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Forbidden Fruit
(mander.xyz)
As a modern male, cannot confirm
This is kind of the best-case fantasy of what happened to introduce that DNA so let's just hope it's true for now.
Yeahhh.... first thought I had when the DNA news hit was that this had pretty rapey vibes...
I don't think there was a lot of consent on offer.
I thought neanderthal males were thought to be a lot less aggressive than homo sapiens (possibly even the reason for their extinction)? Even though I suspect you could be right. I think it's possibly a mistake to apply how we are today to how our relatives were 40,000+ years ago. Also they might not have a comparable concept of rape if you go back far enough. So the personal trama, cultural implications, and psychological impact are possibly hard to analyze from a modern lense.
Sex doesn’t look very consensual for like 99.9% of other species…
Fairly certain even the idea of consent is part of what makes us human.
1: Neanderthals are also humans for the purpose you're discussing, the results of higher cognitive functions. The label is actually applied to all hominins by anthropologists (note the nin and not nid)
2: A lot of tribal cultures have historically had more female autonomy than women in industrialized or preindustrial cultures. There's a lot of discussion about why that is exactly but this image of women as caveman chattel is just a lie
From a very cursory Wikipedia check, hominini includes chimpanzees?
I might have missed something - you're saying anthropologists consider all hominins human? Including chimpanzees?
Hominini is not the same thing as hominin, in short. Hominins are more properly known as the subtribe hominina of the tribe hominini.
I know, it's obnoxious. It's like some of these dudes are just making names up as they go along.
Okay, that makes more sense. Thanks for the clarification!
Gotta need a time machine for that ~~sweet neanderthal pussy~~ interesting anthroplogic research.
Context?
Human genome contains significant contribution from Neanderthals. Because of the location of the neanderthal genes in our genome it can only have come from male Neanderthals.
Unga bunga bang bang
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Neanderthals were more peaceful than Homo Sapiens.
We don't actually know that. Homo Sapiens is on the whole a peaceful species, but we have a few assholes that like to kill and subjugate.
Just because our assholes outlived their assholes, doesn't mean that they were any less assholes on average than we are/were
hunter gatherers vs agriculturers say otherways. Mass of graves and the murdering entire family lines and clans and villages go back as far as humankind goes back. Homo sapiens are no different than any other animal—opportunistic killers like cows and horses are.
Yep, the relative lack of heterogeneity in the Y-chromosome compared to mtDNA is somewhat testament to that too, but those mass grave sites are late stone age. Neanderthals predate those sites by a large margin, so it'd be hard to say that they didn't necessarily follow the same brutal history against their own kin
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Clan of the cave bear vibes
The first one was engaging but subsequent novels really felt like Auel was writing them with one hand
Where do Neanderthal women be??
A trend that continues to this day tbh
So, how likely is it that neanderthals and humans just lived in tribes together, and neanderthals just eventually died off within human tribes?
I bet it at least ended that way.
They died out during the last ice age when one of the big differences from previous ones they survived was the presence of homo sapiens.
I'm guessing it was from a combination of lack of space, raids, and integration (willing or not).
We (who carry it) have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, but it's not the same DNA for all of us, it's pretty diverse, so cross breeding events between us weren't limited to just a few times.
Iirc, there's speculation that neanderthals needed something like 3000 calories per day just to sustain themselves.
We may have just survived because we can go leaner.
One difference that I'm aware of is we were using bone needles at that point to make more advanced clothing, which would have helped in an ice age.
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I'm something of a Neanderthal myself.
Er... I mean... Unga bunga?
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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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