Several recent discoveries seem to show that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens co-existed for longer than previously thought. Then there was the finding of small stature sets of bones on some S. Asian island who had died in historic times of a previously unknown species of Homo.
What I was wondering is if it’s just possible that some of the myths and fairy tales of northern Europe could be remnants of a cultural memory? Something they actually saw. It seems every cultural group has stories of Elves, Trolls, Leprechans, etc. These are generally depicted as smaller than Neanderthals but other characteristics point to behavior one might expect from small isolated groups of these creatures living in a desperate struggle to survive, similar to the remnants of the California Indians in the late 19th c.
Could Neanderthals have survived until say, ~10k BCE?
Not too likely as thus far it appears they died off around 40,000 years ago. But it is not impossible.
The others could have also been small populations of homo sapiens that were different from the tribes that survived to pass on an oral tradition to the ancestors of the Northern Europeans. There is enough variation in humans for oral traditions to expand smallish differences into larger ones.
But mostly just credit humans with a good and robust imagination. It seems the most likely.
We think that the average Neanderthal had a larger nose than the average Cro-Magnon. How much larger? Cartilage does not fossilize well, so we don’t really know for sure. I have seen one reconstruction that had a nose so long that it looked exactly like a troll in a children’s book. But that was speculation. Most forensic artists are more conservative in their reconstructions.
If you read the earliest European descriptions of the Huns, you will think they were bizarre-looking monsters. But, judging by the skulls we have unearthed, they had pretty typical East Asian features. The Roman/German writers simply had never seen an East Asian before. And, since they were terrifying invaders, the descriptions got exaggerated.
Fairytale critters often have long noses and long chins. Human noses keep growing throughout one’s life. If one loses one’s teeth, it makes the chin look longer. In my opinion, the troll in The Three Billy Goats Gruff was probably inspired by a cranky old neighbor who kept telling the storyteller to get off his lawn.
I think I remember William Golding speculating exactly this in the introduction to The Inheritors
Inheritors. I’ve lost my copy unfortunately unfortunately.
I think you are referring to Homo floresiensis, DtypeJag, which may have gone extinct as little as 13,000 years ago. Researchers have speculated that they may have inspired folk stories on the Indonesian island where their remains were found. Perhaps, but it seems like a stretch to say this one colony of small-statured people inspired all the legends of elves and whatnot around the world.
My uninformed vote is for homo sapiens with variations of some body characteristics serving as causes for folklore.
There is a novel ‘Roma’, by Steven Saylor, where the monster Cacus is really just a badly deformed, but strong and violent, person shunned by his tribe who goes on to cause havoc. He is eventually killed by a passing trader who becomes the source for the legendary character Hercules.
While fictional, its a plausible description of how legends get started.
That kind of argument (cultural memory) is frequently used in Creationist circles. They notice that an oddly high percentage of cultures have stories about ancient cataclysms and fire-breathing lizards, and conclude that those cultures are descended from people who actually experienced a severe cataclysm (such as a flood) and lived in an area where there were fire-breathing lizards.
Yes and it may have been more recent than that. When researchers found the the Homo floresiensis (“Hobbit People”) skeletons, local villagers claimed they already knew about the species and even specific details about them like the way that they looked which matches the specimens found very well and the peculiar way that they talked. They even had a name for them, Ebo gogo, and insist that they were still around as late as the early 20th century until they were intentionally killed off.
It is just folklore but is interesting and not impossible. They died off really recently in absolute terms no matter how you slice it and it is possible that some of them survived until modern times but their remains weren’t preserved or just haven’t been found.
We now know that Neanderthals never truly died out either. Instead, they hybridized with homo sapiens particularly in Europe. White and Asian people today usually have between 2% and 5% Neanderthal DNA while subsaharan Africans tend to have none or an insignificant amount but it varies a lot by population and among individuals. It isn’t impossible that some isolated location had people with substantial Neanderthal genetic contributions much more recently than others.
There are analogs to this in the animal kingdom.
“We usually think of woolly mammoths as purely Ice Age creatures. But while most did indeed die out 10,000 years ago, one tiny population endured on isolated Wrangel Island until 1650 BCE.”.
That was only 3,600 years ago and not even a third as long ago as most educated people guess. That is right, some human structures like the Great Pyramid were already really old when the last mammoths were wiped out.
You quite correctly mention the creationists. However, I do remember that in geologist/geneticist circles it was not on to speculate about sudden catastrophic events that grossly altered the slow steady course of evolution because they didn’t want to be associated with creationists. Then they found iridium layers in rock in various places around the world all 65million yrs old and then attitudes changed.
Really? But that’s a simple description of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium. Which was, and appears still is, controversial among paleontologists; but no one could call Eldredge and Gould creationists. (Especially not Gould.)
Were your cohorts leery of being associated with creationists, or just an unpopular scientific hypothesis?
I’ve always thought that dragons mythology was the result of dinosaur bones being found in caves. And the discovery of H. Floriensis got me to thinking about the old Irish myths of “The Little People” called “Tuatha De Danaan” (the people of the Goddess Danu.) There are also many such legends through Southern Asia.
I wonder if this group was more widespread but had been separated and isolated in a few groups on the outskirts of the land.
Yes, they didn’t want to be associated with creationists. There is a difference between crank “hypothesis” and unpopular hypothesis within the scientific community. The latter are respectable.
I was thinking of previous attitudes before Gould, Alvarez et al. and mostly to do with worldwide or very widespread extinctions.
