What Happened to the Neanderthals?
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We are often quick to dismiss them as mere fanciful story-telling of primitive cultures but i am not so sure.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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!
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.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/genesis/6?1
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.”
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?
We'll probably never know how they were perceived in society back then, if it was e.g. like Asians versus westerners now.
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.
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...
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.