Well, they’re not altogether extinct. I have 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, which is considered a high percentage. But most people of northern European ancestry have some percentage of Neanderthal DNA. So, Neanderthals live on, after a fashion, in our DNA strands.
I received the following message in a blast email sent by the administration of the hospital where I work:
“In order to be compliant, Hispanic will be removed from the Race field in the General section of Patient Demographics. End users will still have the option to select Hispanic in the Ethnicity field.”
People sometimes ask me why their interactions with health care is so difficult and expensive.
This is a big reason.
There is an office in the hospital where people occupy themselves with things like this. The office is run by a Director, who reports to a Vice-President, and there are secretaries, assistants, and various other employees. They occupy office space, get salaries and (generous) benefits. They go to Meetings on a weekly basis and meet with other hospital employees. They also go to national meetings to keep up with the latest changes in hospital policies that are mostly but not entirely initiated by Medicare functionaries. They therefore have a travel budget.
Every dollar spent on all of this is a dollar not available to pay a nurse, buy a piece of equipment, or procure a medication. Every minute that I and my clinical colleagues spend reading this drivel is a minute not available for patient care.
Being in Texas, we have a lot of people who were once classified as Hispanic race, but are now Hispanic ethnicity. Many of them are my friends and co-workers. I don’t know if I should offer them sympathy or congratulations.
Ay dios mio, does the stupidity never end (rhetorical)
I hear that Zuckerberg has more or less admitted that Facebook blocked all discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the leadup to the election largely based on the FBI’s requests to be on the look out for the dreaded “Russian disinformation”. He didn’t come out and say that the FBI specifically told Facebook to block that story in particular, but they obviously factored in to the decision.
Of course, given the fact that something like 98% of all Facebook’s political donations have gone to Democrats combined with their long history of demonstrable strong leftward bias somehow I doubt it was a difficult decision for them to wrestle with. It’s like telling a fellow holding a hammer to hammer in a nail.
I generally try not to be too harsh a judge on people’s physical appearence. But to me Mark Zuckerberg has always physically appeared as a living, breathing example of the the Uncanny Valley. In every video I’ve every seen him in he seems to exhibit what mental health professionals refer to as“flat affect”, low-to-no displays of emotion. In his default, resting expression his eyes are always open too wide. And combined with his faint eyebrows he just never felt trustworthy.
Uncanny Valley. Funny.
Given that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pulled off one of the most odious manipulations of the democratic process in 2020, I wouldn’t be surprised if Zuck asked the FBI if they could use them as an excuse for Facebook’s censorship.
I probably have Neanderthal DNA, being of northern European ancestry; besides, I voted for Trump twice, so that proves it.
he couldn’t pass the voight kampf test, to save his life, (since we’re already passed the time of blade runner, and no flying cars)
Since we’re on the subject of Neanderthals, I just found out I’m one. I had a relatively civil conversation with someone on Twitter. It ended up getting a bit heated, but not so much. The guy reported me, and my account was permanently suspended. Here was the tweet in question:
“You people are mentally ill. You should get help, instead of demanding society accept your mental illness.”
Maybe not nice, but “hateful conduct”? I think not.
That aside – does anyone recommend a conservative leaning social media site that isn’t too difficult to deal with?
More young athletes die. Mark Steyn: “Nothing to see here”. He’s under investigation for speaking too freely in a dictatorship so he’s carefully choosing his words.
1) it’s not the vaccines
2) because reasons
3) authorities will not attempt to find out why
maria shriver, seems to have reverted, ala altered states,
well obama, and he’s the edgar bergen of this whole sad episode, susan rice’s mother is credited as the one who shepherded the pell grant (which already you didn’t have to pay back)
The hospital is just following the academic model of expanding the administrative bureaucracy thereby driving up costs to the patient, insurance costs, Medicare and thus driving up all of our taxes. It also then adds to the income of those people in useless bureaucratic positions. Expect to find more and more VPs and Directors of This and That positions to be created. Obviously, like academia, there is a growing class of professional health care administrators that need jobs.
