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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

I have never heard of an example in earlier human history when two groups of humans have blended peacefully after their territories became in contact.

I believe that the idea of blending by peaceful interbreeding is just wishful thinking based on modern ethics.

Some Neanderthals have probably blended into modern human tribes, most likely some children or women. Other hybrid humans may be the result of random encounters.

The majority of the Neanderthals have disappeared during a relatively short time span, of a few thousand years. Some of them might have died as a result of direct fights with the expanding modern humans, the others might have been forced to retreat into worse territories that provided less food, so their population has dwindled.

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The initial contact might not always have been peaceful, but the actual blend often is. Germany is not at war inside even though there is huge mixing between its states and the states themselves are not all historically "cut", one was also created by people voting to merge. People actually wanted to blend the various smaller states into one back in the 19th century (so the other way around).

Nah, the vast majority of groups of humans we think of as extinct (I mean in the historical era, say avars, thracians, cumans, vandals, etc. etc.) not in prehistory (of prehistoric groups hardly anything is known) blended into later populations and did not go extinct by the way of each member being killed. The further we go back into the past, such mass killing would be less possible technologically not more so.

>I have never heard of an example in earlier human history when two groups of humans have blended peacefully after their territories became in contact.

Mexicans are roughly half Native American, half European.

>The majority of the Neanderthals have disappeared during a relatively short time span, of a few thousand years.

People did something that killed off the megafauna, and made people deformed at the same time. Genetically we are one species.

It is weird to provide Mexico as an example of peaceful blending.

After most conquests, which have established a new ruling class in some territory, there has been a mixing between the former invaders and the previous native population.

In many cases, the former invaders were less numerous than the natives, so after a few generations the mixed population has begun to resemble more the previous natives than the new incomers.

Nevertheless, I do not consider that these are examples of peaceful blending. In all cases the original war has inflicted serious losses on the natives and the reason why in more recent times no more of them were killed than necessary was because they were needed as a work force.

Before the organized states, which were able to tax the work of everybody, and before the use of slavery, there were no reasons to keep alive any vanquished tribe, which would compete for the food resources of the territory.

The losers would have been forced to run away to other territories, to stay alive. Except perhaps for women and children, they would have never been adopted by the victorious tribe, to blend in it.

The climate changed and the hunting grounds the Neanderthals were most fit for, disappeared. Sapiens were better adapted to the changed environment. The two groups existed in parallel for a long time. Also IIRC Neanderthals were always isolated in smaller groups compared to how Sapiens lived, even before Sapiens entered the shared stage.

> the idea of blending by peaceful interbreeding is just wishful thinking based on modern ethics.

I don’t see stephc_int13 writing anything about the peacefullness or non-peacefullness of the blending.

It's thought to be 1.7% Neanderthal DNA in Europeans, which I think would require substantial interbreeding.

Or some genes being promoted because of increased fitness.

This event must have happened in prehistoric rather than historic times, but even in historic times, peaceful blending has happened. Not that everything was peaceful; human history is riddled with war and violence, even within homogenous groups of humans. But there are plenty of examples where one group conquered another and then assimilated into the population they conquered. We're quite often not genocidal.

So it's entirely possible that Neanderthals were assimilated into Sapiens tribes.

They very likely fought, but it does not mean that led to genocide.

What I am suggesting is that Sapiens won by numbers, that they were more numerous.

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