Neanderthals Were Wiped Out Due to Smoking

Not completely hyperbolic, but it turns out several diseases like nicotine addiction and type 2 diabetes can be traced to neanderthal genes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25944817

They are exacting their vengeance on us for the rape, pillage, and mayhem.

The most recent Nature podcast has a discussion about the interbreeding. According to the journalist, its likely that humans and Neanderthals would not have been capable of producing offspring all that often, and most of those children would probably be sterile (or worse). Which means that the previous estimates of only about a thousand humans mating with Neanderthals are probably wrong, and the number was much higher, with only about a thousand offspring being born.

This makes me wonder: Given that anthropologists have shown that even if stone age societies don't have a firm grasp of all the biological processes involved, they have all been able to figure out that 'sexytime' is necessary to produce offspring. And human beings being what they are, we all enjoy a little bit of 'sexytime' when we know we don't have to worry about getting pregnant. So, if we assume that Neanderthals were roughly as smart as humans, its possible that one group could have figured out that 'sexytime' between a human and a Neanderthal was great if all you were interested in was having a quickie, and that Neanderthals went extinct not because we deliberately wiped them out, but because they preferred the short term gain of practicing the world's oldest profession with us humans, than the long term gain of mating exclusively with their own kind.

Neandersluts!

An interesting idea, but I think it's ascribing very modern sensibilities about sex and offspring to prehistoric people.

It could be, but eunuchs were often highly sought after by women in ancient times, since they didn't have to worry about getting pregnant by one.

I thought they were highly sought after by men to guard their harem from guys who could get them pregnant. The women's lack of contact with other men would then cause them to develop crushes on the eunuchs.

Eunuchs didn't only exist in societies that had harems, and even in those societies, eunuchs weren't simply created for guarding harems. Castration was long practiced as a means of punishment and/or control. Chinese emperors frequently had eunuchs as advisors (and were tutored by them as children) since they believed that the eunuchs wouldn't have ambitions to the throne (what with them not being able to produce children), and would thus make better advisors. Men who had been captured in battle and were forced to be domestic slaves would be castrated prior to being "installed" in the house in order to make them more docile.

I'm a bit confused about this tangent. Would a eunuch be able to perform?

It would depend on the nature of the castration.

And anyway, this idea that ancient women were so crazy about eunuchs over intact men seems to be over-focusing on one point. In general, women (and men) with more children were more esteemed; it's only been in recent generations where the idea that fewer children = better has taken hold.

Yes, but if they were cut before puberty, they'd not have a large package to perform with.

I have had several eunuch cats over the years, and they never tried to rape the female cats.

Except that I'm not arguing that folks may have thought that fewer children was better, only that some folks might have focused more on getting laid, than on having kids. So, a Neanderthal prostitute would have been more popular than a human prostitute, because you didn't have to worry about the Neanderthal coming up to you and demanding you take care of the kid you had with her.

When were they snipped? If they were cut before puberty, then they wouldn't necessarily have the desire for sex.

We're talking about a time period when proving paternity wasn't exactly a known concept. CaveJohns wouldn't care about whether their prostitute could get pregnant.

That's a good point. Cats are neutered as kittens generally, except for ferrel cats neutered in catch and release programs. I suppose they probably do retain a sex drive if they've reached maturity.

Their prostitute certainly would, though, and she could no doubt make things embarrassing for all her clients if she wanted to. (I'd be willing to bet that blackmail was probably the third oldest profession.)

I think that's even more of applying a modern mindset on non-modern people: they probably weren't as litigious as we Americans are now, and women likely wouldn't have had that much power anyway.

"Morning fog not burned off by fire in sky before geese fly to river. Spirits say Ugg not baby daddy."

Actually, in many stone age societies, women are the power. Its only as a society becomes agricultural that women tend to get stripped of their power.

It's true, there were some societies - especially hunter-gatherer - that were matriarchal, but in most it was and is still men with more power. Either way, for ancient peoples more children = more workers, more followers, more warriors, more descendants = more power.