And like in academia, expect the actual health workers to get the short end of the stick as their wages are stagnant, supplies hard to get, etc etc.
Neat to see, shame not more is known as always wondered on this topic
Important considerations about the MAL raid, and the president’s executive privilege and declassification power.
Michael Crichton’s novel “Eaters of the Dead” tells the tale of the non-fictional Arab ambassador Ibn Fadlan. Ibn Fadlan was tasked with establishing a trade pact with the Bulgars in Russia by the Caliph of Baghdad in the 10th century AD.
He was captured by the Viking Rus near modern day Kiev who brought him north near the Baltic Sea. There Fadlan finds a mysterious people who the Rus called Eaters of the Dead, so called because they never leave their dead soldiers on the battlefield for their enemies to find. His description of Eaters of the Dead has lead some historical scholars to believe they were the last vestiges of the Neanderthal – only about 1,100 years ago.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right, how could they stay apart for thousands of years though,
Has a president ever used such inflammatory language describing his political opponents?
Have we ever had an Alzheimer’s patient in the White House?
Michael Crichton confirmed, in an interview, that the group known to the Norse community as the “Eaters of the Dead” was a “relict” (not to be confused with “relic”) population of Neanderthals who had somehow survived in a remote corner of the north long after their time had passed elsewhere. He provides plenty of hints alluding to the identity of the Eaters, e.g., tremendous upper body strength, the use of atlatls rather than bows, and paleolithic religious rites including ritualistic cannibalism.
It’s a terrific novel that was made into a movie, “The 13th Warrior.” Despite being one of the biggest box-office flops of all time, it’s a terrific movie and superb adaptation of the book. It has gained a cult following: I am one of the cultists. The underlying theme is quite thought-provoking: what or who is human; what does it mean to be human. The story is told from the perspective of the main protagonist, Ibn Fadlan, and he wrestles mightily with these questions, going back and forth on the issue. He finally decides that the determinant for being human is moral not physical, and that the Eaters are not human because they are cannibals, which entails breaking one of the oldest and most widespread of human moral taboos.
The overarching point is the important role that morals and morality play, or should play, in our human identity. The moral dimension is paramount.
Considering how thin on the ground both groups were, the idea that one ate up all the food is hard to feature.
In fact, the idea of any conflict is not obvious. Okay, we’re different from those guys. That’s why I want to go nose-to-nose with short guys with huge muscles and heavy bones. Or, those tall, skinny guys annoy me so I want to get into range of those sharp things we can’t throw very well–shoulder joint–to try to stick them with my spear.
Rather try to nail a cave bear during hibernation and a mammoth prime bull. Safer and more to eat.
Did a wandering hunter whose band collapsed, or woman, join up with the Other. Could always use more hands, I suppose, and they’re both pretty good at whatever it is, been doing it for millenia.
I suspect there were more encounters but the genetics only allowed a few newborns.
Jean Auel postulated that H. Nean women had a hard time in childbirth because the kid’s head was so big, compared to the same in H. Sap. Thus more deaths of mom and or kid in child birth. A H. Sap woman trying to birth a H. Nean kid could be in real trouble, presuming Auel is correct.
But we’re here and they’re not which means the mixed-breeds managed to survive in H. Sap bands. And, for that matter, so did the wandering H. Nean who wanted to join up.
Back in the day, maybe the Sixties, there were a couple of “cave man” novels in which H. Nean stood in for the peaceful innocent padi farmer and H. Sap was the First Cav come to destroy. Pretty obvious.
My post was in reference to the book only, which is to be understood (as I understand it) as a meditation on what it means (and what is required) to be human, using an imagined “what if” conflict between Neanderthals and humans as the vehicle for this thought experiment.
I wasn’t meant as history, not even speculative history. It was certainly wasn’t meant to be about you and your desire to go “nose-to-nose with short guys with huge muscles and heavy bones,” or anything similar.
