Although the whole random guest murdering thing is worse IMO. Tricking the manifestation of death into restraining himself probably counts as self defence, in my books.

The story where he seduces his niece in order to father children that were destined to kill his brother (her father) also isn’t great.

Sisyphus is the only Greek figure I can think of that’s not cringe to ascribe to yourself. And that’s only because nobody remembers the shit he did to get punished. The other tragic ones are either a humblebrag or concerning. Romulus and Remus are concerning. Enkidu is both, Gilgamesh is a straight up brag, as are the non-tragic Greek figures. All biblical prophets are (humble)brags. Norse gods are all brags, and saga heroes are mostly too obscure for me to know in detail.

I guess you could say Zacchaeus if you’re short, or Goliath if you’re really big. Oh wait, I guess going with physical things you could self-own with any monster.

You, if you have non-African roots, have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. Roughly, we can say that means you can take a slice of unrelated ancestors way back that’s 1-4% Neanderthals. Each of their kids had 50% of the Neanderthal genome, and, assuming the next incoming ancestor was fully Homo Sapiens, had grandkids with only 25% of the neanderthal genome.

Since there’s a lot of people and a lot of interbreeding events, you’d naively expect it to be a completely different 50% every time, and collectively contain most or all of the whole thing. However, not every Neanderthal allele is equally likely to be passed down, so that’s not actually what happens.

I don’t know how much of it actually remains across the human population exactly, but I do know parts of the X chromosome are complete deserts of Neanderthal DNA, at the very least. Like I went into elsewhere in the thread, that’s a pattern that indicates having Neanderthal admixture there causes sterility, and so male offspring with only one copy of the chromosome don’t reproduce, and don’t appear as an ancestor of yours. Those segments of the Neanderthal X chromosome are gone in living populations.

Edit: Reading what you wrote again, I think the detail you might be missing is just that lots of people die with no descendants, and the carrying capacity of ice-age Europe was finite. It’s not like the two lines just fused together without a change in size; the mostly-human population slowly grew and the mostly-Neanderthal population slowly shrunk over a few millennia.

It’s not known why, or how exactly that went down. It could be a reproductive quirk, or just humans being slightly better somehow. It’s probably wasn’t organised genocide, though, for quite a number of reasons.

Uhh, I think there was a Nature article about it. Per the Wikipedia, basically there’s just stretches of the X chromosome that are deserts of Neanderthal DNA, because when a Neanderthal allele is present and there isn’t a second copy, it’s a reproductive dead end and selected out.

Oh, here.

For the sake of completeness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans

Yeah, but not their whole genome, and never at more then a few percent of the total modern human genome. It’s more like a remnant.

No, not since Neanderthals, Denisovians and friends went extinct.

Even Neanderthals are a bit of a partial case, since the hybrid males were mostly sterile. We know this from the pattern Neanderthal genes appear in modern DNA.

These days, mostly panicking about getting everything on the bucket list set up. I’ve let to much just fly by already.

It worked for our boy Ea-Nasir.

Ah, thank you. Here’s the Wikipedia.

It sounds like she takes a more expansive view of what constitutes it.

I’m actually not sure it’s a cultural universal. I mean, snapping has seen use even in some subcultures within the West. I’ve seen stomping used for a similar purpose, as well. The point is I guess just to make noise communally.

Fun fact, the kiss might not be universal depending on who you ask, either.

I think you’re worried about the deck chairs on a sinking ship, at this point.

Which parts do you really like?

A good guess. I’m not sure how Evangelical he is, but he sounds like a fellow traveler having worked with Reagan and inflicted abuse on people from other faith groups.

I guessed a Christian author just because most people are over the Protestant vs. Catholic thing, and Chinese communists are a particular favourite bugbear of theirs.

My bad. Uuuuh… Indianapolis infrastructure, according to a quick search. Speaking of cities that get bomb reviews…

LA is aggressively overrated from everything I’ve heard. NYC prices, Kansas City infrastructure, Manilla tidyness. The weather is nice, I guess.

There’s a history of it meaning some kind of magical personality replacement thing, though. IIRC it was a Cold War excuse for why US soldiers defected sometimes. Cults exist, but the techniques they use to pressure people are a lot more mundane and take time to really take root.

Edit: Yup. More info here.

What book is that? Brainwashing basically is not a real thing, so I advise you to check who the author is. (By the sound of it I have my money on a prominant Christian)

Never was. (End humblebrag)

I lean no, but it’s close. On the one hand, life is meaningless and hurts. On the other I’ve gotten to see some cool things.