk about vast time scales populated by different beings with different lifespan lengths in a very specific and detailed manner. It contains both cosmic and civilizational histories all bound together in a single multi-branched narrative. Hence it is a very unique historical corpus from which much can be gleaned and mapped against modern studies.
Some resources:
Hindu units of time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time
Yuga cycle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga_cycle
As an example, The events in the Ramayana are dated towards the end of "Treta Yuga" but the text itself mentions a very long list of continuous lineage before coming to Rama. Look up "Treta Yuga" in the above pages and you can see how far back this particular narrative goes; you could calculate it as; "length of dvapara yuga + length of kali yuga to current date" and it comes to >800,000 years into the past!. Now add the lineages mentioned in the text itself and you go even longer into the past.
The interesting thing is that each of those timelines have some sort of Human/other beings in it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline
In the documentary "The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey", they say that the Aborigines are the survivors of the very first migration out of Africa. They went through the middle-east, moved through South India and thence to Australia and hence have DNA links to some South Indians/Sri Lankans.
Because they were isolated from the latter migrations, they have preserved much of the "true" Human archaeological history in their oral (and other) narratives. Anthropologists call this "Deep Time" oral histories.
And then you go look at where there were Denisovans and Neanderthals, and those cultures have mythologies with trolls and ogres.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - in fact, it is speculated that floriensis perhaps hung on much, much later than 50kya ago - and I see no reason the same shouldn’t apply to Neanderthals or denisovans.
On a similar note - cultural memory runs deep. Take hill forts in the U.K. for instance. Commonly accepted as defensive structures. Except… the populations of these places, the topography, all of it, made them pretty crap defences - and the top of a windy hill, far from water, isn’t such a great place to live. So why? My take: the doggerland flood, and cultural memory. When the sea is slowly encroaching, building on top of a hill, building a dyke, a berm, sensible.
5000 years later, still doing the same thing. Why? Nobody quite remembers, but it’s important.
It is fascinating to note that the distinctions are pretty clearcut throughout the vast corpus which implies it was common and wellknown at that time. There seem to be some good parallels to our anthropological knowledge of different Homo species.
In particular, the "Vanaras" were a humanoid ape-like species who have all the human psychological characteristics but with ape-like physiology. This was one source of inspiration (amongst others) for the "Na'vi" in James Cameron's Avatar movies.
It's just not very plausible that hindu mythology is a corrupted record of living with multiple species of hominids. Timeline-wise, it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
We have no idea when the Rāmāyaṇa was composed or who composed it. We traditionally attribute it to Vālmīki and call him the ādikavi and the work the ādikāvyam -- first poet and first piece of poetry respectively. The entire set up presents it as the story of a man named Rāma.
The poet specifically says in the fifth sarga of the Bālakāṇḍa:
तदिदं वर्तयिष्यामि सर्वं निखिलमादितः।
धर्मकामार्थसहितं श्रोतव्यमनसूयया॥ ४
"Now I shall recite the entire thing from start to end. As it relates to dharma, kāma and artha, it should be heard without complaint/malice/envy/etc."
The neo-Western standard of written or epigraphic evidence being the only real evidence was not really that relevant in the ancient world. Hinduism itself is based on the concept of time as a cycle instead of the linearity that is common in Western religions.
So, the story could have received its present form some time in the past 3-4K years, and has been fiddled with by grammar-obsessed scribes across the country over the past 2K years, but it could encode memories from a time long before that. The story has many fantastical elements like the tale of Sagara and his 60K sons and the descent of the river Gaṅgā from the heavens, but it is much more reserved in other aspects. The etymology of the term vānara itself is debatable. Has it been derived from narō vā (is it a man/human)? Or vanam + naraḥ (forest + man = forest dweller)?
I kinda choose to somewhat believe in this hypothesis because it's mighty fun, and makes the past look so much more romantic!
But it's implausible for all kinds of basic reasons.
It's just clear all throughout history that humans do not have trouble making up fantastic creatures. There's no reason to think that these fantastic creatures weren't made up. It just seems at first blush that there might be a reason because it was "very long ago." Until you realize that "very long ago" by the standards of hindu myth are wildly different than "very long ago" by the standards of hominid species.
No, that is just ignorance.
There is enough specificity and detail in Sanskrit literature to easily refute this. See this comment of mine for details - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284725
> The vanaras were probably conceived of around let's say generously 3000 years ago.
No, that is purely your speculation since we don't have evidence one way or the other.
> it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
This is the oft made comparison which is a meaningless red herring, since we know Tolkien wrote his stories in modern times (20th century). Not so with Sanskrit literature; they are accumulations over time, first orally and then written down gradually.
One must not be glib in dismissing ancient narratives/myths/stories, and equally, accept it as fact without thought and corroboration (of whatever type).