The novel takes place in the Dark Ages when Europe was experiencing rapid population growth due to improving conditions attributable to the continent’s recovery from the disaster of the fall of Roman civilization. Homo sapiens were generally not thin on the ground, in fact the population was growing — hence the great Völkerwanderungen that brought wave after wave of disparate peoples (Indo-Germanic, Hunnic, Turkic, etc.) into Europe during that period. In the river valleys of China, humans were breeding faster than rabbits.
No mention is made — in my post, in the novel, and in the film — of the “the idea that one ate up all the food.” In the event, Crichton’s point was not that the Eaters ate human flesh for sustenance but rather for ritualistic purposes — which, from Crichton’s standpoint, was more morally reprehensible than the former.
EOD was a change for crichton he had mostly done tech heavy scifi before that (although the great train robbery was a change of pace) or pulpy mysteries this was a very well researched historical tale about subjects who were as alien as the andromeda to the human experience
Its also about culture clashes between the cultured bedoiun and the more savage viking at first glance
Irish.
My point was about extinction, not the book.
John Hawks, Uni of Wisconsin, has done a lot of work on this. He figures that there were a billion and a half of the Neanderthal over their existence, but no more than 50,000 alive at any one time.
Hard to imagine a threat to resources sufficient to make going after them more profitable than a few more hours a week hunting.
Re: Doug+Purdie, IrishOtter49, Neanderthals
I was confused by the above comments whether Crichton’s fictional novel was based on a real, if possibly speculative, source about a last vestige of Neanderthals living in historical times.
That’s a delightful fantasy I’ve had for years. So I had to look it up.
Sadly, it is Crichton being Lovecraftian, i.e. fashioning a grand fiction based on supposed real sources. In fact Crichton gives the game away with a direct “footnote” reference to H.P. Lovecraft (Peace Be Upon Him).
_________________________
…Crichton sometimes parodies scholarship by concocting exotic sources. In the bibliography, for example. Crichton cites the “Necronomicon” of Abdul Azhared, an imaginary work that the amateur demonologists in H. P. Lovecraft’s tales are fond of stealing from the library of “Miskatonic University” to conjure demons from across the cosmos.
My favorite practitioner of the bogus source was Jorge Luis Borges (Peace Be Upon Him too). I wondered who influenced whom.
Lovecraft was not only older than Borges, Borges dedicated one of his later short stories “To the memory of H.P. Lovecraft.”
As far as I’m concerned anyone who cares about fiction hasn’t lived unless he or she has made the acquaintance of Lovecraft and Borges.
Except it occurs about 3 centuries after the events after abdul hazred adventures
Looking up the Borges story tonight, I’m struck by the similarity of its first line to the first line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
________________________________
Just as I was about to take my last examination at the University of Texas, in Austin, I learned that my uncle Edwin Arnett had died of an aneurysm on the remote frontier of South America.
–Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things” (1975)
________________________________
________________________________
MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
–Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967)
________________________________
As you can see the Marquez line precedes the Borges line by eight years. But Borges had been born almost 30 years before Marquez and that understated, overly detailed, yet dramatic style had been Borges’s meat long before Marquez came along.
I give the nod to Borges imitating Borges and not Borges imitating Marquez.
In the video I was struck by this passage:
__________________________
… [Neanderthals’] short lives leave less time for learning and passing on knowledge. Another problem is that Neanderthal’s short but very stocky frame needed maybe double the amount of calories than a modern Homo Sapien does…
__________________________
Wow. That would be roughly 4000 calories vs 2000 for Homo Sap. That’s a lot of calories for a hunter-gatherer to hunt and gather on a daily basis.
huxley:
Except for the fact that both passages have the form, “When later event B happened, the person remembers or learns of earlier event A,” I don’t see much similarity.
By the way, Borges is one of my very favorite authors of all time, whereas I’ve never been able to get past a couple of pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, despite trying several times.
The down side of owning an electric vehicle… and note the FL fascistic tax on the bill!
