>somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years, longer than modern humans have been on Earth.

These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing.

Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is kind of messy.

There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle."

In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't have fossils, but something has to be our ancestors. So if we are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien ancestors sapiens.

Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died out. But... there were people everywhere.

Humans existed over a vast range. From south Africa to Northern Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it's confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different species.

Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic diversity we have today. In some sense, we are the inbred ones.

Also... population estimates are pretty dicey. We don't really know. Could have been booms and busts. Could have been ideal habitats with higher populations.

We still have a fairly poor grasp of human "natural history"

It's wild to think how long very human-like beings and modern humans existed before the technological revolution really took off. Hundreds of thousands of years of existing on the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of hides, and fire. Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow. Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.

> Harmful mutations can accumulate through inbreeding. Yet somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years

It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained.

So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once they reach a threshold, as implied by the article.

It’s a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going “extinct”. And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the process, but it works.

On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become pervasive.

The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic diversity as a shield against new diseases.

350,000 years of just chilling, picking berries, you die in identical technological and cultural environment as when you were born. Now we got to be around when God is made in a data center

The phrase "survived on a knife edge" or the dramatization is a product of awareness of modern living. For them at those times, neither "survival" nor "struggle" has any meaning. There was likely no consciousness of such concepts. They just continued via instincts and evolutionary goals such as reproduction, food gathering, hunting etc, which were just the same activities their ancestors did, with no changes. Lack of change should actually mean pretty normal life, instead of rapid change-related struggle that we go through now.

I know even with humans pre-modern populations were drastically smaller, but it's still just astounding to me how small of a population size it seems like Neanderthals had.

Perhaps some cultures' stories about "wild men" are about Neanderthals.

Maybe Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was one.

Seventy years ago, a scientist published a book about Neanderthals. According to his scientific opinion, they didn’t speak; they communicated only through hand gestures and had to go to sleep early because they couldn’t see those gestures at night, lol.

In my country, there is an area with archaeological sites of Neanderthal villages and their mammoth hunting grounds. In one area, there are thousands of mammoth bones. Imagine having only wooden spears and ordinary stones at your disposal. Maybe flint spears, maybe not. In this area, flint is too rare and is mainly used for cutting, because the nearest flint deposit is 400 km away.

I spent a year of high school in the Basque Country, and it always stuck out to me that a common feature of the Basques, especially the beefy ones, was incredibly caveman-like.

I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very small population.