David Frawley coined "Frawley's Paradox" w.r.t. Sanskrit literature vs. Archaeology, where on the one hand you have a massive corpus of quite advanced texts on various subjects, while on the other hand, you have evidence of advanced civilizations (Indus valley, Harappa etc.) with no decipherable/surviving textual evidence.
If you now consider the various ancient vernacular languages (i.e. Prakrits and Proto-Dravidian) their actual archaeological evidence predates Sanskrit!
It is all highly fascinating and gives one a lot of food for thought as we add to history using modern means. But as i said in the beginning, we should not limit ourselves to archaeology exclusively, but look at the sum total of what a culture says about itself and has maintained over time w.r.t. linguistics/literature/narratives/myths etc.
No, this is pure speculation.
While there does seem to be some commonalities (ancestral) it is also the case that entire species lived in different parts of the world following different timelines and experiences with no knowledge of each other's cultures. Thus not everything can be mapped to common ancestral factors.
That is why Sanskrit literature is so fascinating since there seem to be records of "different types of people" coexisting. Note that i am merely drawing parallels and not that they were actually distinct species of Homo.
What is? Shared cultural ancestry between the people speaking early Sanskrit and many of their European counterparts is common knowledge at least since the 19th century, it's very well researched and not really contested at this point.
The more important point is that once the cultures diverged into different geographies, they came into contact with other cultures with their own realities/stories which were incorporated into Sanskrit literature and handed down orally while a similar thing did not happen with the others to the same extent.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/genesis/6?1
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/ezekiel/32?27 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/numbers/13?33 It can be no coincidence that George Lucas chose to name his antagonist "Anakin", taking this Hebrew word from the ancient race of quasi-human adversaries. Perhaps the very narrative of Darth Vader's fatherhood and clash with the peace-loving, spiritual Luke and rebels, is a recapitulation of humanity's own struggle with our brutal Neanderthal past.We'll probably never know how they were perceived in society back then, if it was e.g. like Asians versus westerners now.
Of course, it depends on who you are reading. There are plenty of disagreements on taxonomy among the published academics and 19th-century literature is still influential, and pop-sci writers and their AI pets rarely do thorough research.
Just last week I was in the Coa valley in the iberian penninsula observing upper paleolithic rock art that could only be credited to Neanderthals (because there is zero evidence sapiens has migrated to Portugal 35,000 years ago; Spain was still covered in ice sheets and provided a physical barrier). Excavations had found stone tools and even a burial at nearby sites. Chances are really really good you wouldn't be able to pick out a Neanderthal if one were wearing modern dress walking down the street. Those academics who classify them as a separate species are merely propagating old imperialistic beliefs from the 19th century.
If, on the gripping hand, Neanderthals were a completely separate and unique species, they shouldn't have been able to interbreed, by definition, right, Mr Darwin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluto#Bluto_vs._Brutus
However, because it was a misunderstanding, his "Bluto" moniker was later restored, and even retconned as the name of twin brothers.
Popeye has never been a Disney property. But the funny thing is that my father told me that they renamed "Bluto" so that he wasn't phonetically confused with "Pluto", who is obviously a different character in a different property. And that premise is the one that I grew up believing, until Wikipedia was invented.
E.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1376-z.epdf
There is a good case to be made that Homo Sapiens were just lucky to be based in the milder climate of Africa, and by chance being more adapted to hunting megafauna due to our body structure. Homo Sapiens are also very inbred. IIRC there are two main genetic bottlenecks that have been detected in our DNA. We almost didn't make it.
FWIW:
It looks like the Neanderthals had javelins as ranged weapons: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550x/6/1/17
The paper I linked shows that we were in and out of Neanderthal territories (or vice versa) a bunch.
Punctuated equilibrium (is that still in fashion?) suggests that the inbreeding / limited population eras of humanity are when we got a lot of our special capabilities!
" recent Science study found evidence that couplings followed a distinct pattern: Neanderthal males with modern human females."
The article links to this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/science/human-evolution-n...
https://archive.ph/9mQKV
It is fascinating.
For what it's worth, there isn't even much agreement on what constitutes a genus or species among professional philosophers of science (i.e. academics who care about giving a principled definition for species/genus), even for those that share many of the same views otherwise (like ur-Platonists, Aristotelians, Thomists, Scotists, etc.).
1) Paleo genomics i.e. DNA study of any surviving material.
2) Statistical study of Human Morphology i.e. variation w.r.t. current day human (and close primates?) biological structures. Eg. Current-day human cranium sizes vary within known limits. So if we find a fossil cranium which is outside these limits then there is a high chance it might be a different species.
3) Fossil dating shows different species (w.r.t. above data) occupying the same geography and within overlapping time periods.
Controversial, because of the prediction it makes for human populations. If we keep traveling the world, it is a matter of (a surprisingly short) time before only a single race survives. If the current situation continues, in about 5 centuries all our kids will be the same race.