OT of politics…SCIENCE! “She blinded me…with SCIENCE! Of a James Webb Space Telescope Landmark FIRST Discovery: a distant exoplanet with life-giving Carbon Dioxide in its atmosphere. From NASA:
“NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. This observation of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light-years away provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet. The finding, accepted for publication in Nature, offers evidence that in the future Webb may be able to detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets.
“WASP-39 b is a hot gas giant with a mass roughly one-quarter that of Jupiter (about the same as Saturn) and a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter. Its extreme puffiness is related in part to its high temperature (about 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit or 900 degrees Celsius). Unlike the cooler, more compact gas giants in our solar system, WASP-39 b orbits very close to its star – only about one-eighth the distance between the Sun and Mercury – completing one circuit in just over four Earth-days. The planet’s discovery, reported in 2011, was made based on ground-based detections of the subtle, periodic dimming of light from its host star as the planet transits, or passes in front of the star.
“Previous observations from other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, revealed the presence of water vapor, sodium, and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere. Webb’s unmatched infrared sensitivity has now confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on this planet as well.
_. _. _
“ As soon as the data appeared on my screen, the whopping carbon dioxide feature grabbed me,” said Zafar Rustamkulov, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and member of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science team, which undertook this investigation. “It was a special moment, crossing an important threshold in exoplanet sciences.”
“No observatory has ever measured such subtle differences in brightness of so many individual colors across the 3 to 5.5-micron range in an exoplanet transmission spectrum before. Access to this part of the spectrum is crucial for measuring abundances of gases like water and methane, as well as carbon dioxide, which are thought to exist in many different types of exoplanets.
“Detecting such a clear signal of carbon dioxide on WASP-39 b bodes well for the detection of atmospheres on smaller, terrestrial-sized planets,” said Natalie Batalha of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who leads the team.
“Understanding the composition of a planet’s atmosphere is important because it tells us something about the origin of the planet and how it evolved. “Carbon dioxide molecules are sensitive tracers of the story of planet formation,” said Mike Line of Arizona State University, another member of this research team. “By measuring this carbon dioxide feature, we can determine how much solid versus how much gaseous material was used to form this gas giant planet….”
A comment from the video:
“My uncle was a Neanderthal but he converted to orthodox Denisovan.”
huxley
Not sure what a short, stocky frame has to do with doubling necessary calories. There are short, stocky, H. Sap who aren’t authorized double rations and they seem to get along okay.
Stocky, short or not, increases volume per unit of surface area, thus, among other things, preserving heat. Nean, having spent a lot of time in really cold environs, could use the help. And it’s not just living four miles south of the face of a glacier. I’m up early, the window is open and I’m getting a breeze of about 58 degrees. If I were outdoors all night, I’d have had to burn up a few extra cals to stay warm.
I do recall, however, reading that there was a metabolic inefficiency on a cellular level in H. Nean. No idea of where, but the implication was more food was necessary. Which meant more waste which meant, possibly, considerably more B.O.
It would be nice to know the causes of death for the Nean who passed about age forty. Old age at a young age? Cumulative traumas of injuries and diseases?
The folks at Skara Brae had some nice, tight homes, up there in the North Atlantic winds. And they died pretty young, all things considered. Sitting around a fire half the day, most of the year, is going to give you a case of the lung crud.
Saw a meme at The Week in Pictures, at Power Line. “Just got my ancestry DNA results back. Assorted Crackers.”
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Well, they’re not altogether extinct. I have 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, which is considered a high percentage. But most people of northern European ancestry have some percentage of Neanderthal DNA. So, Neanderthals live on, after a fashion, in our DNA strands.
I received the following message in a blast email sent by the administration of the hospital where I work:
“In order to be compliant, Hispanic will be removed from the Race field in the General section of Patient Demographics. End users will still have the option to select Hispanic in the Ethnicity field.”
People sometimes ask me why their interactions with health care is so difficult and expensive.
This is a big reason.