In most stone age societies, women are considered to be at least equal to men. And most guys when they're getting a quickie aren't thinking about offspring, their just thinking about getting laid, and fucking's a pretty common thing in stone age societies, with people worrying about entanglements only after they've hit reproductive age (though they happily fuck before then). So the guys aren't going to be thinking about producing babies every time they fuck, and they're going to want to fuck at times when their wife (or wives) are unavailable to them, or they're not going to want to run the risk of producing offspring because if they bang this guy's daughter, then the families will be aligned in some manner.

Nor are all stone age societies equally violent, some are pacifistic, while others are extremely violent, so the more warrior aspect wouldn't appeal to all societies equally. Supposedly, the guys who developed the first birth control pills were inspired to develop them after reading about ancient Native American practices of eating certain plants to prevent pregnancy. So, it seems likely that members of stone age societies were interested in birth control at least part of the time.[/b]

One plains Indian tribe used a "chastity blanket." If a couple wanted to have sex/make babies they had to get the leadership's consent.
They gave them the couple the communal chastity blanket (god I hope there was more than one, or a strong detergent to wash it in) and they had sex on that blanket.
You don't have the blanket, no sex. Also in some tribes the measure of manhood was how long you could go without having sex, pretty much the opposite of how masculinity is perceived in most societies.

In many African societies up until the 1800s war was largely ceremonial. Basically, the men of two different tribes would show up for a "battle," lob a couple of spears in the general direction of the other side, do a John Travolta impersonation, and then declare one side the winner, after everybody went home. If anybody got hurt, it was more likely to be by accident than by deliberate action and was generally frowned upon. Shaka Zulu was the bastard son of a tribal chief who never should have come to power, but basically schemed and murdered his way to power, and totally transformed how African warriors fought.

So?

There have been maybe a hundred billion humans and thousands if not millions of societies; you're bound to find at least a handful of examples of nearly everything plausible. The important thing for anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, psychologists, and anyone else theorizing about the behavior of others is to keep in mind how their own biases might be influencing their assumptions.

Given your postings in this thread, you should be the one paying attention to your advice. You're the one hewing to a narrow interpretation of what societies in ancient times were like (one which has largely been shown not to be universal), not me. I'm not saying that the reason Neanderthals went extinct was because they spent all their time screwing humans, only that it could have been a factor.

Certainly, given the low odds of a human and Neanderthal mating producing children, let alone fertile children, there had to be large numbers of humans and Neanderthals doing the nasty for even 2% of their genes to make it into modern humans. The Toba Event is thought to have reduced human population numbers down to a few thousand some 70,000 years ago. No idea of what Neanderthal populations might have been at that time, but assuming a similar drop (Neanderthals wouldn't go extinct for another 40K+ years), that certainly would have encouraged the two groups to mate, but if they're not producing offspring as frequently as human and human or Neanderthal and Neanderthal sex, and humans are only interested in making lots and lots of babies, why continue fucking the Neanderthals? You're unlikely to have kids, and even if you do have kids, the odds of them being able to have kids are very, very low. So, you're best bet is to only screw humans, which would lower the already low odds of Neanderthal genes surviving to effectively zero. Yet 2% of their genes (and some of them are detrimental to us, which means they would have been selected against) have managed to survive into the 21st Century. How'd that happen? I don't know, other than it took a lot of fucking between the two groups, not just the occasional instance of bumping uglies.

You're the one who is sounding like he's too enamored of his theory to consider it critically.

So, some up with something that fits all the facts.

They probably just had lots of sex, as often as possible, with whomever was willing (or catchable). I doubt primitive sapiens really understood the connection between sex and fertility.

^
I think it's plausible that they might have known that sex leads to babies, but whether they were having interspecies sex to deliberately avoid babies - especially to the point of helping to obliterate one species - would be quite a leap. Even if some populations did do that, it's very possible that the mechanisms for extinction in other populations were completely different - again, different societies, different ways of doing things.