I think they probably mixed in and we just became one, sort of

Most populations die out. Most sapiens. Most neanderthals. Most everything. The chance of becoming an ancestor is very, very low.

Neanderthals were not slowly observed. Most of our neanderthal DNA comes from a single mixing event/period.

Evolutionary history is a history of bottlenecks. Small populations that survive and become large populations. The rest don't make it.

There are a few still. One made it to President of the USA.

It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science. Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.

Which, taking into account that their chores were quite physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.

That said they probably socialized more than us for many reasons, just not instead of work.

That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.

In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.

It’s neat what we do to each other…

Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.

We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.

Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.

IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.

I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.

Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).

They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.

Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.

[1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056

If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.

For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0])

> Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.

Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out. Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza. Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an inter-connected population, requiring a critical community size in the hundreds of thousands.

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/290/2011/202...

Fossil evidence exists pointing towards large eagles scooping up 3-5 year olds. It’s been a long time since we had to think of our toddlers safety the same way we think of a lap dogs.

We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.

This article talks about the Basque language from before contact with the Romans, 5-1 centuries BCE. It also references a "pre-proto-basque" language, that would have been the one before the Celtic invasion of Iberia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtiberians).

The rabbit hole kind of ends there, as not much linguistic artifacts or history remain from BC unfortunately. But one can imagine the Basque society would live in relative isolation for a long time before that.