There is an office in the hospital where people occupy themselves with things like this. The office is run by a Director, who reports to a Vice-President, and there are secretaries, assistants, and various other employees. They occupy office space, get salaries and (generous) benefits. They go to Meetings on a weekly basis and meet with other hospital employees. They also go to national meetings to keep up with the latest changes in hospital policies that are mostly but not entirely initiated by Medicare functionaries. They therefore have a travel budget.
Every dollar spent on all of this is a dollar not available to pay a nurse, buy a piece of equipment, or procure a medication. Every minute that I and my clinical colleagues spend reading this drivel is a minute not available for patient care.
Being in Texas, we have a lot of people who were once classified as Hispanic race, but are now Hispanic ethnicity. Many of them are my friends and co-workers. I don’t know if I should offer them sympathy or congratulations.
Ay dios mio, does the stupidity never end (rhetorical)
I hear that Zuckerberg has more or less admitted that Facebook blocked all discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the leadup to the election largely based on the FBI’s requests to be on the look out for the dreaded “Russian disinformation”. He didn’t come out and say that the FBI specifically told Facebook to block that story in particular, but they obviously factored in to the decision.
Of course, given the fact that something like 98% of all Facebook’s political donations have gone to Democrats combined with their long history of demonstrable strong leftward bias somehow I doubt it was a difficult decision for them to wrestle with. It’s like telling a fellow holding a hammer to hammer in a nail.
I generally try not to be too harsh a judge on people’s physical appearence. But to me Mark Zuckerberg has always physically appeared as a living, breathing example of the the Uncanny Valley. In every video I’ve every seen him in he seems to exhibit what mental health professionals refer to as“flat affect”, low-to-no displays of emotion. In his default, resting expression his eyes are always open too wide. And combined with his faint eyebrows he just never felt trustworthy.
Uncanny Valley. Funny.
Given that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pulled off one of the most odious manipulations of the democratic process in 2020, I wouldn’t be surprised if Zuck asked the FBI if they could use them as an excuse for Facebook’s censorship.
Oh look, they even have their own CZ logo.
I probably have Neanderthal DNA, being of northern European ancestry; besides, I voted for Trump twice, so that proves it.
he couldn’t pass the voight kampf test, to save his life, (since we’re already passed the time of blade runner, and no flying cars)
Since we’re on the subject of Neanderthals, I just found out I’m one. I had a relatively civil conversation with someone on Twitter. It ended up getting a bit heated, but not so much. The guy reported me, and my account was permanently suspended. Here was the tweet in question:
“You people are mentally ill. You should get help, instead of demanding society accept your mental illness.”
Maybe not nice, but “hateful conduct”? I think not.
That aside – does anyone recommend a conservative leaning social media site that isn’t too difficult to deal with?
Got space in the garage, Neo?
https://silodrome.com/rolls-royce-corniche-convertible/
More young athletes die. Mark Steyn: “Nothing to see here”. He’s under investigation for speaking too freely in a dictatorship so he’s carefully choosing his words.
1) it’s not the vaccines
2) because reasons
3) authorities will not attempt to find out why
https://youtu.be/gkQ7LsHPASA
Good combo of specific instances and vetted statistics.
All the monkeys aren’t in the zoo
Every day you meet quite a few.
We’re all criminals now. MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy.
Has a president ever used such inflammatory language describing his political opponents?
When Biden was vice president he said Republicans were going to put you’all back in chains. What he said yesterday is worse.
Everything that is said and happens until the midterm elections is an effort to get MAGA supporters to overreact and do something stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5aQoobjHrQ
its like a robin cook tale, or michael palmer (he’s the lead medical mystery writer now, right)
meanwhile the rick roll
https://twitter.com/Larry_Beech/status/1563209748974931973?s=20&t=44iDf2XMoZyO9ECOjqeu7Q
maria shriver, seems to have reverted, ala altered states,
well obama, and he’s the edgar bergen of this whole sad episode, susan rice’s mother is credited as the one who shepherded the pell grant (which already you didn’t have to pay back)
sure that will work
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2022/08/26/ho-lee-chit-electric-vehicles-that-supposedly-save-americans-lots-of-money-have-one-very-very-very-expensive-problem-screenshot/
WestTX,
The hospital is just following the academic model of expanding the administrative bureaucracy thereby driving up costs to the patient, insurance costs, Medicare and thus driving up all of our taxes. It also then adds to the income of those people in useless bureaucratic positions. Expect to find more and more VPs and Directors of This and That positions to be created. Obviously, like academia, there is a growing class of professional health care administrators that need jobs.
