Dear Umair. I like you, I read your stuff all the time. I think you are a really great economist, social commentator, and climate evangelist. So, I'm going to do something no one else commenting has done yet.
I'm going to tell you you are completely wrong on this.
Please reconsider this piece.
Before you dismiss me, you might want to consider that I found your piece about "Climate Change being the Express Train to Hell" to be brilliant. You brought a number of ideas in my head together so that I could write my newest climate piece.
The Crisis Report — 07 (part one of two)
We look at Global Warming the wrong way.
The Earth is not a pot of water, and we are not frogs.
The Crisis Report — 08 (part two)
I’m going to be blunt. We have already locked in 4C-5C of warming.
I have nothing but respect for you. So, I'm telling you this as a friend. Your information on the Neanderthals is outdated and incorrect. You are repeating something you learned 15-20 years ago.
In humility you might want to read my piece on how that happens. It's really common. It happens to all of us.
Thinking about Culture and Information Transmission.
Most of what you “know” is incorrect or outdated. That has implications.
I tell "Parable of The Clovis Culture". I think you would find it illuminating and helpful.
Now here's where it gets weird. You are like the 5th or 6th smart writer here on Medium to make the claim in the last few years that "humans killed the Neanderthals". You all love the narrative about what great killers we are and how violent we are.
Where did you hear that?
It's total crap.
I wrote a long essay about this the first time I saw someone say it.
But, if you are busy here's the short version I wrote as a comment for a piece by Indi.ca.
We are indeed "cockroaches with guns".
You are just slightly off on the paleogenomics.
There was a near extinction event for us around 75Kya.
Recent research suggests it was a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. The Toba eruption likely released 100 times as much SO2 as the Pinatubo event, and was the greatest natural disaster of the last 2.5 million years.
Temperatures dropped between 3.5 and nine degrees Celsius worldwide, and global rainfall decreased by 25 percent. What’s worse, computer simulations of the Toba super-eruption, found this event could have wiped out up to half the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Remember the concerns about “destroying the ozone”?
We were right to worry, recent studies suggest that if we hadn’t stopped destroying it, things would be going very badly for us right now.
The Montreal Protocol was designed to heal the ozone layer. It may have also fended off several degrees of warming — and a collapse of forests and croplands.
The effects of this disaster on the human genome indicate that the human population shrank down to a remnant group of no more than ten thousand. Probably living in Southern Africa.
In this crucible we "evolved". We became the "super-breeders" of the hominids. We also became inbreeding resistant.
But we are not a genetically diverse species. The big reason we survived is that we fucked all of our cousins to death.
We were not the ONLY Hominds 75Kya. There were a LOT of cousins.
Based on the traces in our genome we think that there may have been 9 to 11 other intelligent hominid species like the Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Florensis. Species that don't exist anymore except as ghosts in our genome.
We survived because we subsumed every other hominid species we encountered.
We absorbed the genetic diversity of all the other hominids.
There are no other hominids, because we are "all" the hominids. We carry the genes of all our cousins.
Tens of thousands of years later over 20% of the Neanderthal genome is still present in the European population. Although most individuals have only about a 2.5% Neanderthal contribution.
We didn't kill our cousins Umair. We loved them into oblivion. We are not "killer apes". We are bonobos.
That's how we got through that disaster as a species. That option isn't going to be available this time around.
Please, Please Please stop spreading this outdated meme and infecting more minds with it.