And like in academia, expect the actual health workers to get the short end of the stick as their wages are stagnant, supplies hard to get, etc etc.
Neat to see, shame not more is known as always wondered on this topic
Important considerations about the MAL raid, and the president’s executive privilege and declassification power.
Just another in a long line of hoaxes.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/five-big-unanswered-legal-questions-trump-raid-case
Michael Crichton’s novel “Eaters of the Dead” tells the tale of the non-fictional Arab ambassador Ibn Fadlan. Ibn Fadlan was tasked with establishing a trade pact with the Bulgars in Russia by the Caliph of Baghdad in the 10th century AD.
He was captured by the Viking Rus near modern day Kiev who brought him north near the Baltic Sea. There Fadlan finds a mysterious people who the Rus called Eaters of the Dead, so called because they never leave their dead soldiers on the battlefield for their enemies to find. His description of Eaters of the Dead has lead some historical scholars to believe they were the last vestiges of the Neanderthal – only about 1,100 years ago.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right, how could they stay apart for thousands of years though,
Has a president ever used such inflammatory language describing his political opponents?
Have we ever had an Alzheimer’s patient in the White House?
Michael Crichton confirmed, in an interview, that the group known to the Norse community as the “Eaters of the Dead” was a “relict” (not to be confused with “relic”) population of Neanderthals who had somehow survived in a remote corner of the north long after their time had passed elsewhere. He provides plenty of hints alluding to the identity of the Eaters, e.g., tremendous upper body strength, the use of atlatls rather than bows, and paleolithic religious rites including ritualistic cannibalism.
It’s a terrific novel that was made into a movie, “The 13th Warrior.” Despite being one of the biggest box-office flops of all time, it’s a terrific movie and superb adaptation of the book. It has gained a cult following: I am one of the cultists. The underlying theme is quite thought-provoking: what or who is human; what does it mean to be human. The story is told from the perspective of the main protagonist, Ibn Fadlan, and he wrestles mightily with these questions, going back and forth on the issue. He finally decides that the determinant for being human is moral not physical, and that the Eaters are not human because they are cannibals, which entails breaking one of the oldest and most widespread of human moral taboos.
The overarching point is the important role that morals and morality play, or should play, in our human identity. The moral dimension is paramount.
Considering how thin on the ground both groups were, the idea that one ate up all the food is hard to feature.
In fact, the idea of any conflict is not obvious. Okay, we’re different from those guys. That’s why I want to go nose-to-nose with short guys with huge muscles and heavy bones. Or, those tall, skinny guys annoy me so I want to get into range of those sharp things we can’t throw very well–shoulder joint–to try to stick them with my spear.
Rather try to nail a cave bear during hibernation and a mammoth prime bull. Safer and more to eat.
Did a wandering hunter whose band collapsed, or woman, join up with the Other. Could always use more hands, I suppose, and they’re both pretty good at whatever it is, been doing it for millenia.
I suspect there were more encounters but the genetics only allowed a few newborns.
Jean Auel postulated that H. Nean women had a hard time in childbirth because the kid’s head was so big, compared to the same in H. Sap. Thus more deaths of mom and or kid in child birth. A H. Sap woman trying to birth a H. Nean kid could be in real trouble, presuming Auel is correct.
But we’re here and they’re not which means the mixed-breeds managed to survive in H. Sap bands. And, for that matter, so did the wandering H. Nean who wanted to join up.
Back in the day, maybe the Sixties, there were a couple of “cave man” novels in which H. Nean stood in for the peaceful innocent padi farmer and H. Sap was the First Cav come to destroy. Pretty obvious.
My post was in reference to the book only, which is to be understood (as I understand it) as a meditation on what it means (and what is required) to be human, using an imagined “what if” conflict between Neanderthals and humans as the vehicle for this thought experiment.
I wasn’t meant as history, not even speculative history. It was certainly wasn’t meant to be about you and your desire to go “nose-to-nose with short guys with huge muscles and heavy bones,” or anything similar.
The novel takes place in the Dark Ages when Europe was experiencing rapid population growth due to improving conditions attributable to the continent’s recovery from the disaster of the fall of Roman civilization. Homo sapiens were generally not thin on the ground, in fact the population was growing — hence the great Völkerwanderungen that brought wave after wave of disparate peoples (Indo-Germanic, Hunnic, Turkic, etc.) into Europe during that period. In the river valleys of China, humans were breeding faster than rabbits.
No mention is made — in my post, in the novel, and in the film — of the “the idea that one ate up all the food.” In the event, Crichton’s point was not that the Eaters ate human flesh for sustenance but rather for ritualistic purposes — which, from Crichton’s standpoint, was more morally reprehensible than the former.
EOD was a change for crichton he had mostly done tech heavy scifi before that (although the great train robbery was a change of pace) or pulpy mysteries this was a very well researched historical tale about subjects who were as alien as the andromeda to the human experience
Its also about culture clashes between the cultured bedoiun and the more savage viking at first glance
Irish.
My point was about extinction, not the book.
John Hawks, Uni of Wisconsin, has done a lot of work on this. He figures that there were a billion and a half of the Neanderthal over their existence, but no more than 50,000 alive at any one time.
Hard to imagine a threat to resources sufficient to make going after them more profitable than a few more hours a week hunting.
Re: Doug+Purdie, IrishOtter49, Neanderthals
I was confused by the above comments whether Crichton’s fictional novel was based on a real, if possibly speculative, source about a last vestige of Neanderthals living in historical times.
That’s a delightful fantasy I’ve had for years. So I had to look it up.
Sadly, it is Crichton being Lovecraftian, i.e. fashioning a grand fiction based on supposed real sources. In fact Crichton gives the game away with a direct “footnote” reference to H.P. Lovecraft (Peace Be Upon Him).
_________________________
…Crichton sometimes parodies scholarship by concocting exotic sources. In the bibliography, for example. Crichton cites the “Necronomicon” of Abdul Azhared, an imaginary work that the amateur demonologists in H. P. Lovecraft’s tales are fond of stealing from the library of “Miskatonic University” to conjure demons from across the cosmos.
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/25/archives/with-real-and-bogus-footnotes-eaters-of-the-dead.html
_________________________
My favorite practitioner of the bogus source was Jorge Luis Borges (Peace Be Upon Him too). I wondered who influenced whom.
Lovecraft was not only older than Borges, Borges dedicated one of his later short stories “To the memory of H.P. Lovecraft.”
As far as I’m concerned anyone who cares about fiction hasn’t lived unless he or she has made the acquaintance of Lovecraft and Borges.
Except it occurs about 3 centuries after the events after abdul hazred adventures
Looking up the Borges story tonight, I’m struck by the similarity of its first line to the first line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
________________________________
Just as I was about to take my last examination at the University of Texas, in Austin, I learned that my uncle Edwin Arnett had died of an aneurysm on the remote frontier of South America.
–Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things” (1975)
________________________________
________________________________
MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
–Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967)
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As you can see the Marquez line precedes the Borges line by eight years. But Borges had been born almost 30 years before Marquez and that understated, overly detailed, yet dramatic style had been Borges’s meat long before Marquez came along.
I give the nod to Borges imitating Borges and not Borges imitating Marquez.
In the video I was struck by this passage:
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… [Neanderthals’] short lives leave less time for learning and passing on knowledge. Another problem is that Neanderthal’s short but very stocky frame needed maybe double the amount of calories than a modern Homo Sapien does…
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Wow. That would be roughly 4000 calories vs 2000 for Homo Sap. That’s a lot of calories for a hunter-gatherer to hunt and gather on a daily basis.
huxley:
Except for the fact that both passages have the form, “When later event B happened, the person remembers or learns of earlier event A,” I don’t see much similarity.
By the way, Borges is one of my very favorite authors of all time, whereas I’ve never been able to get past a couple of pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, despite trying several times.
The down side of owning an electric vehicle… and note the FL fascistic tax on the bill!
https://mobile.twitter.com/odonnell_r/status/1562846628503261185
OT of politics…SCIENCE! “She blinded me…with SCIENCE! Of a James Webb Space Telescope Landmark FIRST Discovery: a distant exoplanet with life-giving Carbon Dioxide in its atmosphere. From NASA:
“NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. This observation of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light-years away provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet. The finding, accepted for publication in Nature, offers evidence that in the future Webb may be able to detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets.
“WASP-39 b is a hot gas giant with a mass roughly one-quarter that of Jupiter (about the same as Saturn) and a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter. Its extreme puffiness is related in part to its high temperature (about 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit or 900 degrees Celsius). Unlike the cooler, more compact gas giants in our solar system, WASP-39 b orbits very close to its star – only about one-eighth the distance between the Sun and Mercury – completing one circuit in just over four Earth-days. The planet’s discovery, reported in 2011, was made based on ground-based detections of the subtle, periodic dimming of light from its host star as the planet transits, or passes in front of the star.
“Previous observations from other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, revealed the presence of water vapor, sodium, and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere. Webb’s unmatched infrared sensitivity has now confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on this planet as well.
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“ As soon as the data appeared on my screen, the whopping carbon dioxide feature grabbed me,” said Zafar Rustamkulov, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and member of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science team, which undertook this investigation. “It was a special moment, crossing an important threshold in exoplanet sciences.”
“No observatory has ever measured such subtle differences in brightness of so many individual colors across the 3 to 5.5-micron range in an exoplanet transmission spectrum before. Access to this part of the spectrum is crucial for measuring abundances of gases like water and methane, as well as carbon dioxide, which are thought to exist in many different types of exoplanets.
“Detecting such a clear signal of carbon dioxide on WASP-39 b bodes well for the detection of atmospheres on smaller, terrestrial-sized planets,” said Natalie Batalha of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who leads the team.
“Understanding the composition of a planet’s atmosphere is important because it tells us something about the origin of the planet and how it evolved. “Carbon dioxide molecules are sensitive tracers of the story of planet formation,” said Mike Line of Arizona State University, another member of this research team. “By measuring this carbon dioxide feature, we can determine how much solid versus how much gaseous material was used to form this gas giant planet….”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/26/nasas-webb-detects-carbon-dioxide-in-exoplanet-atmosphere/
A comment from the video:
“My uncle was a Neanderthal but he converted to orthodox Denisovan.”
huxley
Not sure what a short, stocky frame has to do with doubling necessary calories. There are short, stocky, H. Sap who aren’t authorized double rations and they seem to get along okay.
Stocky, short or not, increases volume per unit of surface area, thus, among other things, preserving heat. Nean, having spent a lot of time in really cold environs, could use the help. And it’s not just living four miles south of the face of a glacier. I’m up early, the window is open and I’m getting a breeze of about 58 degrees. If I were outdoors all night, I’d have had to burn up a few extra cals to stay warm.
I do recall, however, reading that there was a metabolic inefficiency on a cellular level in H. Nean. No idea of where, but the implication was more food was necessary. Which meant more waste which meant, possibly, considerably more B.O.
It would be nice to know the causes of death for the Nean who passed about age forty. Old age at a young age? Cumulative traumas of injuries and diseases?
The folks at Skara Brae had some nice, tight homes, up there in the North Atlantic winds. And they died pretty young, all things considered. Sitting around a fire half the day, most of the year, is going to give you a case of the lung crud.
Saw a meme at The Week in Pictures, at Power Line. “Just got my ancestry DNA results back. Assorted Crackers.”